The Ultimate Choice: How Charter Authorizers Approve and Renew Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans

The num­ber of char­ter schools in the Unit­ed States is rapid­ly grow­ing. Behind this trend is the idea that pro­vid­ing schools with more auton­o­my, cou­pled with more intense account­abil­i­ty, will lead to inno­va­tion and bet­ter results. If char­ter schools fail to per­form, then a gov­ern­ment-des­ig­nat­ed autho­riz­er can poten­tial­ly close them down or turn them over to anoth­er school oper­a­tor. The approach to open­ing and clos­ing char­ter schools is quite dif­fer­ent from tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools. For more than a cen­tu­ry, pub­lic schools have been gov­erned and active­ly man­aged by local school boards and dis­tricts, which opened and closed schools based main­ly on total dis­trict enroll­ment, dis­trict finances, and local pol­i­tics. The approach is so dif­fer­ent with char­ters that pol­i­cy­mak­ers need­ed a dif­fer­ent word, autho­rize, to define it. Char­ter autho­riza­tion cre­ates a very dif­fer­ent process for open­ing and clos­ing schools and may open up school lead­er­ship to new­ly emerg­ing non-prof­it and for-prof­it char­ter operators.

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