Alliance calls for study with Governor supporting charter bill

The charter cap is gone but the “charter gap” persists

A letter to education policy makers

North Carolina Alliance for Public Charter Schools

June 14, 2011

Contact: Eddie Goodall 919.900.8951 eddie.goodall@nccharters.org

The passage of Senate Bill 8 on June 9, 2011 completes what we’ll call phase one of the charter movement in North Carolina. That period of these public schools of choice, for now 43,000 students, may be called the “Cap Period”. The policy debate for the past decade, after the 100 school limit was reached around 2000, has centered almost exclusively on the arbitrary limit of 100 schools and little else.

The NC Alliance suggests we now recognize a second phase, the “Gap Period”.

The lack of information, or perhaps more accurately the abundance of misinformation, displayed from the introduction of Sen. Stevens’ bill on February 2, through the grueling House Education Committee “debates” between Rep. Stam and all the Democratic committee members, was overwhelming and demonstrated a gap in the public’s understanding and indeed, even seasoned legislators’, comprehension level of public charter schools and their related law.

During the latter stages of 2010, during my final months as a state senator, we spent many hours working with legislative staff to come up with a draft of a charter school bill modeled on the best practices and laws of other states across the country. We tried to represent in the draft those policies required based upon needs of existing schools, gleaned from charter school roundtable meetings the Alliance hosted, as well as interests of a more comprehensive charter program going forward for new schools.

In January of this year I left the Senate and thus the draft bill behind. I was told by Sen. Stevens that he would be handling any charter bill so I relayed that to the legislative attorney working on our bill, unsure of whether it would be mothballed or not.

On January 27 Senate Bill 8 was introduced and it only repealed G.S. 115C-238.29D (b), the cap, and was void of the comprehensive changes to the charter landscape we had prepared. Sen. Stevens explained to me that the plan would be just to increase the cap and that everyone was on board to do that and additional provisions could be submitted in a later bill. We told him that the extra components needed for a quality charter school law in the state would be less likely to pass if they were not included in a bill lifting the cap.

On February 16, SB 8 was heard in Senate Finance and that is when Sen. Soucek’s committee substitute, containing the 22 pages of language we had crafted two months earlier, surfaced. Sen. Stevens had decided to push for the comprehensive bill knowing we could get the cap lifted under most any circumstances. The only thing missing from the new version was the language re-establishing the original definition of the “Local Current Expense Fund” which would have provided for a bigger pot of funds for local districts to share with charters.

This new substitute bill seemed to be the education equivalent of “shock and awe”, yet the real volcano erupted when Stevens had the finance provision put back in the bill. That’s when the NC Association of School Administrators and the State School Boards Association began the media attack on charters and the bill using real molten lava. So, despite the across the board support of the original lean 1-page version of SB 8, the 22-page bill was met with a firestorm of protests from the education establishment and the Democratic House caucus.

That verbal storm lasted from Feb. 16 to June 8, a day before the bill’s passage, when the Governor’s office got the word to the conference committee what verbiage would be acceptable. Republicans acquiesced and accepted what was available,  a cap increase plus the other adjustments knowing the bill would sail through the session the next day and would be signed by Gov. Perdue.

So the charter cap has been removed and thus was anything accomplished by the decision to go for the touchdown versus the first down? Was the war of words raged between February 16 when Dan Soucek explained our substitute bill, and now, worth it?

Absolutely. It exposed the “charter gap” to policy makers of K-12 education in North Carolina.

No one was excluded. The general public, the media, local school boards, and even the members of the body making our laws, the General Assembly, all displayed differing levels of what they did not know about public charter school education. It exposed a huge differing interpretation among scholars about who was to make the laws and rules for K-12 education, the State Board of Education or the General Assembly.

The purpose of this letter is not to embarrass people, but only to point out that because the subject of charters had so narrowly been focused upon our state’s cap for all these years, the more important matters of the substance of charter education had lain dormant. However, the introduction of the 22 pages changed that. The information gap was exposed.

This gap was exhibited by Republicans and Democrats alike, the former seeming to have left their talking points in their offices, while the latter relied on tried, albeit highly effective, old arguments using race and class. Meanwhile, the press printed what was said and there is no need to speculate who won that war of words.  The anti-charter lobby had an email campaign margin described to me by the beleaguered House Majority Leader Skip Stam, as “a thousand to one”.

We ask education policy makers first to agree that there is a charter information gap. Secondly, since charters represent 3% of our public school enrollment, with more on the horizon, let’s agree that this factual knowledge of charters and their performance is worth exploring and narrowing, if not closing. The question then is how do we do this? How do we close the charter information gap?

The NC Alliance recommends, as part of the General Assembly’s 2011 session, and in addition to those reporting requirements of the State Board of Education in Section 6 of SB 8, the inclusion in the “Study Bill” of a “Public Charter Schools Study Committee”. Its charge would be to meet and hear testimony from both charter and district school board members and administrators, national and local charter interest groups, and others, and to report prior to the 2012 session its findings of the following, among others questions:

1. How have charters performed academically in NC, how can they do better, and how can charters make district schools better?
2. How and to what extent are charters funded, and are there suggestions for changes?
3. How do charters and district schools interact, and are there ways to improve these relationships?
4. How do the North Carolina statutes governing oversight of charters differ from other states, and what changes should be made?

This will be a giant step towards a common goal of closing the public charter schools information “gap” and elevating district public schools at the same time.

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