When the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Board voted in mid-November to close Smithson-Craighead Middle School at the end of the current academic year, the decision angered parents and generated pleas for patience. This despite the fact that the charter school had been warned over several years that it needed to improve its performance or risk closure.

The most recent TCAP scores showed that only 7.6 percent of Smithson-Craighead students were proficient in math and only 17.6 percent in reading. These abysmal scores were far below those of other Nashville charter and public schools.

Nationally, the data on charter school closings have been mixed. One report from the Center for Education Reform indicated that 15 percent of the 6,700 charters opened over the past 20 years have closed. However, less than a fifth of these closed because of poor academic performance. Most were closed because of financial problems or mismanagement.

And charter school closures are down, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). The association observed a three-year decline in the percentage of charters closed at the time of charter renewal with 6.2 percent being closed in 2010-2011. However, the association cautioned that there could be several reasons for the decline, including improvement in school quality.

Critics who believe that charters are too slow to close might bear in mind another study, by Peabody alumnus David A. Stuit for the Fordham Foundation, that showed that poorly performing charters are much more likely to be closed than poorly performing public schools.

Signs also suggest that more charters may be closed in the years to come. In the fall, NACSA launched its One Million Lives campaign to strengthen charter school standards. It plans to work with authorizers, policymakers, legislators and charter school operators to close failing charter schools while opening new ones and enrolling many more children. In the face of evidence that most charter schools are neither better nor worse than their public school peers, NACSA hopes to help the charter school movement do a better job of policing itself and improving academic performance. The organization estimates between 900 and 1,300 charter schools are performing in the lowest 15 percent of schools in their states.

In the end, performance should be at the heart of the question of whether to continue or close a charter school. This means looking closely at student achievement on a school-by-school basis. Unfortunately, Smithson-Craighead Middle School did not withstand close scrutiny. MNPS was right to make the decision early enough in the year to allow parents to make other plans for their children. More such decisions may be needed in the years to come.

Parents, politicians and other charter school advocates need to remember that charters have always been experimental in nature. In exchange for public funding and operational latitude, charters promise innovation and academic success. When that success is not forthcoming, the experiment must come to a close.

Camilla P. Benbow is Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Her column on education appears every other Thursday in The Tennessean Local section.

According to the Center for American Progress (CAP), an influential, left-leaning voice in Washington, “Future federal charter school investments should focus on quality. The Charter School Program can help drive state quality-control measures by targeting grants to states with robust authorizing practices, smart charter school caps, and those that demonstrate the capacity to effectively monitor charter schools and close poor-performing ones.”  Most charter advocates believe this is what state laws already do – or should do — and that it’s not the feds’ job to regulate quality, particularly when they have little access to real-time, accurate data on outcomes, demographics and the individual goals of individual charter schools.

But Democrats and Republicans alike do not seem to understand the power that a new federal law has on the market.  Under the proposed 2011 “Empowering Parents through Quality Charter Schools Act” (HR 2218), as summarized by CAP, states’ efforts “to support quality authorizing practices must be considered in the awarding of state grants, including activities intended to improve how authorizing practices are funded, but the proposal does not prioritize state grants based on the quality of state authorizing efforts.” The question remains– Who decides what quality authorizing is? You can bet Washington won’t leave that to the states!

Then there is the All-Star Act (HR 1525), introduced by Reps. Jared Polis (D-CO) and Erik Paulsen (R-MN) in April 2011.  The Center for American Progress reports that, “The bill is also important in that it prioritizes states that have strong authorizing policies and an effective process for closing down low-performing charter schools for Charter School Program state grants. This critical element should be included in other charter school proposals and in ESEA.”

Interesting that without new legislation or authority, the U.S. Department of Education, on November 19, 2012, issued to the state of Pennsylvania a mandate as to how the state must assess its own charter schools for purposes of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). State officials sought to align charter ratings to the way school districts are ranked, but clearly the opponents of charters are ruling the day in DC.

“Federal education officials have denied Pennsylvania’s request to evaluate charter school achievement using more lenient criteria, saying they must be assessed by the same standard as traditional schools. ‘I cannot approve this … because it’s not aligned with the statute and regulations,’ U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Deborah Delisle wrote in a letter released by the state Wednesday, November 21.

