Too strict oversight
will hobble progress
of charter schools

A recent report by state auditor Marion Higa seems to suggest that the Board of Education should have been more closely patrolling all charter schools from the day they open in order to see that they are functioning properly and effectively. There has been the suggestion that it was only a poorly written law or ineptitude of some other sort that has blocked this kind of oversight ("Audit rates Puna charter school worst," Star-Bulletin, Jan. 20).

Such a conclusion errs and vastly oversimplifies the challenge! A major purpose of charter schools is to provide a public school free of the usual regulatory control and oversight agencies. If the BOE and Department of Education were closely monitoring the charter schools, charters would probably look little different from other DOE schools. Granted, there are some risks in the kind of free rein that Hawaii's charter schools have been given. And recent headlines have revealed some of the negatives that can arise. But a study just completed by Kamehameha Schools' research unit confirms that Hawaii's youngsters are faring just fine in charter schools -- many of them considerably better than their counterparts in other public schools.

The study, conducted by Kamehameha's Policy Analysis and System Evaluation team, involved all 23 of the state's start-up charter schools, but gave special emphasis to the 13 targeting Hawaiian children. The research found that the Hawaiian youngsters enrolled in charter schools attend far more willingly and regularly, and achieve far better, than do Hawaiians attending regular public schools. Hawaiian children in regular public schools were four times as likely as the charter school students to be chronic absentees. And at the 10th grade level, Hawaiian students in the charter schools were almost 50 percent more likely to reach a proficient level in reading than their counterparts in regular public schools. On math tests, the charter school students scored at least as well as those in other public schools.

Enabling Hawaiian youngsters to succeed in school is a problem we've been trying without much success to solve for a long time. If charter schools can do it, we ought to take that pretty seriously. And it's certainly not clear that we stand to improve things by tightening DOE-BOE control over these schools.

The challenge, it seems to me, is to figure out some new and novel way to have a previously untested school observed several times during it first couple of years without having DOE supervise or monitor it. Ideally there might be some other agency agreed upon by both parties -- the charters and the DOE -- that would visit to make sure progress was being made toward a management system that makes sense, and an educational system that shows promise. The observing agency needs to be sufficiently well informed about education and sufficiently innovation-minded not to insist upon conformity to a single organizational or pedagogical model. Such open-mindedness is necessary because charter schools must be left free to invent or a great deal of their individuality, and with it their value, will be lost. This minimal kind of oversight is needed to protect children and their families, as well as the public. And assuming a credible and knowledgeable observer has been chosen, such minimal oversight should certainly suffice to do so until the school is several years old and an audit or evaluation is reasonable.