Last week, a representative from a local charter school came to speak to the members of my civic association. He told the members what a great school it was, and that the nonprofit organization that runs the school deserved to have its application to open new schools in Philadelphia approved by the School Reform Commission this week. He hoped the civic's members would voice their support for the application. Everyone clapped.
It didn't surprise me to hear that the man's organization obtained the approval it wanted from the SRC this week. No one disputes that his school is a good one. In various rankings of schools, it finishes in the top echelon. Hordes of parents enter their children in a lottery each year for a seat in the school. Only a tiny percentage get in. The school's facilities and programs seem superior to those of other schools I'm familiar with. I think, based on anecdotal evidence, that this charter school makes people who run other schools in the area uncomfortable. Too many of their students are on its waiting list.
The visitor at the civic deserved our support. But one thing he said would have best been omitted. He told us that he resented it when his school was "lumped in" with certain other charter schools with much worse reputations. He didn't explain why they have bad reputations. His complaint was that the SRC had been unfairly holding up his school's application based on other charter schools' problems. Rather than hold up the applications, he implied, the SRC should err on the side of approving them, and sort out problems later.
I hope that the SRC's action has removed the visitor's cause for complaint. But guys like him who run high-quality charter schools could have taken an easy step to assuage both the SRC's concerns with respect to these applications, and the public's lingering apprehension about funding charter schools when some of them are run by crooks. Even today, they could still take action; indeed, all they need to do is something that other individuals and organizations faced with similar problems also commonly do.
Philadelphia's better charter schools need to associate, and to self-regulate. In other words, they need to form an exclusive club of charter schools, one that keeps out schools that are crookedly or incompetently run. Existing charter school organizations don't fit the bill because they are designed for lobbying rather than standard-setting. They offer no way for outsiders to distinguish between good and bad charter schools. Forming an organization for purposes of self-regulation might take a little effort, but it wouldn't be impossible, and would yield major benefits to schools that were part of the club if it were done properly.
The founding member schools in the club would have to agree on rules for membership. They should be designed to exclude schools that people like the civic's visitor don't want to be "lumped in" with. I'm sure that he and his counterparts have some ideas in mind about what constitutes a bad charter school that would be excluded from the club. Knowing how to run good schools, they should also know how to make rules that set objective criteria for membership in a club of good schools. The rules should limit membership to schools that supply a quality education and pose a low risk of betraying the public trust.
I can think of a few rules of exclusion on the public trust side to get them started. First, member schools should be organized as nonprofit organizations. Second, the annual pay of member schools' top administrators should be publicly disclosed, and should not exceed a certain percentage of a member school's operating budget. Third, member schools' contracts for services that are larger in value than a modest amount must be subject to a public bidding process. Fourth, member schools, their directors, and their highest-paid employees must publish annually a disclosure of their holdings of ownership interests in businesses, and the directors and employees making the disclosures must divest themselves of interests in businesses with which the school does business, or resign. Fifth, schools that are sanctioned by a public authority may not be members of the club for five years afterward. Sixth, members must admit students exclusively through a lottery process, so that members may not engage in picking and choosing of students to seek out ones that will yield the most state or Federal funding while necessitating the least expense. Other rules could be added to these.
It's unreasonable to think that the SRC-- or the public-- should be able to readily distinguish between good and bad charter schools for purposes of allocating resources. The people who run bad charter schools are aware that the work they're doing would arouse the consternation of taxpayers and public officials if it became widely known. They don't have to disclose as much information as one might expect, and they no doubt conceal their misbehavior whenever possible.
Nor should the SRC be asked to fund "charter schools" categorically, and be reprimanded by people like the civic's visitor for dragging their feet. Everyone knows that "charter schools" as a group include both good ones and bad ones, and that telling the difference between them (except in the case of exceptionally good schools like the visitor's, or exceptionally bad ones) is not easy. If the SRC takes a cautious approach, and people like the civic's visitor have failed to take a few easy steps to make it easy to distinguish between good and bad charters, no one should fault the SRC for exercising due diligence.
So far, charter schools, good and bad, have tended to stick together for lobbying purposes. Doing so has served them well to this point in Harrisburg. But they've reached a point in their development where the stick-together strategy no longer makes sense. Those who run better charter schools should recognize that bad charters will continue to set back their ambitions as long as officials and the public lack a reliable way to separate the chaff from the wheat.
The civic's visitor wrote on his school's website that he "has focused on branding the school." Clearly, he's concerned to set his school apart from lousy ones. Making his school a member of an exclusive club of charter schools that gains recognition would do just that.
