K–12 | Daily Report

The State Board of Education is working on new rules that would clamp down on underperforming charter schools.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the state board would annually review charter schools for possible changes or closure if they are:

• At least 5 years old or more

• Have test scores in the bottom 10 percent of all schools statewide

• Have test scores in the bottom 20 percent of schools with similar demographics

The rule changes come as a debate grows over making charter schools more accountable. They operate with more freedom than public schools, so as to encourage innovation and high performance.

Flickr photo by Renato Ganoza

Charter schools receive their charter status from a local school district, county office of education or the State Board of Education and must renew every five years. Nick Driver of the California Charter Schools Association disagreed with the new rules, saying the board needed to examine more than one year of test scores to get a true picture of a charter's performance.

An LA Times editorial also criticizes the rules as necessary, but flawed.

More accountability for charters is long overdue, but the standards under consideration by the state board are at once too harsh and too lenient. No school should be judged on a single year's test results; at minimum, the board should consider two years worth of results. At the same time, why would we allow a charter school that has been operating for at least five years to have scores in the bottom fifth among schools that have students with similar learning challenges, such as poverty or lack of English fluency?

At this point, the proposed standards would affect only 18 of the state's more than 800 charter schools; California has a lot more disappointing charter schools than that. A more reasonable measure would be schools that fall in the bottom 20 percent statewide, and bottom 40 percent compared with similar schools.

State Board of Education member Ben Austin told the Chronicle that he favored closing failing charters.

"I don't have a lot of tolerance for these schools," Austin said. "We need to be holding charter schools to at least the same standard as regular schools, if not higher."

The board is expected to finalize the new rules next month.