Editorial: Charter schools may fail, and they need a better warning system
Charter schools are where the public school system meets startup culture. While regular public schools go on forever, charter schools sometimes do not.
Like startups, the charters challenge the existing paradigms, and they often fill niches the larger system may underserve. They receive public tax money, but they are free from many of the hiring and operating constraints of traditional public schools. The intent is to encourage alternatives, and there is research indicating that their presence can even raise success in the public schools they operate parallel to.
And when they fail, they fail like the free-market creatures they are. Such was the case this week when the Alianza Academy closed three days into the school year, leaving the parents of 270 students scrambling for a school and the Granite School District scrambling to find them one.
The four-year-old school had in the last year been put on probation by the state's Charter School Board for problems with budgets, low test scores and special-education services. Then last week, days before it was scheduled to open for the year, the board proposed it be terminated. The school's operators tried to open anyway. In a scenario the school's executive director likened to a bank run, too many parents heard the news about its problems and the school didn't get enough returning students to operate. Parents said that news was their first indication of trouble.
Granite District has more than 65,000 students. Absorbing 270 is not insurmountable, but odds are the burden will fall hardest on schools nearest Alianza. It's likely some of them will need to hire new teachers in a hurry. Some parents may even find other charters but, unlike the regular public schools, the charters don't have to accept them if they don't have the staff or the room.
That means more than the charter students are affected by this. It will interfere with those public schools' efforts to educate the students they already have, and that will be no fault of the schools.
The charters point out that public schools fail, too, but they just keep operating. That's true, and that's because they can't close. That's an undeniable fact for charter proponents. The charter system simply couldn't operate without the public school system there as a backup. The Alianza experience makes that obvious.
The charters' entrepreneurship may still be worth continuing, but these are schoolchildren. They cannot absorb losses like venture capitalists. We need a system that prevents the kind of chaos that Alianza Academy is producing at this late stage, and that means requiring schools to inform the parents at the first sign of trouble, bank run or not. It also means not waiting until a week before school starts to propose terminating one. If they can't figure that out, the people promoting charters aren't as inventive as they think they are.Editorial: Charter schools may fail, and they need a better warning system | The Salt Lake Tribune:
