Minnesota charter school failures must be addressed

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Just last month, Minnesota’s highest court upheld withholding $1.3 million in state funding from a charter school with campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) held back the funding after an investigation found that the Minnesota Internship Center deliberately inflated its enrollment numbers. The court found that in 2021 the high school improperly received reimbursement for 137 students who did not actually attend the school.

In 2023, a Burnsville charter program, Gateway STEM Academy, agreed to take corrective action after a state investigation found that nearly $300,000 in school funds was steered to companies owned or controlled by three of its former leaders. That examination found program directors failed to sufficiently monitor the school’s founder and director, who has since been replaced.

Before that, a founder and superintendent of the popular Hmong College Prep Academy in St. Paul resigned because of mismanaging funds. In that 2021 case, the state auditor confirmed that the school violated state law and its own policies when it invested $5 million in a hedge fund and lost all but about $700,000.

And now comes a recent Minnesota Star Tribune news investigation series documenting not only serious financial problems with charters but that many have also failed at their core mission: educating children.

Clearly, over the past three decades too many of the state’s charter programs have fallen on the job. State lawmakers must review the cumulative evidence and make significant changes in the way charters are established, monitored and overseen.

And MDE must be more transparent and responsive to requests for what is rightfully public information. Though MDE routinely has provided records to the Star Tribune within weeks or months in prior requests, the department hasn’t provided most of the complaints against charters that the newspaper requested this past Feb 1. Within seven months, MDE has turned over just seven of the requested records. A department spokesperson said in a statement that the request is “complicated” and that MDE “plans to produce another portion” of the request by the end of this month.

A brief history: The charter school concept was born in Minnesota when the state Legislature voted to create this type of school in 1991. The idea was to allow independently operated public schools that could foster educational innovation and would not be subject to many of the same rules as traditional public programs. To create a charter, a group must have a state-approved authorizer (usually a school district, nonprofit, or college or university) to help oversee its operations. There are currently 12 approved authorizers. After Minnesota’s first charter opened in 1992 the model spread across the nation; now 45 other states have charters that educate one out of every 13 American students.

According to data supplied by MDE, 271 charters have served students since 1992; of that number 130 closed, never opened or merged with other charter schools. Not all charters have been failures — a few have survived and thrived. But a majority are not living up to their promise. Minnesota charter students are less likely to meet grade-level standards in reading and math. Just 13 of them have consistently exceeded state averages since 2016 when a new accountability process was put in place.

Academic outcomes have been poor for many of the charters that often enroll a majority of lower-income students of color. On Tuesday, it was reported that a school featured in the Star Tribune series abruptly closed on Sept. 6 without public explanation. LoveWorks Academy for Arts in Minneapolis closed after more than a decade of poor test scores and attendance. In 2024, just 1.3% of the students at the school were performing at grade level in math, while 7.1% were proficient in reading, according to MDE records.

Some of the poorly performing school examples cited in the Star Tribune report involved improper use of taxpayer dollars — a problem that has plagued other states. Around the nation, enrollment fraud in particular has become a growing issue. Since 2019, charter school leaders have been criminally charged with stealing more than $300 million in taxpayer funds by falsifying attendance figures, according to a review of cases in California, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and North Carolina.

In Ohio, concerns about cooked enrollment books by the state’s 381 charter schools led the state auditor to conduct a random review of 30 charter schools in 2015. That evaluation found that half of the schools claimed to have more students than actually showed up, which helped spark major reforms of Ohio’s charter school system later that year.

There remains reason for glimmers of hope if reforms are relentlessly pursued. As the news series noted, a few of Minnesota’s charters have survived, thrived and done well by their students. Still, about $1 billion in state funding was allocated last year to serve the nearly 70,000 Minnesota students enrolled in the state’s 181 charter schools. That is money that must be better spent to account for the future of students and families who continue to be promised so much more than what is delivered.

Yet the evidence and data show that too many of them are failing. Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota professor and school researcher, is an early-supporter-turned-critic of charters. “They promised these schools would be better,” he told the Star Tribune. “The vast majority are really bad. Many of them are so bad they never should have opened. We shouldn’t continue to allow that.”

We couldn’t agree more.