{"id":1742,"date":"2009-10-14T09:37:03","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T13:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1742"},"modified":"2009-10-14T09:37:03","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T13:37:03","slug":"why-you-dont-always-need-a-statewide-charter-authorizer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1742","title":{"rendered":"Why you don’t always need a statewide charter authorizer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t understand the obsession some people have with multiple charter-school authorizers. In Florida, it has always been the county school board since the charter-school law was first approved in the mid-90s. A few years ago in Florida, the legislature decided for some reason that not enough proposals were being approved and created (and spent gobs of money) on a commission that would be an uber-authorizer. To me, it looked like a giant loophole for low-quality applications and politics. Fortunately, the state court system struck down the law as an infringement on the constitutional authority of school boards. <\/p>\n

While there may be an apparent conflict of interest between an elected board and charter-school authorizer, in fact there has not been. And there is a need for people with at least some experience looking at schools to vet the proposals. In Manatee County, for example, staff are going to recommend that the school board reject 8 applicants to open charter schools, and at least from a Bradenton Herald article<\/a>, the rejections would come for some fairly good reasons. There is no charter cap in Florida, and a number of school boards have no problems approving well-planned charter schools. In addition (and this is fairly important), we have a public-records and open-meeting statute that is rigorous, and the administrative rules in place in Florida make it difficult for a public agency to be arbitrary without being held accountable on appeal. <\/p>\n

Disclosure: I have been associated with two organizations that have started charter schools… and then stopped running them. In one case (my university), it was planned in my first year and I would not have had the chance to participate in planning. The USF charter school was essentially turned over to the county public schools (and became a local public school within the system) some months ago. In the other (a non-profit organization), I expressed my concerns about organizational capacity from the inside, the charter school started operations, and I was no longer a member at the time that the school closed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t understand the obsession some people have with multiple charter-school authorizers. In Florida, it has always been the county school board since the charter-school law was first approved in the mid-90s. A few years ago in Florida, the legislature decided for some reason that not enough proposals were being approved and created (and spent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-s6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}