The report was commissioned by the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board.
The report analyzed the state’s charter school reporting system through a review of laws, rules, policies and interviews with stakeholders.
It found three main points: first, charter schools’ reporting burden is similar to that of traditional public schools’.
The report identified the most significant source of required reporting was in the accreditation process. The Oklahoma State Department of Education requires districts to annually submit documentation to maintain accreditation.
“Importantly, the concerns about reporting regulations expressed by interviewees were generally not objections to accountability itself,” the report said. “Charter leaders repeatedly acknowledged the importance of financial transparency, academic accountability and safeguards for students and staff.”
At issue, according to the report, were reporting “inefficiencies.” These inefficiencies were described as an ever-expanding system of compliance obligations, policies requiring duplicative reporting and “avoidable administrative friction,” such as a confusing reporting portal.
The report points to the manpower cost of burdensome requirements.
“A small rural district and a small charter school may have very different governance structures, but both have limited central-office capacity over which to spread fixed compliance obligations,” the report said.
Second, the report found that charters often question which laws and regulations apply to them, creating an atmosphere of potentially nonessential reporting rather than risk noncompliance. Some Oklahoma statutes refer to public schools and charter schools, but others use terminology like “schools,” or “public schools.”
The authors argue this ambiguity leaves questions about whether certain requirements pertain to charter schools or fall under the exemptions of the Charter Schools Act.
According to the report, OSDE hosts a document listing certain rules applicable to charter schools, but it’s undated and does not appear to be regularly updated — as evidenced by the header of the document, which lists former Superintendent Joy Hofmeister. The Charter Schools Act requires the document to be annually updated.
“Ensuring that such a resource is comprehensive, current and readily available could reduce unnecessary reporting, lower administrative costs, and allow charter leaders to devote less time to determining their obligations and more time to fulfilling them,” the report said.
Third, the report found that charter authorizers, like universities and the Statewide Charter School Board, require varied levels of information dependent on the authorizer.
Authorizers approve charter school contracts and monitor their performance. They have the ultimate authority over whether a charter school’s contract may be revoked for noncompliance or other issues.
In some cases, authorizers require information already reported to the state, but in different formats or with additional information, according to the report. Charter leaders reported a wide range of manpower hours to meet these authorizer reporting requirements, ranging from a few minutes to 130 hours.
Also under the microscope were the authorizers themselves. Involvement from authorizers ranged from heavy-handed requirements to an authorizer a charter leader described as “extremely immature and uninvolved,” lacking dedicated capacity and short on engagement with its charters.
“The substantial variation we observed among Oklahoma authorizers may reflect both unnecessary administrative burden in some cases and insufficiently developed accountability systems in others,” the report said.
The report recommends the state department update its charter compliance guidance, review current reporting requirements for all public schools and that Oklahoma use a “collect once, use many times” reporting system to alleviate the burden on charters to submit the same information to state agencies and authorizers.
It tasked lawmakers with clarifying explicitly by statute whether public school mandates apply to charters.
It also recommended charter sponsors adhere to national best practice standards for authorizing. It listed the National Association of Charter School Authorizer’s standards, which include minimizing compliance burdens and focusing on school outcomes rather than processes.
The full report is available here.
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