Bruno V. Manno

Charter School Accountability: Problems and Prospects

Today, public school accountability depends mostly on compliance. This accountability-via-regulation will only make charter public schools like district public schools. A different approach to charter accountability is envisioned, designed to help these schools succeed as genuine education alternatives. This accountability-via-transparency is based on giving charter schools operational, financial, and program autonomy in exchange for holding them accountable for results. Furthermore, rather than bureaucratic control from higher levels within the system, charter accountability is propelled mostly by public marketplaces in which a school’s clients and stakeholders reward its successes, punish its failures, and send it signals about what must change. In what follows, approaches to accountability in today’s charter world are reviewed; how a transparent charter accountability system following Generally Accepted Accountability Principles for Education (GAAPE) would work for charter schools, their sponsors, and statewide programs is described; and three accountability dilemmas that charter schools face are discussed in the conclusion.

Improve Governance for Charters.

With 25 years of experience, the charter sector has had enough time to experience a host of unanticipated and unresolved problems related to the complex ways in which charter school governance relates to school leadership. The time has come for the sector to revisit some fundamental decisions about how charter schools and networks are governed, both to tighten arrangements that are excessively loose and to encourage further innovation. The future of chartering should not be a linear extension of the past. If we left some problems unsolved in 1991 (or had no idea that they would become problems), that is no reason not to take stock of things as they stand today and to set matters right before moving forward. This article is based on the authors’ book, Charter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities (Harvard Education Press, 2016).

The District and Charter Sectors of American K-12 Education: Pros and Cons.

ABSTRACT This article probes ways in which the school-choice marketplace as it developed via chartering has not worked as well in practice as many had hoped. It includes reflection on the profoundly different operating principles and theories of action that separate the district and charter sectors in their pure forms. It also offers market-strengthening suggestions that blend the 2 approaches, organizing them under 10 categories.