Reporting for the Minnesota Star Tribune, Jeffrey Meitrodt explains how the state authorities allow failing charter schools to keep operating.
Five years after SciTech Academy opened in Richfield, the charter school was failing on almost every level.
SciTech’s test scores were among the lowest in the state. The school’s finances were a mess. And school leaders were ignoring advice on how to fix the situation, according to a 2023 contract review by the school’s nonprofit regulator, the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools.
The review, which documented nearly three dozen contract violations, could have led to the closure of SciTech Academy last year. At most, by flunking all of its primary performance measures, SciTech should have received no more than a one-year contract extension, according to a subsequent analysis by the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). Instead, the guild gave SciTech a three-year contract, typically reserved for schools that meet most of their goals.
Such leniency is common in Minnesota, where state leaders largely outsourced the job of regulating charter schools to 10 nonprofits, whose public funding is dependent on how many schools they oversee as so-called “authorizers.”
The flawed reviews are part of broader oversight problems with Minnesota’s charter schools, which were created to produce better educational outcomes for children. But most are failing to deliver on that promise. A 2024 Minnesota Star Tribune investigation revealed that just 13 of 203 charters have consistently exceeded the state average in math and reading proficiency since 2016, when regulators began implementing a new accountability system.
According to a new Star Tribune review of more than 200 evaluations covering 80 charter schools, authorizers routinely overlooked academic failures and other problems in order to extend the lives of schools that collectively pay them millions of dollars in fees each year for regulatory services. The 10 nonprofits, which oversee all but three of Minnesota’s 173 charter schools, perform these evaluations each time a charter school’s contract is up for renewal, usually a period of three to five years.
In three out of four reviews, schools failed at least one important academic goal, often by large margins. Many of those schools also demonstrated significant weaknesses in financial management, board governance or operations, records show.
When schools failed to meet their contractual goals, some of the nonprofits simply lowered their requirements to a more “realistic” level by taking such steps as reducing the amount of annual growth expected on test scores or the size of a school’s financial cushion, the records show.
Moreover, each authorizer uses different criteria to measure performance, making it difficult for state officials to compare their work. Some base all or most of their evaluation on a school’s test scores and other academic achievements. Others consider test scores to be a minor part of the overall academic picture, allowing low-performing schools to earn points by taking kids on field trips, doing well on parent and teacher surveys and avoiding legal compliance issues.
The state Education Department, which checks each contract renewal for compliance with state law, finds problems with 80% of the renewals, records show. The most frequent complaint is with the reviews themselves. In some cases, MDE noted that authorizers gave schools credit for meeting goals they actually missed. At least 19 schools obtained longer contracts than their performance warranted, MDE records show.
Though MDE has the power to sanction authorizers for “unsatisfactory performance,” it has never done so.
