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Never Trade Flexibility and Autonomy for Money and Buildings

By Jeanne Allen

As the Georgia legislature races this afternoon to finish its work before adjournment, an important piece of legislation may yet get an up-or-down vote. On the bright side, the bill would guarantee that local school districts provide charter schools easier access to critical funding and facilities. Unfortunately, HB 430 includes new, prescriptive regulations that would take Georgia charter school in a very bad direction. It’s another example of why policymakers need to always be on high alert for regulatory creep within charter school policy.

Section 1 of the bill would direct the State Board of Education and State Charter Schools Commission to jointly create one-size fits all standards of “high-quality authorizing practices,” and would then have an “independent party” make sure that charters are deprived of the most important reason for their success: freedom from the regulatory strait jacket that hobbles traditional public schools.

The bill would require that the “independent party” possess a “demonstrated history of evaluating charter school authorizers for quality authorizing practices.” Don’t be fooled. If this section of the bill had a nickname, it would be the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) Guaranteed Contract and Empowerment Act. It’s a sweetheart deal with the organization that would love to insure that its idea of how charters should be run be guaranteed by law.

There’s nothing wrong with having the State Board of Education and/or the State Charter Schools Commission developing what they believe to be best practices for authorizing, but it should be just that — best practices. There should be flexibility and autonomy for authorizers to do this in the way they deem best for the types of schools they oversee.

But mandatory one-size-fits-all-standards are never good policy in charter schooling. It discourages innovation and is antithetical to core principles of charter schools. But if standards are to be imposed, they should be developed openly and with the involvement of the entire charter school community, not in the dark by an unelected and unaccountable third party.

In an otherwise worthy piece of legislation, this language represents the very opposite of what makes charters special in the first place. It would centralize control of charter schools, develop a single set of standards outside an open rulemaking process, use an unelected, unaccountable third party to use those standards to evaluate authorizers annually and determine whether to terminate authorizers and the charter schools they oversee.

In other words: No accountability. No transparency. No due process. And, most alarmingly, no effort to involve in the process the most important stakeholders — parents, teachers and charter school boards. Is this really the direction we want to go after fighting so hard to pass the Georgia Charter Schools Amendment in 2012 that gave charter schooling more freedom?

To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with quality authorizing and standards. But increased regulation and centralized control is not the answer. Not in Georgia, and not in any state.

Charter school supporters should never feel pressured to trade flexibility and autonomy for money and buildings. The offending language should simply be removed and individual charter schools and authorizers allowed to be free to contract and set standards and goals they believe are best for the students they serve.

Jeanne Allen is the founder and chief executive of the Center for Education Reform. Follow her on Twitter, at @JeanneAllen.