Lessons from New Orleans on charter school screening

If charter schools are well-vetted before they’re allowed to open, will they be more likely to succeed?

A new review of authorizing in the almost-all-charter, post-Katrina education system of New Orleans suggests: It depends.

Whether they’re trying to rein in charter schools that are likely to fail or aid the growth of high-performing schools, people who care about charter school quality have paid a lot of attention recently to the importance of authorizing.

A policy brief released last week by the Education Research Alliance looks at charter applications submitted to Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to try to see whether the screening of charter applications could predict whether schools were likely to do well.

It finds much of the information prospective charters included in their applications (whether their school would partner with a for-profit company, whether its governing board members had education backgrounds, the number of schools run by the same operator, the number of minutes students would spend in the classroom) seemed to have little bearing on schools’ success, either at having their applications approved, or at raising student achievement once they opened.

One measure examined by the researchers did seem to predict which schools would be approved, and which would later have their contracts renewed: The ratings the school received from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which helped vet charter applications for Louisiana’s state board, and followed up with school visits and interviews of potential school leaders.

The report concludes:

Our results suggest that the charter authorization process can partly succeed in excluding low-performing charters, especially if great efforts are made to interview candidates and references and to visit sites of applicants’ current schools. Even with these efforts by NACSA and a 1,000-page application, it is still difficult to predict future school performance, however. Past performance is the best predictor of future performance, but only when we can actually observe past performance.

If the goal is to replace low-performing charters with higher-performing ones, then the availability of other potential charter operators is crucial. In New Orleans during this period, there were nearly twice as many applicants as schools approved, which gave the state options to choose from and the ability to not renew charters and give them to other operators. If the state had had few applications, closing or taking over schools would have been a risky proposition.

This is one of the first reviews of charter school authorizing in a pioneering school choice city. It’s territory worth exploring in other jurisdictions, but it points, at least tentatively, toward a few conclusions.

First, it looks like follow-up can make a difference. NACSA has been encouraging Florida school district officials to interview charter school applicants and check out their qualifications, rather than simply rely on information in the paper application.

The report also might lend credence to free-market types who argue districts need to cut down applications that are hundreds of pages long, and focus on the narrower set of questions that are most likely predict whether a school will actually succeed.

Finally, the report suggests New Orleans benefitted from having a large number of operators applying to open charter schools. This allowed state officials to turn down schools that didn’t pass muster, confident that other operators would step up in their place.