National Experts: Charter School Employees Should Not Be State Employees
02/15/2012
Katherine Poythress/Civil Beat
A proposal to overhaul Hawaii's charter school system will go a long way to fixing known problems, but it lacks a key component that could dramatically improve accountability, national experts say.
Charter school employees should not be state employees, experts told Senate Education Chairwoman Jill Tokuda in a briefing about her omnibus charter bill last month.
Charter schools, although publicly funded, operate independently under charters with the state.
"When our organization did an evaluation of the Charter School Administrative Office, we saw them spending a significant amount of time on the personnel matters of charter school employees because they were state employees," said Greg Richmond, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
"That's a highly unusual arrangement that charter school employees must be state employees," he said. "It actually undercuts the charter school concept of increased autonomy and accountability. You're taking away autonomy and creating administrative headaches. That's a big issue, and I would suggest you take a look at that."
Richmond said he doesn't know of any other state that classifies charter school employees as state employees. Some allow the staff and faculty to remain state employees in schools that convert from traditional public schools into charter schools.
The original purpose for charters was to serve as laboratories for educational innovation, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. Nathan helped write the nation's first charter school law.
A healthy balance of autonomy and accountability are the keys to creating the ideal environment for that kind of ingenuity, he said.
Richmond pointed out that Hawaii's charter system has an imbalance between those two concepts.
"Your charter schools have really good autonomy here except in the most important area: staffing," he told Civil Beat. "For autonomy to really count, the principal needs to be able to determine how you pay, evaluate and schedule your employees."
