Counterpoint: What you should know about charter schools beyond the criticisms

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Recent media articles don’t accurately reflect Minnesota’s chartered public school sector or the thousands of dedicated leaders and teachers I know and work with (“Charter experiment failing kids,” special section, Sept. 15).

At the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, we agree that there are challenges in the public education sector. We believe chartered public schools should be held accountable, transparent and held to high standards. Our charter law, the first in the nation, has evolved over time to increase accountability while maintaining the autonomy to allow chartered public schools to innovate and explore exciting ways to serve students’ and their families’ unique interests and personalized learning needs. Parents of more than 68,000 students choose to send their students to attend tuition-free charter schools, which are open to all students regardless of ability or need. Charters are governed jointly by licensed teachers, parents and community members, and are subject to the same legal requirements as traditional public schools regarding state testing, teacher licensing and financial reporting.

There are many successes within our sector: Six of Minnesota’s Top 10 public schools are charters, and in 2024, 122 of the state’s 180 charter schools earned the Minnesota Department of Education School Finance Award for sound fiscal management.

However, like all public schools across Minnesota, some individual charters face challenges in areas such as finances, academics or governance. The charter sector has proactively addressed these issues by advocating for laws that increase accountability and transparency. In the last two legislative sessions, we passed several bipartisan bills to address these challenges, and our focus now is on implementing these important reforms.

For instance, in the last session we passed new bipartisan laws that enhance training requirements for board members and school administrators. These new laws strengthen and expedite board training requirements on financial management, governance best practices, and legal obligations. The laws also require boards to conduct annual performance assessments and develop robust improvement plans. To ensure that school directors are prepared, leaders now must have a four-year degree and complete significant annual training on essential topics like instruction/assessment, financial management and state/federal law.

Additionally, these laws enhance transparency and more thoroughly address conflict of interest issues and strengthen public accountability/reporting requirements for companies working with charter schools.

We fundamentally as a sector want students to achieve and emphatically support academic measurements and accountability for our schools. In fact, charters are held accountable for academic performance by the state’s NorthStar accountability system and by their authorizers in their contracts. Schools must meet contract benchmarks to continue operating and serving students. New laws have clarified and strengthened authorizers’ roles in oversight and evaluation, while also enhancing their training responsibilities with the Education Department.

Despite our efforts to improve accountability and performance, chartered public schools remain significantly underfunded. Charters in Minnesota serve a higher percentage of students of color, students with disabilities, English learners and low-income students than traditional district schools, yet receive less than 70% of the funding. That means that a public school student who attends a charter is not funded equitably when compared with a public school student in a traditional district school, despite the fact that they need similar or more supports. Charter students are excluded by law from public school levy funds, even though charter parents pay these taxes. As a result, charter students are denied hundreds to thousands of dollars per pupil each year that district students receive. Charters also do not receive school safety funding, equal funding for after-school or summer programs, or adequate transportation funding to cover skyrocketing costs, among many other funding inequities.

These funding inequities must be addressed to ensure all students in Minnesota’s public school system are supported equally. While we work to improve charter laws, we urgently need legislative help to fix these disparities and continue strengthening the public school sector.

Our sector consistently and proactively works to enhance accountability, transparency and conflict-of-interest protections to help all Minnesota chartered public schools succeed in their missions. Now is not the time to introduce barriers that prevent teachers, parents and communities from co-creating schools that meet their children’s needs. Instead, we should focus on funding schools equitably and implementing the new legislative reforms already passed.

Joey Cienian is executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools.