The Fordham Institute released a pithy new paper today on the governance of public charter schools. In it, the author, Adam Emerson, questions one of the age-old (at least since 1991, when charters first came on the scene) assumptions about charters: that each school must have its own community-based governing board that operates the school and serves students from nearby communities.
A lot has changed over the last 22 years, with “all of those Os” emerging in the sector (via CMOs and EMOs), as Dr. Howard Fuller said at our conference in 2009. While 68 percent of public charter schools still fit the original “mom and pop” mold, 20 percent are operated by non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs) and 12 percent by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). And 200+ charters offer full-time virtual instruction. Emerson offers two sets of policy recommendations for better aligning the regulatory environment for charters with what’s happening on the ground that are consistent with our model law:
The first would allow a single governing board to manage multiple schools to make it easier for high-performing charters to replicate and expand (that’s Component #15 in our model law).
The second would create statutory guidelines for relationships between charter schools and educational service providers to ensure that the schools are in the driver’s seat in these relationships – not the other way around (that’s Component #10 in our model law)
Emerson also recommends that virtual charter schools be authorized by state authorizing entities, given that these schools usually end up serving students from all over a state. Among other things, this approach would remove the financial incentives and quality disincentives that exist for small districts to authorize large virtual charter schools. It’s a sensible recommendation, and one that we’ll be considering when we revisit our model law in the future.
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