Idaho’s public charter school law turned twenty-five last year. Over that quarter century, the statute has grown warts. It’s also too complicated, burdened by vestigial code and rules, and confusing to schools, authorizers,[1] and state education agencies alike.
The time for an update seems to have come. The “Accelerating Public Charter Schools Act” (a.k.a. HB422) passed out of the House recently on a vote of 66-3-1, passed out of the Senate Education Committee unanimously, and is expected to sail through the Senate in coming days.
Strong support for operational flexibilities
The updated statute seeks a balance between operator flexibility and accountability for performance, while also supporting the continued growth of Idaho’s charter sector, which has seen the addition of about forty new schools in the last eight years.
HB422 seeks to “reward public charter schools that meet their accountability measures with enhanced autonomy and freedom from regulatory burden.” Successful charter schools can earn autonomy. Those that have met all targets and satisfy all requirements over the terms of their contracts can renew for terms of twelve years. Longer terms mean that successful schools can spend less time worrying about renewal and more time educating students. This also saves time for the staff of the Idaho Public Charter School Commission, which authorizes 60-plus schools with a staff of three and a half employees.
Additional flexibility provided in the legislation would allow successful charter networks with multiple school sites to operate as a single local educational agency (LEA). This is common practice in other charter states and will enable Idaho networks to innovate in areas such as the cross-collateralization of debt for school facilities. This can drive down the costs of facility loans.
The bill also provides for “fast-tracked replication.” Schools that successfully complete at least one renewal cycle without conditions can clone an additional school—using the same model and serving some or all of the same grades—with paperwork and approval completing in a speedy forty-five days. This will allow successful schools that want to replicate themselves to spend less time navigating the regulatory process and more time planning their schools and finding teachers, leaders, and facilities. It should also save them some legal fees!
More transparency but light on results-based school accountability
On the accountability front, however, the pending legislation does some compromising, as has been the practice in Idaho, where parent choice and marketplace forces are the primary drivers of school accountability. On the plus side, the bill will allow “Revocation of a Charter.” Specifically, a charter may be terminated by its authorizer if, after fair notice, the school “commits a material and substantial violation of any of the terms, conditions, standards, or procedures required by this chapter or the performance certificate (including academic performance and growth).” This gives authorizers some discretion, but Idaho’s charter law (and charter program) has never been hawkish about closing schools for academic reasons. In fact, only nine charter schools have closed in Idaho since the early 2000s, and all were the result of financial mismanagement, low enrollment, or failure to maintain full accreditation.
Still, the “Accelerating Public Charter Schools Act” will encourage transparency around school performance. It requires authorizers to make school performance certificates—which must include student academic proficiency, student academic growth, and college and career readiness for high school students—available to the public and parents. It also requires an authorizer to “continually monitor the performance and legal compliance of the public charter schools it oversees, including collecting and analyzing data, and may conduct prearranged site visits, if needed, to support ongoing evaluation according to its performance certificate.” In this way, it is hoped that high-flying schools will be separated from struggling ones.
Then there’s the appeals process. If an authorizer does seek to revoke or non-renew a charter, that decision may be appealed to the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH). This is a change from current law, which requires such appeals to go through the state board of education. The OAH was created in 2022 “to assure fair hearings without the perception of bias.” Whether this is an improvement won’t be known until the first case is brought to the OAH, but it is noteworthy that lawmakers are taking the decision of whether to approve the closure of a public school out of the hands of the state board of education.
HB422 also seeks to balance the role of authorizer as quality control agent with that of school support organization. Under current law, authorizers, especially the Idaho Public Charter School Commission and its seven-member board appointed by the governor, have struggled to balance oversight and school support. The new legislation tasks the state department of education with “enrolling charter schools in need of improvement in support and development programs, including but not limited to the Idaho Building Capacity Program.” The purpose of this program is to support Idaho’s lowest-performing schools in improving their instructional systems and targeting academic achievement. Another way to see it is as a last chance for a charter school to turn itself around or face revocation.
In public testimony, the primary author of HB422, Alex Adams of Governor Little’s office, made it clear that the bill is not perfect. It’s a balancing act. For other states, the parts most worthy of study and possibly embracing involve operational flexibility and the streamlining of the charter approval and renewal processes for high-performing schools. The Idaho approach to school performance has to be termed accountability-lite.
How does HB422 line up with national best practice?
I asked Todd Ziebarth at the National Alliance for Public Charter School what he thought of the changes in HB422 and he summarized it thusly:
HB 422 streamlines Idaho’s charter school law with the goal of balancing charter school autonomy and accountability. The bill largely accomplishes this goal. As a result, charter schools in Idaho will have more flexibility to innovate while still being held accountable for results.
HB 422 moves the Idaho charter school law closer to the National Alliance’s model law in two important ways. First, it requires that the terms of a charter school’s initial contract must be for six years, giving a new school a sufficient amount of time to prove its worth before it faces renewal. Second, it allows a high-performing charter school to have its contract renewed for up to twelve years, allowing the school to spend more time focused on educating students instead of completing bureaucratic paperwork requirements.
While HB 422 represents forward progress for the charter school sector in Idaho, more work remains to be done to provide charter schools even more flexibility to innovate, especially as it relates to teacher policies, and more equitable funding and facilities support—all while holding the line on ensuring that charter schools deliver results for Idaho’s families and taxpayers.
[1] In Idaho, the primary authorizer is the Idaho Public Charter School Commission. A handful of school districts authorize schools, as well. State colleges, universities, and nonsectarian colleges are also allowed to authorize schools, but none has yet taken this role on.
