Sixty Charter Schools Fall, With a Little State Shove

In some ways, this month’s collapse of the state’s largest charter school was school choice working at its best: A new school opened, to which parents could choose to send their children. The school was judged inferior; the school closed.

But the case wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t parents exercising choice that closed the California Charter Academy’s 60 schools across the state, but rather government actions that effectively choked off funding. By the standard of choice, the schools were a roaring success, with more than 10,000 students enrolled in the academy’s satellites. But the whole network collapsed this summer after the state withheld $6 million on grounds that about 10 of the satellites were set up illegally, without appropriate supervision by a local school district. The state also cut off funding for California Charter’s adult students -- who accounted for about 40% of enrollment -- and denied additional funds after concluding that the academy was spending too little on instruction.

The demise of California Charter Academy shows that sometimes choice and accountability run in opposite directions. Indeed, the grand California charter-school experiment, now starting on its second decade, has made a subtle turn away from choice and toward accountability, especially when it comes to the choice of school owners to do as they please. The result is that California’s charter schools will be less avant-garde and probably less profitable. But they are likely also to be better.

Charter schools are free public schools that operate outside some of the rules that govern regular schools. Their supporters point out that more than 90% of charter schools have survived. The fact that about 9% haven’t is proof, they say, of real accountability at work. Thus, it’s a quality-control success story every time a bad charter school closes.

Because charters must operate like businesses, the theory goes, they have built-in accountability: If customers -- students and their parents -- choose to enroll, the school stays in business; if customers elect to go elsewhere, the school fails. The free market will ensure that exemplary schools stay afloat while the poor ones won’t.

Critics of charter schools insist that such logic is too simplistic. Most businesses, they note, aren’t supported by public funds. With a restaurant, say, if the service is bad, or the food overpriced and unhealthful, those flaws are not subsidized by tax dollars. All that counts is whether people want to continue patronizing the restaurant. But with a school supported by public funds, critics say, the marketplace shouldn’t be the final arbiter. If a school’s academics are weak, if it teaches religion, if its teachers are undertrained or ineffective, it shouldn’t be supported by state funds even if students and their families are happy.

In the early days of charter schools in California, almost everything was tried in the name of school reform and parental choice until the state cracked down: bizarre educational theories, textbooks with strong religious content, schools that charged tuition, schools without campuses or teachers.

A charter could be dreadful, provided that its sponsoring district didn’t mind. And if the charter brought in extra funds through higher enrollment, many districts didn’t mind much at all.

But in recent years, the state has exerted increasing pressure on charters to administer standardized tests to their students -- just as regular schools must do. And, as of this year, charter schools must meet a minimum performance standard or they will automatically lose their charters.

The state’s nine-member Advisory Commission on Charter Schools, set up in 2001, is also emerging as a champion of higher standards. The panel, made up of charter-school operators, state officials and appointees who represent parents and teachers, turned up the heat on California Charter Academy by concluding that it didn’t spend a high enough share of its state dollars on services to students. CCA’s funds were docked accordingly.

Pressure on CCA also came from another, more unlikely source. The episode marked a breathtaking change of tone for the state’s charter-school association, which used to be dominated by conservative critics of public schools who wanted the state to keep its hands off charters. The group included unorthodox, for-profit entrepreneurs, and it reflexively observed an unarticulated code of silence. Charter operators frequently resisted disclosing damaging information about their peers -- especially to prying reporters. But the organization has been reshaped under the leadership of former L.A. school board President Caprice Young and others. A spokesman for the group, commenting on the closing of CCA, said recently: “It’s about time.”

At least in the case of CCA, the system seems to be working. Some of CCA’s satellite schools may have been worthy, but there’s little doubt that the operation was a profit-generating machine, in part because its nonprofit schools contracted with a for-profit management company run by CCA’s leadership. The charter operation also maximized profits by operating campuses along an independent-study model. Such schools receive regular funding, but can have low overhead -- with few traditional classes, no food services and cheap storefront “campuses.”

The state wasn’t especially targeting CCA, said state education department staffer Keith Edmonds, but rather was just holding the school accountable for not playing by the rules.

Bad apples aside, how are charter schools doing? The results so far suggest that, on balance, they are performing about the same as other schools, though there are impressive success stories that deserve study and emulation. That’s the essential finding in national data reported last week in the New York Times amid a cacophony of competing interpretations. Other recent studies out of California offer comparable results.

Charter schools are shaping up as neither curse nor corrective, while also being difficult to pigeonhole in any meaningful way.

“My hard work at a classroom-based charter school gets clumped in with distance-learning charters and home schools,” said Steve Barr, who runs five small, start-up high schools in the L.A. area. “Those are totally different animals. And there are some really, really good charter schools and some really, really crappy ones. Just like regular public schools.”

The challenge has always been to find the right balance of freedom, public support and oversight. Ideally, the endpoint of accountability won’t be shutting down a school just before the start of a school year, as happened at the California Charter Academy. But holding charters to high standards is crucial.

After a bad meal at that Italian restaurant, you can always go down the block to get better food for your next meal. But a child can never get back the moment when he or she should have learned to read and write.