Charter schools, which are public schools authorized by state laws, differ from traditional public schools, primarily because they enjoy exemptions from most of the state’s educational bureaucracy and regulations in exchange for accountability to parents and authorizers.
The authorizers negotiate the charter contract, under which the school promises to operate in certain ways, and those authorizers can withdraw the contract under certain circumstances.
Authorizers also can help charter schools innovate and learn from one another.
But what if the national association of authorizers, as it develops “best practices,” encourages members to replace one bureaucracy with another? Or issues ideological pressure? Or uses its assessment of the regulatory regime as its test of quality, rather than innovation or the number of charter schools in a state or actual student…