“The issue surfaced in September when Pennsylvania’s latest standardized test scores were reported. … State Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis treated charter schools as districts, not individual schools.

“Schools must hit certain targets at every tested grade level to make AYP. But for a district to meet the benchmark, it needs only to hit targets in one of three grade spans: grades 3-5, 4-6 or 9-12.

“Under Pennsylvania law, every charter school is considered its own district. So by using the grade span methodology, about 59 percent of charters made AYP, a figure that supporters touted, comparing it with the 50 percent of traditional schools that hit the target.

“Yet only 37 percent of charters would have made AYP under the individual school method. Delisle ordered Pennsylvania to re-evaluate charter schools’ AYP status using that standard by the end of the fall semester.” (See the Philadelphia Inquirer for the full story.)

What the U.S. Department of Education officials fail to appreciate is that many charter schools have different grade configurations than traditional district schools. Some charters offer all grades, others are more limited.  But regardless, they operate like districts unto themselves regarding management and operations, and without commensurate funding. Apples should be compared to apples.  If a school district’s AYP can be met based on just one target, why should a charter have to meet all three to make AYP?  The bad policymaking at the federal level underscores why the U.S. Department of Education has no business regulating the charter school arena, but Congress and the Administration persist, nonetheless, without any authority to do so.

Advocates should be concerned not only about these policy moves but the proposals making their way through Congress, which are supported by many national charter school groups, for reasons we can only hope is due to ignorance about the political process.  The Charter School Quality Act (S686), introduced last year by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) will result in yet another heap of federal oversight over charter schools. As CAP puts it, the bill “seeks to improve state chartering policies by targeting Charter School Program grants to states that have developed a transparent process for accrediting, training, and evaluating state charter authorizers. In addition, states that evaluate the effectiveness of their charter authorizers; encourage authorizers to abide by research-based best practices; and primarily base charter school approval, renewal, and closure on student achievement data, are also prioritized for grant awards.”

This doesn’t sound like anything having to do with whether students learn but an excuse to create more process-oriented rules which make charter schools just like failed schools — the very approach that the charter concept once sought to avoid, and is now forcing them into school-district like boxes, with all the best of intentions.

One point I want to make is that all of us are going to have responsibilities to get this economy education moving again. And when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers Congress had given themselves the education system $20 billion $100 billion worth of bonuses in new spending — the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 effectively doubling federal funding of education — at a time when most of these institutions were are teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don’t provide help that where they don’t have any other choices for educating their children, the entire system could come down on top of our heads if the next generation – indeed, this generation – can’t compete in a global economy — that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful.

And part of what we’re going to need is for folks on Wall Street in the education BLOB who are asking for help to show some restraint accountability and show some discipline transparency and show some sense of responsibility. The American people understand that we’ve got a big hole that we’ve got to dig ourselves out of — but they don’t like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they’re being asked to fill it up.

And so we’re going to be having conversations as this process moves forward directly with these folks on Wall Street the BLOB to underscore that they have to start acting in a more responsible accountable and transparent fashion if we are to together get this economy rolling again. There will be time for them to make profits an opportunity for those with rigorous programs to put them in play in the classroom, as is already seen in charter schools across the country, and there will be time for them to get bonuses quality teachers to excel and be compensated on their merits rather than their seniority — now is not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them, I expect Secretary Geithner Duncan to send to them — and Secretary Geithner Duncan already had to pull back one institution that had gone forward with a multimillion dollar jet plane purchase tenure protection contract at the same time as they’re receiving TARP ARRA money. We shouldn’t have to do that because they should know better. And we will continue to send that message loud and clear.

Having said that, I am confident that with the recovery package moving through the House and through the Senate, with the excellent work that’s already been done by Secretary Geithner in consultation with Larry Summers and Paul Volcker and other individuals education reformers in the trenches, that we are going to be able to set up a regulatory framework that allows accountability, transparency and choice to rights the ship and that gets us moving again. And I know the American people are eager to get moving again — they want to work be able to choose the best education for their children, be it in a conventional, charter or private school. They are serious about their responsibilities; I am, too, in this White House and I hope that the folks on Wall Street in the BLOB are going to be thinking in the same way.

(brought to you as a public service by M.O.M.S. – Mothers Opposed to Misappropriated Stimulus)