The Challenge of Reporting on Charter Performance and Finances

Journalists describe obstacles that prevent a fair and full look inside the practices of publicly funded school alternatives

Earlier this year, Matthew Kauffman, an investigative reporter with the Hartford Courant, partnered with his newspaper’s education reporter, Vanessa de la Torre, to look at “choice schools” in Connecticut, which include charter schools.

Their reporting focused on these questions: Was student enrollment at these publicly funded alternatives truly random as lotteries would imply or was there recruiting for admission? Did the choice schools experience significant year-to-year “churn” in student population, perhaps due to policies that “counseled out” weaker students and those with especially difficult behavior issues? And what could be learned about the finances at schools run by charter management organizations whose leadership was the same as that of the schools themselves?

The reporters submitted a Freedom of Information request about finances to the management organization and were turned down. They appealed to the state’s Freedom of Information Commission and were denied again.

They also couldn’t obtain statistical information about the admission lotteries owing to privacy protections under FERPA. What’s more, state government officials said they weren’t interested in looking into charter school lotteries themselves, even after Kauffman and de la Torre uncovered evidence that a prominent charter operator had lied about recruiting top athletes to a magnet high school.

Reporting Roadblocks

Kauffman and de la Torre certainly aren’t the only education journalists challenged to keep their audiences fully informed about charter schools in their communities. Reporters in various places point to the roadblocks thrown in their way when attempting to shine the light on charters, as they are able to do with student performance data and finances at traditional public schools.

Some reporters have taken to explaining to readers the differences in student populations between the two types of schools, especially when it comes to evaluating data on academic proficiency.

This issue is important because journalists for print and digital publications nationwide are a proxy for the families of school-aged children and all interested citizens when it comes to evaluating and comparing traditional public and charter schools. The performance review of charters bears particular weight under the current federal administration, with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos favoring the expansion of charter schools and the use of public vouchers for student enrollment at an array of nonpublic school op-tions, including cybercharters.

At the same time, Karega Rausch, vice president of research and evaluation at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a Chicago-based advocacy organization promoting the interests of larger charter groups nationwide, says accountability lies with the authorizing bodies, or sponsors, for making reliable, useful information available to the press and public. The association has developed its 12 “essential practices” for authorizers to follow, including the production and distribution of annual, independent audits and yearly student performance reports. Still, Rausch says, about 30 percent of larger charter school groups may not be following these guidelines.

Lottery Questions

Ryan Delaney, an education reporter at St. Louis Public Radio, says his experience seeking academic and financial information from the St. Louis metropolitan area’s 33 charter schools has been a “mixed bag,” ranging from stonewalling to sharing of complete details about school operations.

Delaney is part of a reporting team involved in an ongoing series about the city’s charters. “Some are more hands-on, some provide less information,” he says. Typically, the larger charter school networks are better about providing even routine information, such as how they measure school performance.

Danielle Dreilinger has confronted a similar situation in New Orleans. As the education beat reporter for nearly five years at the city’s daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, she says she had “radically different experiences with different charter groups” operating in New Orleans in her bid to inform families and other readers.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans transformed more than 90 percent of its elementary and secondary schools from traditional public schools to charters. The Louisiana Department of Education provides the same academic proficiency data about students in both school sectors, and the agency began disaggregating test score performance by specific student populations under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, she says.

The enrollment lottery for charter schools in New Orleans is centralized, but Dreilinger says, “some charters don’t participate in the system, and those schools have been secretive about that.” The most popular charters among the 80-plus in the New Orleans metro area receive three times their capacity in applications, making a lottery system to fill classroom seats unavoidable. “Calling it a choice system isn’t fully accurate,” she adds.

Financial information on charters that’s made available to the public varies widely, Dreilinger says, “There’s … a difference from school to school in collecting e-mails, fine-grained financial details.”

The city’s largest charters, many of which are former public schools with long histories, typically are among those least likely to respond to open records requests, Dreilinger says. “There’s an attitude of, ‘We don’t care; we don’t have to,’” she adds.

Sunshine Laws

The search for financial information, in particular, about charter schools has driven reporters in some locations up against states’ open records laws, sometimes referred to as “sunshine laws,” especially when private charter management organizations are at the helm. These nonprofits claim time and again to be exempt from such laws because they are not government agencies.

Journalists counter that public money’s role in the operating budgets of these schools makes the management organizations subject to open records laws. These issues have played out in Connecticut, largely due to the Hartford Courant’s reporting; in California, where a legislative bill recently failed that would have required charter school governing boards to comply with the state’s open records law; and in Washington, D.C., where nearly half of the district’s students are enrolled in charter schools.

Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says practices such as lotteries make the entire system for enrolling students at charters different from public schools, which must accept all students. This distinction makes it challenging for research and reporting on comparing student outcomes — particularly if the fair operations of lotteries can’t be verified.

“If we have charter schools shaping who enrolls, we can’t compare them to public schools,” says Welner, a professor of education policy and law. “If we can control access and retention, then any comparison between charter schools and nearby public schools is an apples to oranges comparison.”

In addition, student outcomes at well-supported charter schools are difficult to compare with outcomes at those schools that are struggling financially, he says.

Similarly, Margaret (Macke) Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, wrote in an e-mail, “School-level comparisons aren’t valid because the student composition of charter schools is significantly different from the district schools around them.”

To generate fair comparisons, she adds, student-level analysis must include strict controls for equal samples. “But states are required to work under FERPA to restrict access to student-level data. Sad to say, reporters are not considered eligible to receive student-level data. And researchers that do access the data are restricted in two ways. They can only use the data for express purposes detailed in advance, and they cannot share the data in any way with others.”

Comparison Limits

Denise Smith Amos, a veteran reporter, has covered education in places where test scores for charter schools are separated out from public school data — as in Cincinnati, where she worked for the daily Cincinnati Enquirer. In Duval County, Fla., where she’s now covering K-12 education for the Florida Times Union, the data are not disaggregated.

Additionally, in Duval County, she says, “the school district polices magnet school lotteries but not charter school lotteries. We have to take their word for it. That makes me kind of nervous.” KIPP, a national chain with 200 charter schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia, says it has 1,000 students on waiting lists in Duval, but FERPA prevents Amos from verifying the claim.

Amos tries to provide context for her readers when reporting on student test scores for any of the district’s 32 charter schools that draw from middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. She includes demographic backgrounds whenever comparisons are made between traditional public schools and charters.

Welner, at the University of Colorado, thinks that all reporting on academic progress at charters should remind readers or listeners that “if you look at the overall body of reliable research, you can conclude that there isn’t a significant difference between outcomes at charters and outcomes at public schools.” Any coverage of this subject, he says, ought to carry a “stock paragraph about the history of charter school research.”

Accountable Practices

Meantime, at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Rausch says charter school authorizers, by following his organization’s recommendations, can help local communities evaluate their charter schools.

Rausch’s organization represents large authorizers, those with 10 or more schools, which account for 68 percent of all charter authorizers nationwide, he says. Most are school districts, but they also include universities, state boards and state departments of education, municipalities and nonprofit organizations. About 70 percent of the larger authorizers follow at least 11 of the 12 recommendations, Rausch contends. Smaller authorizers “are less likely to adopt the practices,” he adds.

Whether schools are sponsored by large or small authorizers, Rausch insists the ultimate responsibility for informing communities rests with the sponsors. “Where there are problems getting access to information,” he says, “we need to hold [them] accountable.”