MARCH
29, 2001
MARCH
29, 2001
Testimony of Robert I. Cane, Executive Director, Friends of Choice
In Urban Schools (FOCUS)
Distrcit of Columbia Public Charter School Board
Public Haring
Draft Fifth-Year Review Framework
My name is Robert Cane, and I'm executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, a non-profit support group for the District's public charter schools. FOCUS educates parents, opinion leaders, policy makers, and the general public about D.C. public charter schools. We also keep public charter school leaders informed and help them solve the many problems facing their schools
Prior to becoming executive Director of FOCUS I worked in the Virginia public schools, most recently as principal of a 1200-student high school. I also am a lawyer and worked for twelve years in private law practice and legal education. Thank you for the chance to testify about the very important subject of charter revocation.
The Ability to Close Non-Performing Schools is Essential to Public School Reform
Traditional public schools are permitted to go on forever, miseducating generation after generation of students. Public charter schools, on the other hand, are given time-limited charters – essentially permits to operate – and are reviewed periodically to determine whether their permits should be pulled.
The idea of closing down a school creates anxiety among the public, whose experience with school closure is limited to the politically-charged process of closing schools because of declining enrollments. Closing schools for academic reasons, however, is not only an entirely different breed of cat but is essential to true school reform. Not just public charter schools but all public schools should be required to accomplish their educational mission or lose their power to operate.
Charter Revocation is Part of an Accountability Scheme that Rejects Central Control of Individual Schools
Centrally-Controlled School Reform Has Failed
Centrally-controlled schooling has everywhere failed to provide decent schooling to the urban poor. Recognizing their failure and under intense pressure from school reform advocates and politicians, school systems have for three decades tried to reform themselves. While creating so-called school-based management systems that gave the illusion of local control, in reality school systems were tightening central control over individual schools. The primary method to this madness was the development by central office bureaucrats of “clear expectations” for performance and the imposition of an inspection regime to determine whether these expectations were being met. As might have been predicted, this expect-inspect method of school reform was successful in inverse proportion to its huge popularity among school superintendents and boards of education.
It is in the context of the abject failure of centralized bureaucracies to achieve school reform that public charter schools came into being. The School Reform Act, which established charter schools in the District, radically decentralized authority over the schooling process. Charter schools were to be non-profit corporations, not part of any system, and the power to decide how children were to be schooled, in what, and by whom was to reside not in the school superintendent and board but in the schools' own boards of trustees.
This new structure would cause creative, dedicated people to seek charters. Those who could survive the rigorous application process [1] would be given wide latitude to set up their schools and run them as they saw fit. No longer would school leaders be treated as middle managers controlled by a distant bureaucracy. Instead, they would be able to bring their creativity and expertise to bear on the real problems of their students unhindered by school-system interference in their day-to-day affairs.
The School Reform Act established this new scheme by giving the school corporation many powers, both express and implied. The express powers are numerous: to be governed by a board of trustees in accordance with the charter; to acquire real property; to receive and disburse funds; to secure insurance and make contracts and leases; to incur debt; to solicit grants and gifts; to be responsible for the school's operation, including preparation of a budget and personnel matters; to sue and be sued. The Act also expressly gives to the school corporation exclusive control over its expenditures, administration, personnel, and instructional methods, unless the Act itself imposes limits on this control. [2]
The Act also frees the school corporation from interference with its curriculum, instructional methods, and management operations by giving the chartering boards oversight authority only over the charter, which the Act defines very narrowly to exclude these and most other elements of the charter application. [3]
The Public Charter Schools Are Far More Accountable to the Public Than Are Traditional Public Schools
The many powers granted to the school corporation by the Act indicate the clear bias of its drafters toward the independent school model and away from the bureaucratic model.
However, because public charter schools are publicly-funded schools, a number of very important limitations were placed on their freedom of operation. Among these are the need to attract and hold students, to follow the law, to operate in a transparent manner, to act as fiduciary over public funds, to obtain accreditation, to administer standardized tests, and to undergo 1-, 5-, and 15-year performance reviews
It is noteworthy that among these many accountability measures only one involves the chartering boards. And this monitoring function of the boards must be read in conjunction with the Act's bias against bureaucratic control of schools, its grant of independent corporate status to the schools, its enumeration of charter school powers and exclusive areas of control, its enumeration of legal and other limitations on school authority, its establishment of specific review intervals, and its narrowly circumscribed definition of “charter.”
