EDITORIAL: What accountability in education looks like

Everyone responds to incentives, even schools.

FuturEdge Charter Academy is in serious financial hot water. The North Las Vegas charter school, which served more than 300 students last year, owes more than $14 million. Its lender threatened foreclosure. The K-8 school has struggled academically, too. Its elementary school has been a one-star school for two years.

The school’s governance had fallen apart. State Public Charter School Authority staff found the school hadn’t had a legally compliant governance body for months. The board was supposed to have nine members, but just three were actively serving.

Imagine this was a traditional public school. Officials would parade these problems as reasons the school needed more money — immediately. Additional funding could have stemmed the immediate crisis, but think about the precedent. Education officials would realize that new funding could be obtained by failure. The more dire the circumstances, the better the sob story.

But that doesn’t happen with Nevada’s charter schools. The State Public Charter School Authority ended the contract with the academy’s operator, although the school will stay open this coming school year. The lender isn’t going to foreclose immediately either. The charter authority is now working to have Academies of Math and Science, which runs several charter schools in Arizona, take over the campus. This fall, the group will open a school near Nellis Air Force Base, its first school in Southern Nevada.

This is far from the first charter school to fail. At this same meeting, the charter authority received a report detailing the closures of TEACH Las Vegas Charter School and Eagle Charter Schools of Nevada.

Charter school opponents might cite these schools as evidence that charter schools are a failed experiment. After all, multiple charter schools have now failed.

But consider this. Many politicians and education officials like to talk about accountability. Nevada charter schools aren’t just talking about it. They’re living it out. The groups running charter schools can be removed if they perform poorly. Closing failing charter schools is what accountability looks like. Yet traditional public schools face no such consequence for repeated poor performance. Never mind that replacing the worst-performing schools with even average schools will quickly improve a school system.

The charter school system also rewards success. Charters that do well attract more students, which increases funding for those schools. Failing schools often lose students and their per-pupil funding. This is a much better incentive structure than traditional public schools usually have.

No one wants a school to fail, but the charter school system does a much better job of dealing with the reality that some schools will do precisely that.