When Bad Charters Stay Open, Parents Deserve a Warning
By James Merriman
The charter movement has created some truly terrific schools, but also some schools that chronically fail their students. The failures are supposed to be shut down by their authorizers, but after two decades we know the ugly truth: far, far too often low-quality charter schools are allowed to remain open.
Sometimes authorizers lack the capacity and standards they need, and NACSA is doing great work to change that. More often there’s a tougher problem: parents and public officials don’t want school closure, and authorizers lack the political will to say otherwise.
It wasn’t supposed to work that way. In theory, closure by an authorizer would be a backstop option, since parents would tend to “vote with their feet” against a low-quality school. Instead, invested parents tend to persist
