Education Next – June Kronholz
“The 7:40 p.m. agenda item at a meeting of Washington, D.C.’s charter-school authorizer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, was a “discussion” about a school for 700 low-income, African American girls. As authorizing-board members listened in stony silence, the school board’s new chair explained that a recent “self-assessment” revealed that staffers had been misusing school credit cards, teacher retention was miserable, the front office was staffed “like a Fortune 500 company,” and two-thirds of the previous year’s students hadn’t verified that they were D.C. residents and eligible to attend at D.C. taxpayer expense. Among the non-D.C. students: the enrollment manager’s daughter. Whose responsibility is it when a charter school gets into trouble—when its students aren’t learning or it misses its enrollment targets or money runs short or it closes? Everyone I asked gave the same answer. “I’d point right to the board,” said Mark Lerner, who sits on the board of Washington Latin charter school. “The failure of a charter is the failure of the board,” said Tom Keane, who directs strategic initiatives at AppleTree, an early-learning charter with six D.C. campuses. “Every closure ultimately can get traced back to the board not doing the job,” added Marci Cornell-Feist, a Massachusetts-based education consultant and entrepreneur.”(more)