Last night, HBO's John Oliver aired a segment skewering charter school scandals. It's mainly a comedic rehash of talking points and headlines from the past few years. Online reactions from both sides of the charter school debate have been fairly predictable.

But Oliver spends a good deal of time on a subject we've covered quite a bit on this blog: Charter school oversight in Florida, and specifically, the importance of stopping unqualified charter schools that wind up shutting down in the middle of the school year, leaving parents and students in the lurch. The points he raises here deserve attention.

He cites the specific example of Ivy Academies in Broward County, which plagiarized parts of their charter application from a successful network of South Florida schools, shuttered weeks after opening for the 2013-14 school year, and remain mired in legal trouble to this day.

"When schools close that fast, it's shocking, because you would assume someone would rigorously screen a school before it was allowed to open, making sure it was financially and academically sound, but that is not always the case," Oliver says.

That may have rung true a couple years ago, in some parts of Florida more than others. The question is: Does it still?

In the years since the Ivy Academies episode, both the state Department of Education and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) have invested heavily in helping school boards, which oversee all but a handful of the state's more than 650 charter schools, improve their supervision not just of existing charters, but new ones that apply to open. State rules and laws have been updated to strengthen school boards' scrutiny of new charter school applications.  (more…)