Overseeing Charter Schools

Charter schools are private schools funded by taxpayers. They are not subject to the same rules applied to regular public schools. The supervising agencies for charter schools are known as authorizers. They are charged with making sure the charter schools can be trusted with kids and with public money. 

But one has to wonder how these authorizers are chosen. For example, Minnesota’s largest authorizer, overseeing 32 charter schools, is a nonprofit that rehabilitates birds. In Ohio in 2013 authorizers had approved more than a dozen charter schools that received state funding and then either collapsed in short order or never opened at all. In Philadelphia an investigation found lavish executive salaries, conflicts of interest and other problems at more than a dozen charter schools.

It seems that there are few hard-and-fast rules for how the regulators charged with overseeing charter schools are supposed to do the job. Furthermore, many authorizers lack the resources and expertise to do the proper job.