Florida’s charter school laws continue to get middling rankings from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. The state’s rating remains unchanged in the group’s latest national report, leaving it tied with Arizona for the 18th-best charter school oversight policy in the country.
The state’s executive branch is trying to tackle some of the issues raised in the third edition of the annual report, which came out this week.
In a nutshell, Florida gets pretty good marks for charter school accountability. Districts are required to keep track of charters’ performance, and schools can lose their contracts if they don’t meet academic goals. The lowest performers — those that earn consecutive F’s through the state grading system — can be shut down automatically.
But the state falls short when it comes to holding districts accountable for the charters they oversee. Local school boards sponsor all but a handful of the state’s more than 650 charter schools.
There are several issues here.
For one thing, the state constitution largely bars entities other than school districts from sponsoring charter schools. Other states allow statewide boards or universities to sponsor charters, but in Florida, districts are basically the only game in town. State law also limits school boards’ discretion to reject prospective charter schools. To say no to a school, they have to find areas where applications fall short of requirements in state law.
NACSA recommends states allow multiple authorizers in each jurisdiction. That way, a charter school that might get unfairly rejected by a local school board could apply to a statewide charter board, or vice-versa. And if one district has a track record of approving shoddy schools or capriciously rejecting good ones, the state can take action against it, or even revoke its ability to authorize charters, without closing the door on all charter schools in its local area.
This dynamic, highlighted in previous NACSA reports, shows why efforts to allow entities other than districts to authorize charter schools is not just about rolling out the welcome mat to new charters. It could also lead to a system where authorizers have more flexibility to reject charter applications they don’t like — and where they’re more likely to be held accountable for the decisions they make. It’s hard to see how that kind of system could come about without changes to the state constitution.
But NACSA’s recommendations focus on ways the state can improvie its system without a constitutional change. The group wants the state to do a better job tracking which charters districts approve, what their decision-making process looks like, and how well the schools they approve perform.
The state’s application for its latest federal charter school grant is right on point:
The Department will develop, in consultation with authorizers and operators, a standardized Authorizer Report Card (ARC) that will evaluate and publicly report on authorizer performance and outcomes. The ARC will evaluate whether an authorizer’s practices align with the Florida Principles and Standards for Quality Charter School Authorizing, as well as the academic and financial performance of the charter schools within the authorizer’s portfolio. The ARC will build upon the Annual Authorizing Report already produced by the Department. The ARC will provide authorizers valuable feedback on their strengths and areas that require attention and improvement. It will also provide the public and policy makers information on how well the authorizer is managing its portfolio of charter schools.
The NACSA report is mostly focused on the state laws. But if districts and the state education department make these changes in practice, improving the law might become easier. That, in turn, could help ensure districts weed out poor-performing charter schools that harm students, and encourage good ones to grow.
