While moving ahead with its procedures for revoking the licenses of two charter schools, the Delaware Department of Education faces a major charter school issue of its own: the department is working with an application, monitoring and review system that a national evaluating agency rates as “undeveloped” or “minimally developed” in most aspects.
The evaluation was delivered to the state Department of Education (DOE) in March, a month before the department began its formal review of the Pencader Business and Finance Charter High School and resumed a suspended formal review of the Reach Academy for Girls.
The results of the evaluation by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) were not unexpected, said John Carwell, charter schools officer in the Department of Education since last August.
“I knew coming in that there was some work to be done,” Carwell said, adding that the state sought the review by NACSA “to help benchmark ourselves against high-performing charter school authorizers from across the country.”
The evaluation found that:
- DOE does not have an established process or the tools to evaluate new charter school applications in their entirety.
- DOE’s monitoring of academic, financial and operational performance is limited, and there is no consensus within DOE or its Charter School Office on how to monitor academic performance.
- DOE has not prepared and submitted an annual report on charter schools, required by state law, since 2006.
- DOE does not define, in a clear and transparent way, measurable and attainable goals and standards that schools must meet for renewal.
- DOE does not grant increased autonomy to schools that perform well, and its current authorizing practices discourage autonomy and innovation.
“The state’s long-standing approval process, regulatory oversight mechanisms and ability to intervene when problems occur need significant improvement,” Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery wrote last week to Sen. David Sokola (D-Newark) and Rep. Terry Schooley (D-Newark), chairs of the Senate and House Education Committees.
To make those improvements, DOE has followed up on the NACSA evaluation by securing a $75,000 grant from NACSA, supplemented by $20,000 from the Rodel Foundation, to hire a consultant who will help the state create a brand new application form for charter schools, set new standards for measuring progress at the schools and define the processes for conducting the assessments.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly, heading into the last week of its regular session, is considering legislation that could remedy some of the problems identified in reviews of troubled charter schools, including Pencader and Reach. The legislation incorporates some ideas from a “Charter School Omnibus Bill” developed in 2008 by charter school leaders and Department of Education officials but never introduced, said Gregory R. Meece, director of the Newark Charter School and president of the Delaware Charter Schools Network.
Gregory Meece – Newark Charter School director & President of Delaware Charter Schools Network
Excerpts of DFM News interview with Meece on charter school issues facing Delaware
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H.B. 205, which is awaiting Senate action after winning House approval Thursday by a 40-0 vote, would, among other things:
- Require charter school board members and founders to have criminal background and child abuse registry checks and prohibit persons with felony convictions or convictions for a crime against a child from serving on a charter board;
- Require charter school board members to disclose any financial interest they may have in a charter school;
- Reduce the funding received by new charter schools at the start of their first year of operation;
- Require that charter schools have annual external audits;
- Increase the state’s authority to intervene in school operations if financial problems become evident.
The review of Reach Academy noted that the Department of Education found payroll, management and budget problems at the school within two months of its opening last August. An investigation by The News Journal revealed that its founder was a convicted child abuser who was paid $7,000 per month by the school for consulting services. The review of Pencader Academy cited a pattern of financial mismanagement at both the board and school leader level that raised concerns about their capacity to operate the school effectively. In addition, the Charter School Office discovered a significant financial shortfall for the current operating year. Last year, the school board had to secure a loan to close a similar financial shortfall.
The Department of Education has scheduled public hearings, July 11 for Reach and July 13 for Pencader, after revocation recommendations by its Charter School Accountability Committee. The State Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the recommendations during its July 21 meeting.
The difficulties with Reach and Pencader are not the first experienced among the state’s charter schools. Last year, the Department of Education found a new operator for the Moyer Academy after revoking the original charter due to deficiencies in student performance, curriculum and teacher qualifications. In 2008, the Marion T. Academy lost its charter because of academic deficiencies.
While the NACSA evaluation focuses on shortcomings in the state’s charter application, monitoring and review process and H.B. 205 attempts to resolve problems identified in recent charter school reviews, both demonstrate an inherent tension between charter schools and the Department of Education.
It’s a tension that becomes more apparent when a charter school runs into trouble. “The fact that we have some less than stellar charter operations does not help the situation at all,” said Ron Russo, the first president of the Charter School of Wilmington.
According to William Haft, NACSA’s vice president for authorizer development, in Delaware, as in many other states, the people responsible for authorizing charter schools typically have many education-related responsibilities before they become authorizers “and then charter schools get thrown on their plate.”
To put it more bluntly, Russo pulls out a quote from Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank: “Charter authorizers are like eight-year-olds charged with looking after a new puppy that in many cases they never even asked for.”
Authorizers in Delaware and elsewhere, Russo said, have typically spent 20 to 25 years in the traditional education system, and have little first-hand experience inside charter schools. The result, he said, is “anytime there’s an interpretation of the charter law, the interpretation that’s come out is a traditional school interpretation.”
Meece, who worked with Russo at the Charter School of Wilmington before starting the Newark Charter School, said he sometimes feels the state is telling the charters “we want you to be different as long as you look like everybody else.” As an example, he noted that, while charters are supposed to be different, one of the questions on the application asks how well the charter’s proposed curriculum aligns with the state’s model curriculum.
Carwell, DOE’s charter schools officer, said that DOE is required to follow state law in evaluating charter school applications — determining whether the school’s plan satisfies 14 criteria specified in the law. “We have to look at it in two different ways,” he said. “Schools have to have the flexibility and autonomy to innovate, and we have to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.”
When one charter school runs into trouble, Meece and Russo said, it creates difficulties for those that are functioning well because authorizers with traditional school backgrounds tend to develop solutions that result in additional regulations that apply to all schools.
“Rather than permitting [well-run] charter schools to move ahead on their own, and holding them strictly accountable [for their performance], they tried to pull them back,” Russo said. “You pull them back too much, you’ve destroyed the reason for charter schools.”
Even so, the criteria the DOE’s Charter School Office applies in its monitoring are not always well defined.
That happens, NACSA’s Haft said, because, at the outset, authorizers don’t know for sure what they’re getting into. “With anything new, you don’t start out with a structure, you start with what comes in the door,” he said.
Some of the comments in the NACSA evaluation point to this dilemma. In the section on performance-based accountability, the evaluators wrote: “The authorizer executes a Performance Agreement with each school; however, this Agreement is not used as a basis for oversight or renewal reviews…. The authorizer does not systematically review school academic and non-academic performance…. There are, however, indications that the authorizer verges on financial micro-managing, particularly of specific line item expenditures…. Because the authorizer does not engage in systematic performance-based oversight of schools, non-renewal is the only proactive action the authorizer has taken thus far to discontinue the operations of — or close — a charter school.”
Key priorities identified in the report include:
- Developing rigorous criteria and procedures for making merit-based application decisions.
- Ensuring that every charter school has a binding contract or charter that serves as the basis for performance-based accountability decisions.
- Focusing renewal decisions on academic, financial and operational performance rather than primarily on compliance with regulations.
- Monitoring school operations on a consistent, ongoing basis.
“The report showed where we might have some holes,” Carwell said.
Patricia Oliphant, executive director of the Sussex Academy of Arts and Sciences, said she is pleased that DOE requested an independent review of charter school authorization procedures and that it is hiring a consultant to develop a new system.
She hopes the new evaluation system can focus primarily on key performance measures: “Are the kids learning? Are the finances stable? Do parents want their children here? What’s the climate like inside the school?”
Meece said any new system must put a greater emphasis on identifying a charter’s potential flaws before it begins operating. He noted, for example, that while a charter applicant has to identify its board members, explain its curriculum and summarize its financial plan, it does not have to identify the school’s top academic manager, who, in many cases, has not been hired at the time the application is filed. “Are we asking for the right things on the application form?” he said. “Are we really getting at the proper indicators for success?”
“My goal,” Carwell said, “is to create a charter school portfolio that consists of the highest performing schools in the state. To get to that goal, we have to ensure that our authorizing practices are very strong.”