Charter school goes shopping

Trine University came to the rescue eight years ago when Thea Bowman Leadership Academy was in danger of losing its charter and being shut down.

Now Trine has revoked the Gary, Indiana, school’s charter, citing academic and governance issues. But another private institution, Calumet College of St. Joseph, has stepped up.

“It’s funny how things have come full circle,” said Lindsay Omlor, executive director of Education One, Trine’s charter-school-authorizing office.

Today’s topic is authorizer shopping, what happens when charter schools jump from one authorizer to another to stay open or find a better deal. Thea Bowman looks to be taking the practice to a new level. It now has its third authorizer in less than a decade.

Lawmakers flout ‘unwritten rule’

There’s an unwritten rule at the Indiana Statehouse that you don’t pass laws to interfere with litigation that’s working its way through the courts. But rules can be ignored at the whim of the legislature’s majority, and it seems to be happening more and more.

The most egregious example is House Bill 1235, which says that only state government – not cities, towns or counties – can bring lawsuits against the firearms industry. It’s an effort to kneecap a lawsuit that the city of Gary has been waging for nearly 25 years.

Indiana Statehouse

“HB 1235 is unprecedented in its reach and brazenness,” Paul Helmke, former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne and former head of the Brady Campaign, writes in the Indiana Capital Chronicle. In passing it, legislators “would be placing an entire industry above the law.” 

It has been approved by the House and a Senate committee and goes before the full Senate today.

Public school transfers are Indiana’s biggest choice program

The term school choice usually refers to charter schools and private-school vouchers. In Indiana, the biggest choice program remains “public school choice,” students attending a public school in a district other than the one in which they live.

More than 88,000 Hoosier students crossed district lines to attend a public school in fall 2023, according to the Indiana Department of Education public corporation transfer report. That compares with nearly 69,000 who received state-funded private school vouchers and 47,000 who attended charter schools.

Most school corporations have accepted cross-district transfers since 2009, when Indiana shifted most school funding from local property taxes to the state budget. Districts benefit from admitting more students because they get more state funding, assuming they have room for additional students.

Source: Indiana Department of Education public corporation transfer report

The system is popular, but it’s not for everyone. Families that transfer must provide transportation, so it favors those with resources and flexibility. Students are more likely to transfer from high-poverty to low-poverty districts than vice versa. Districts that lose the most students to transfers tend to be compact urban districts hemmed in by suburban or rural districts: e.g., Kokomo, Anderson, Muncie and Marion.

School districts may have to share referendum funds with charter schools

Indiana legislators voted last year to make school districts share referendum funding with charter schools but limited the law to four counties: Lake, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh. Now they are poised to expand the requirement statewide.

Senate Bill 270, approved Tuesday by the state Senate, would require all school districts to share revenue from operating referendums approved after May 10, 2024. The funds would be shared, on a dollar-per-pupil basis, with charter schools attended by students who live in the districts.

Virtual charter school operators indicted

The other shoe has finally dropped. Federal authorities indicted the founder of two Indiana virtual charter schools and two of his associates on criminal charges. The indictment alleges they defrauded the state of at least $44 million.

We’ve been waiting for this news. A February 2020 report from the State Board of Accounts alleged widespread wrongdoing by Indiana Virtual School, Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy and their operators. It said the findings had been referred to criminal agencies “due to potential violations of state and federal law.”

The indictment, filed last week, focuses on Thomas Stoughton, who founded and ran the schools; Phillip Holden, a director of the schools; and Percy Clark, a superintendent. They face one count of conspiracy, 17 counts of wire fraud, and 58 counts of money laundering. Also mentioned in the indictment, but not charged, are Christopher King, a manager of student operations; and an unnamed manager of student services representatives.

Report: Indiana short-changes rural schools

Public schools are the heart and soul of rural and small-town life in Indiana. They are centers for community activity, sources of local pride and more. But the state hasn’t been doing a good job of supporting its rural schools, according to a recent report.

Indiana ranks near the bottom of the states for policies that strengthen rural education and for support for the learning and development of rural students, according to “Why Rural Matters 2023,” a report by the National Rural Education Association. And that’s important, not only for rural schools and students but for the state, said Chris Lagoni, executive director of the Indiana Small and Rural Schools Association.

“We have the eighth-largest rural student population in the nation, over a quarter of a million students,” he said. And rural schools and their graduates “feed the jobs machine” of urban areas.

The report ranks states according to how urgently their rural schools need attention, with a low number signaling improvement should be a high priority. “You don’t want to be in the top 10,” Lagoni said.

But we almost are; Indiana ranks No. 11 for urgency. It’s about average in ratings of rural diversity, educational outcomes for rural students, and the percentage of schools and districts that are rural. But it’s third worst at providing support and services for rural students. And it’s No. 1 – at the bottom – in the “educational policy context” for rural schools.

Can charter schools be religious?

In 1897, the Indiana General Assembly came very close to declaring the value of pi to be 3.2. A Hoosier country doctor and amateur mathematician pitched the legislation, and the House passed it unanimously. Fortunately, a Purdue University math professor was at the Statehouse on unrelated business. He persuaded the Senate to kill the bill.

I like to tell this story when someone claims charter schools are public schools because state laws say they are. Laws don’t trump reality. If the “Indiana pi bill” had passed, it wouldn’t have changed pi.

Study suggests focus on charter school authorizers

Students who transfer to charter schools authorized by the Indianapolis mayor’s office tend to perform better on state assessments than their peers who stay in traditional public schools. But students who switch to charter schools authorized by Indiana colleges and universities fall behind academically.

Joseph Ferrare (University of Washington Bothell)

Those are among the top-shelf findings of a recent study of Indiana charter schools and their authorizers. And the evidence that charter school authorizers may have an impact on the schools’ effectiveness should be getting more attention from policymakers, an author of the study told me.

“Charters are here, and they are a fairly sizeable sector,” Joseph Ferrare, a social scientist at the University of Washington Bothell, said in a phone interview. “We should want them to do well.”

Remote authorizing for charter schools raises questions

Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville received a 5-year extension to its operating charter recently. Well, not that recently. It happened in December 2022. Ellettsville and Monroe County residents may have missed it, though, because the extension was approved nearly 200 miles away.

It was approved by the three-member board of Grace Charters LLC, a nonprofit formed by Grace College and Theological Seminary to authorize charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated. The board met on the Grace College campus in Winona Lake, Indiana.

To meet legal requirements for public meetings, a notice was published in the local newspaper: the Warsaw Times-Union, which probably no one in Monroe County reads. One member of the public attended, according to minutes of the meeting: Seven Oaks headmaster Stephen Shipp.

Charter schools made big gains in legislative session

Indiana’s private school voucher system was the big winner in the 2023 legislative session, but charter schools came in a close second. They secured sizeable increases in state funding to pay for facilities and transportation, along with – for the first time – a share of local property taxes.

As Amelia Pak-Harvey of Chalkbeat Indiana explains, the success followed an all-out lobbying and PR effort in which charter supporters teamed with voucher proponents. Advocates insist charter schools are public schools, and private schools certainly aren’t.  But the joint effort was effective.

The Republican supermajority in the General Assembly rewarded charter schools with: