In 1997, The Learning Center, a charter school with the slogan “Naturally Grown Kids,” opened in Murphy, North Carolina. It grew to almost 200 students, and the parents and guardians believed the well-established school was a sure bet. Sadly, they were wrong.
Last May, The Learning Center’s board voted to close the school on June 30, due to fraud. The school’s director allegedly had used school funds for what a board member delicately referred to as his own “private enterprise.” So far, little information has been released to parents or the public as a police investigation proceeds.
This is not an aberration. Three Rivers Academy, also in North Carolina, closed on April 8, forcing its eighty-five students to find a new school. Three Rivers, according to the North Carolina State Board of Education, posed an “immediate threat” to students and to public funds.
Donnie McQueen, the owner of the for-profit entity that ran the school, allegedly had been cooking the books on attendance numbers to secure additional public funding, according to the North Carolina Justice Center’s NC Policy Watch.
The closure of Three Rivers was quickly followed by the shuttering of Torchlight Academy, another charter school run by McQueen. The director of the school’s special education program, Shawntrice Andrews, who is McQueens’s daughter, was accused of falsifying students’ Individualized Education Program (IEP) documents. Together, the family appears to have run the school like a personal piggy bank, NC Policy Watch reported. Now, with Torchlight’s closing, an additional 500 students are forced to search for a new school to attend this fall. The McQueens deny any wrongdoing and say the issues were “mistakes.”
The three recent closings in North Carolina were not based on popularity, or even low test scores—they were the result of greed and fraud.
The three North Carolina schools were not on the state’s radar before they folded. In fact, both Torchlight Academy and The Learning Center were awarded $500,000 and $700,000 expansion subgrants, respectively, from the federal Charter Schools Program.
In May, a study by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University found that charter schools close at much higher rates than public schools, even when controlling for factors such as enrollment and test scores. Each year, roughly 5 percent of charters close, compared with 1 percent of public schools.
But REACH’s data likely underestimates the problem. Because so many new charter schools open each year, the closure rate is offset by the overall growth of the industry. And a new charter opening in Columbus, Ohio, is of little help to a student whose charter just closed in Memphis, Tennessee.
To more accurately capture the big picture, we at the Network for Public Education published a report on the long-term viability of charter schools. We looked at seventeen cohorts, each composed of all U.S. charters that opened in a given year, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2014. Our goal was to track these schools over time and see how they fared when compared with one another. We found that, by year three, an average of 18 percent of charters had closed. By year ten, the proportion of failed charters topped 40 percent.
Enrollment data for the year before each school closed indicated that charter schools opening between 1999 and 2017 have collectively displaced upwards of one million students—often with almost no warning.
The alarming rate of charter school closures prompted the U.S. Department of Education to direct federal startup funding to schools more likely to succeed. But even modest proposals have met stiff resistance from the charter lobby. For them, the closures are seen positively: It is “the sector working as intended,” Chalkbeat reported, citing National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Chief Executive Officer Nina Rees.
And she’s right—charter churn, including abrupt closures, is baked into the marketplace model that believes only the most popular performers should survive. The three recent closings in North Carolina, however, were not based on popularity, or even low test scores—they were the result of greed and fraud.
To prevent this, government officials at all levels need to tighten regulations and hold charter school boards accountable. Until government officials get serious about charter school reform, each parent or guardian who enrolls their child in a charter school deserves a notice that says, “Caution: This school could close with little to no warning.”