Charters may be revoked at five years for failure “to meet the goals and student academic achievement expectations set forth in the charter.” Given the overall scheme of the Act and its clear definition of the term “charter,” the Board must limit itself in its revocation review to whether the public charter school is demonstrating an ability to school its students. In order to avoid repeating the mistakes of its traditional school board brethren, in conducting this analysis the Board should eschew primary reliance on standardized test scores in favor of a more meaningful inquiry. [4]
In determining whether to revoke a charter the Board must not concern itself with anything but academic progress – so-called “educational outcomes” – and not with school processes, methods, management competency, and other non-academic measures. There is no justification in the School Reform Act for looking at non-academic matters, including such things as “non-academic accountability targets,” “enrollment and re-enrollment levels,” and “all areas of school management,” to list a few mentioned in the draft. What's worse, as we have seen from the experience of traditional public schools, for a school board to concern itself with such things is a prescription for failure.
In this regard, the Board can not justify a review of non-academic matters on the basis that the schools have listed non-academic goals in their “accountability plans” or “charter school contracts.” These items are nowhere authorized by the Act, are inconsistent with the Act, and were imposed on the schools without proper rulemaking, even assuming the Board has rulemaking authority.
The Board Should Use The Requirement to Conduct a Revocation Review to Reexamine its Entire Approach to Public Charter School Accountability
No reasonable person can doubt the Board's commitment to the success of its schools. In seeking to guarantee the success of its schools, however, the Board has strayed very far from the charter school ideal and has wandered, no doubt unintentionally, into the territory long-ago staked out with such disastrous results by traditional public school systems. The Board now inserts itself into every aspect of charter school management and control, so much so that it has had to disseminate to the charter schools nearly 100 pages of rules and regulations under the heading “Monitoring and Accountability.” These rules go far beyond that which is authorized by the language of the School Reform Act or contemplated by its drafters. Where the School Reform Act mandates an annual financial statement, the Board requires monthly financial statements. Where the Act mandates an 11-part annual report, the Board requires a 28-part report, not to mention a pre-opening visit, a self-study guided by a 32-page manual, monthly attendance reports, and quarterly reports on staffing, contracts, and board of trustees meetings. Nor is the Board shy about using the information so derived to force its schools to take action in areas given over by the Act to their exclusive control.
No doubt the Board would justify these intrusions on the basis that to do otherwise would cause many of its schools to lose their charters. Not only does such a view misapprehend the nature of charter school reform, but it mimics the justification for the central control of individual schools so long put forward by school superintendents and boards of education.
We call upon the Board to break with its past tendencies and limit its revocation review to matters clearly authorized by the letter and spirit of the law. We further call upon the Board to realign its school oversight policies with the law and with the charter school ideal embodied in the law, which provide the only hope that this reform, unlike the others, will achieve real change.
[1] The application process, which includes multiple lengthy meetings with chartering board personnel and consultants, weeds out over 2/3 of the applicants.
[2] As an example, the exclusive control over school expenditures is limited by the Act's express requirement that the schools seek review of contracts of $25,000 or more.
[3] The Act defines a “charter” as the parts of the application that cover mission and goals, governance, articles of incorporation and bylaws, health and safety, accreditation, the relationship between school and its employees; plus any amendments to those sections agreed to with the chartering board. The parts of the application dealing with instructional goals and methods, student evaluation methods, discipline procedures, employee qualifications, community involvement efforts, and many others are not included in the charter and therefore cannot be monitored by the chartering board. The exclusion of instructional elements from the definition of charter and hence from board oversight makes perfect sense, given that the school corporation has exclusive control over its instructional methods. Their exclusion also reveals the Act's bias toward holding the schools to their mission and goals but not to how they carry out their mission or achieve their goals. In defining charter the way they did, the Act's sponsors were saying, “We don't care how you get kids to learn, we only care that you get them to learn. You have to stick to your missions and work toward your goals, be governed as you said you would, get accredited, and keep the kids safe, and the chartering boards are going to make sure you do; as to the rest, it's up to you.”
[4] The inquiry should seek to determine whether the students are learning the basic intellectual skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, calculating, problem-solving, observing, measuring, estimating, and exercising critical judgment – and whether they are acquiring organized subject matter knowledge and an understanding of important ideas and values (see Adler, The Paideia Proposa), and many other thoughtful writers.