Transcript
BRIAN C. HASSEL: The topic of this paper is "charter school accountability." As everybody knows, accountability is really a central part of the charter school concept. Everyone says charter schools are held accountable. They are accountable public schools. They will be shut down if they don't perform. And that almost comes out of everyone's mouth first when they are talking about charter schools. That is the trade for the autonomy that they receive; in return, they are held accountable for results. And they are held accountable in lots of different ways.
They are held accountable to families and children, because they can choose to attend the schools or not. They are held accountable to their authorizers, the agencies that give them a license to operate and can take that license away. And, as Robin and her colleagues have pointed out, they are also accountable to lots of other entities with which they partner or other government agencies that oversee them in different ways.
But this paper is focusing on charter schools' accountability to authorizers, the agencies, typically public agencies, that oversee them and give them their license to operate.
And even more specifically, this paper focuses on an aspect of charter school accountability which is unique, and that is the threat of shutdown. The idea in charter schools, as all of you I am sure know, is that if a charter school fails to perform after a certain period of time, it can be closed.
I think the question that a lot of people have about charter accountability is: Is it real? Proponents say that charter schools are the most accountable public schools because of this threat of shutdown. Skeptics say it is a sham, that authorizers won't really close bad schools. It is just a piece of rhetoric that charter school proponents use to justify the autonomy that charter schools are receiving.
So the question we pose in this study is what really happens when charter schools reach that moment of truth when they face a renewal decision or a decision about having their charter taken away.
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