This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
I don’t know – because the District still really hasn’t explained it – whether there is a good reason to contract out more of our schools to charters and private providers. But I think I can tell you what will happen if we do it the way we’ve done it the past.
Before I explain that, though, let me mention that I’m very impressed by some charter schools. This piece isn’t anti-charter. It’s pro-oversight.
And in that connection, consider the lowly scarecrow – the original passive security system. You put it up, and it keeps bad things from happening to your garden while you do something else. Now imagine taking the scarecrow approach when it comes to ensuring that public money for educating children, handed over to private providers, is used effectively. You just announce that you’ll be overseeing the work of the providers closely, and that problems will quickly be spotted and addressed. Then – perhaps with the best of intentions – you turn to other things.
It doesn’t work. “Did anybody think about the kids?” asks Monday’s Inquirer editorial, which criticizes the District for not closing the failing Germantown Settlement Charter School more quickly.
Actually, I’m sure that the folks in the District’s under-resourced charter school office have been thinking hard about the kids at Germantown Settlement and at other problem charters. In fact, these are the folks who first discovered some of the problems. But I also agree with the Inquirer’s view that, at higher levels, the District has been less than energetic about exercising its oversight authority.
Are the District’s hands tied? Not really. Section 1728-A of the state Charter School Law says that the District must “annually assess” each charter, and gives the District “ongoing access to the records and facilities of the charter school." And Section 1729-A empowers the District to move to revoke a charter at any time if the school is in non-compliance with its charter, with good fiscal management practices, or the law. The language isn’t perfect, but it certainly doesn’t say that the District must wait passively until scandals hit the paper.
To be sure, this isn’t the whole story. The charter school law has some loopholes. There’s lots of politics in the charter arena. And it’s unclear whether the District has the resources to do an adequate oversight job.
But there’s the rub — and it has implications for proposals, such as those in the District’s strategic plan, to make even greater use of charters and external partners. If we’re going to depend on other entities to educate our kids, we need to monitor the heck out of what those entities do. That means:
- establishing clear and binding expectations, set out in understandable documents that all can see;
- creating a monitoring process that will determine whether the expectations are being met;
- having a system for swift action if they are not;
- and – because this stuff won’t happen for free – committing the resources needed to do all this.
If we can’t do it, then we shouldn’t hand things over to outside entities.
Which is what lots of people said back around 2001, when the “diverse provider model” first came on the scene. Yet the District proceeded to sign massive contracts with outside providers without allowing the public any advance input into what the contracts would say. Then, even after they’d been finalized, the contracts were almost impossible to obtain – at least for families without a team of lawyers on retainer. And those contracts that were located turned out to lack teeth. In short, no one seemed to be “thinking about the kids.”
Some respond that the District isn’t doing a very good job monitoring its own performance, and has plenty of scandals of its own. Whether or not that’s true, it’s no excuse for failing even more children who are now to be assigned to schools operated by others. Nor do I buy the idea that because the point of charters and external providers is to permit innovation, close monitoring by the bad old School District will be counterproductive. We haven’t seen a case yet in which the District has tried to shut down an innovative school that was producing good results, and I doubt that we ever will. (Nor, I believe, have we seen a case where a truly innovative and successful charter objected to having its work reviewed by the District or the public.)
So I’ll end as I began. I don’t know whether engaging more non-profits and for-profits and charters and other “diverse providers” is a good idea. But I know one way of doing it that definitely doesn’t make sense. And that’s the way we’ve been doing it up till now.