The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools — a nonprofit organization that describes its goal as “working to grow the number of high-quality charter schools” — ranks the states’ charter schools laws in terms of how well they further that goal.
In its latest ranking in 2010, Pennsylvania was 12th out of 41 states.
Minnesota, home to the first charter schools, ranked first. Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado and New York rounded out the top five. Nine states don’t have any charter school laws.
“In general, Pennsylvania law provides an environment that’s open to new start-ups, public school conversions, and virtual schools and supportive of autonomy,” according to the report. But the report said the legislation could improve in several ways: by prohibiting caps on growth, increasing the accountability for the authorizer, allowing more entities besides school boards to approve charter schools and allowing the same organizations to start multiple charter schools.
This March, legislators in the House and Senate proposed changes to the charter school law. Hearings on the proposals are expected this summer and fall.
Senate Bill 094 and House Bill 1348 would:
•Establish a state commission — located in Harrisburg and comprised of state-level appointees — that could approve charters to operate anywhere in the state.
•Remove caps on student enrollment.
•Allow charter school leaders to select their authorizer: Either the commission, a local college or university, or local school board. The Senate bill’s sponsor, Jeffrey Piccola, RDauphin, said he’s been impressed by a charter school run by Widener University in Chester and would like to see the 14- state owned schools get into the charter business.
“The benefits that would flow to the kids are just absolutely incredible,” he said.
In an analysis critical of the proposal, the Education Law Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit and education advocacy organization, said having multiple authorizers would end up “creating a race to the authorizer with the least oversight by the community.”
•Require that charter renewals last for 10 years as opposed to the current five years. New York, New Jersey and California all have five-year renewal periods, according to the Education Law Center.
•Allow school boards to convert any existing district-run school — including those that aren’t labeled as failing — into a charter.
•Allow any charter to become a “Multiple Charter School Organization” that could operate multiple schools.
“The role will be whatever the market demands,” Piccola said. He added that “if (school districts) are not meeting all of the educational needs of a significant block of students, there may be a market for a charter school to come in. That’s not to say the public school is doing a bad job necessarily — there may just need to be a special niche.”
The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools supports the legislation, and spokesman David Speers said it “would remove the civil war that’s going on” between charter schools and district-run schools.
Others disagree. The Education Law Center’s analysis said the bills “would repeal Pennsylvania’s current charter school/cyber charter school law in its entirety and replace it with language that permits the unfettered expansion of charter schools throughout the state, reduces accountability, and effectively removes all local control of charters, while continuing to redirect millions of dollars of public funding away from traditional public schools — when charters have been shown, on the whole, not to improve student performance any more than traditional public schools and in many charters, students have fared worse.”
The authors of the analysis also argue that the proposals abandon one of the original purposes of charter schools.
“Rather than creating competition, choice, and innovation, the bill would allow schools to open that simply replicate the traditional public school system,” the analysis states. — Ed Mahon
