Montana is making progress on creating more school choices for families, but it needs to ensure the quality of choices families have to choose from is good. Thus, lawmakers should carefully decide between competing public charter school bills pending in Helena. One focuses on public charter schools’ core purpose: improving student outcomes. The other is likely to polarize communities, politicize education, and doesn’t guarantee high-quality new schools for its students.
HB 549 would make each of Montana’s 302 school districts a charter school “authorizer,” which is the term for the entity that grants a charter school the right to exist and to use taxpayer dollars to provide free public education. HB 549 would effectively turn the state’s school boards into fiefdoms with the power to deny a charter school sought by its citizens, no matter how much the community wants it. That could pit parents against one another and roil school board meetings. While well-intentioned, it invites chaos around what should be professional, pragmatic decisions based on merit, not emotion.
To further understand why this is a bad idea, consider research from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — the nation’s foremost authority on charter school authorizing practices. After studying authorizing practices nationwide for 15 years, NACSA released a report that nailed “the” critical element in authorizing that produces high-quality schools. NACSA Executive Director Karega Rausch wrote, “When there’s institutional commitment, the work of authorizing is visible, it’s part of the larger organization’s strategic plan and goals, and it’s adequately resourced.”