Last week, I spent a couple days at the TASA (Texas Association for School Administrators) TxEd conference in San Antonio. It was the first time attending, as the bulk of my work and bookreport‘s work has been for public charter schools, and TASA is exclusively focused on traditional public schools.
bookreport‘s mission from day one has been to improve K-12 education through providing better financial tools and operations to school leaders — giving them the clarity to see where their money is going and spend it on what matters most for students. My work has been mostly with charters, quite frankly, because that’s where the opportunities have been.
While attending UPenn, I contacted both district and charter schools in West Philadelphia, volunteering to help in any capacity and found the charter schools more responsive and flexible in saying yes.
I taught at a charter school in DC, because they were flexible to have a program to train someone with no formal teaching experience (but two years of crushing Excel at Goldman Sachs!).
I helped start a Montessori For All charter school, because I cold-emailed a woman, immediately helped her with her school’s financial projections by catching a $1M mistake and got the opportunity to continue helping her build the school’s financial operations from scratch.
We built bookreport alongside charter schools, and now that the core platform is complete, we’re expanding to serve other school systems — traditional public schools and private schools included. The goal is to improve K-12 education, and the more I learn about each sector’s financial operations, the more I hear common complaints not unique to any one type of school. Which is what brought me to the TASA conference in San Antonio.
My most meaningful conversation there was with a Superintendent of a small district who had implemented a Montessori model for her lower grades. She had seen it work at another small district, got their playbook, and implemented. Charters often argue they are needed because they move fast, but this Superintendent proved that at least small districts can move just as fast at innovating and I was impressed.
She mentioned her interactions with her board on implementing this change, and I felt like I had a moment of reconsideration. My skepticism of big district boards had always been part of my pro-charter worldview. When you’re managing a $1B budget, it’s not hard to steer a $300K contract to a friend, or make sure the district buys the math software from the vendor who happened to pay for a board member’s cruise. Big district boards are often political positions — and where there’s political power and big money, there’s corruption.
But she wasn’t running a big district.
The premise of increase accountability in charter schools is that accountability is tied to enrollment; a school doesn’t get funds if parents don’t choose to send their kids to a school, so that’s the ultimate accountability. No happy parents, no school.
Charter schools are founded and operated by 501(c)3s (non-profits) that have a contract with the state allowing them to provide K-12 education and receive public funding for the students they serve. The non-profit corporation has a board that is generally selected by the CEO (sometimes the board comes together before the CEO and selects the CEO, but more often it’s the other way around). So if a parent isn’t happy with the way a charter school is running, they can complain to the board, they can take their kid out of the school, but they can’t vote out the board to make the school change. The accountability is really binary: yes, we like the school and we’re staying, or no we don’t and we’re leaving. If a charter school parent likes the school enough to stay but feels a board member is corrupt or wishes they had different priorities, it’s just tough luck.
School districts, on the other hand, have publicly elected boards. In theory, that’s a different kind of accountability — not exit, but voice. At big districts, I’m not convinced it’s even voice. Over the years, I’ve watched too many video clips of upset parents at school board meetings being stonewalled or escorted out. Big district board members seem about as accountable to the people as our current elected officials: not so much. They get elected by big money and big interests, and the small, everyday concerns are often overlooked.
But the 7-member school board elected by their small town? That’s a different animal. Managing under a $10M budget, you can’t easily hide a $500K contract to a relative or friend. No big construction company is knocking down your door to build a $150M school building. I know nothing about the specific board members of her district, but I don’t imagine they’re career politicians using this as a stepping stone. I would imagine they are members of the community they were elected to represent — with kids in the district, held accountable by voters who also happen to be their neighbors and the people they see around town.
My favorite speaker from the main stage drove this home. He ran a small district and talked about what accountability actually looked like there. Rather than centering everything on the state’s A through F rankings, his district built accountability around character — 22 principles, including one that stuck with me: “if someone bumps into you, say excuse me, even if it wasn’t your fault.” It’s the kind of standard that can only be set and enforced by a superintendent who knows every student’s name. Who hears about it when Sally from down the street runs into him and complains about an “impolite young gentleman from your school I met at the Dairy Queen.”
And they hold public board meetings. While looking more into TASA, I saw their legislative priorities regarding charter schools. As a charter supporter, I was holding my breath. Under charter schools it reads: “Oppose the further expansion of publicly funded charter schools, including increases in the number of campuses under existing charters, unless charter schools are subject to the same accountability and transparency laws and regulations as community-based public schools including those related to: special education requirements, public notices, school discipline, financial dealings (leases, mortgages, bond debt, contracts) transportation, bilingual programs, policy notices, employment contract policies, parental rights, lobbying and political expenditure restrictions, student data privacy, efficiency audits, lunch programs, and nepotism.”
My instinct as a charter supporter was always to push back: if a regulation is stifling innovation, the answer isn’t to impose it on charters, but to question why traditional districts have to follow it either. But if you look at the specific topics they list, it’s hard to argue that publicly funded charters should be subject to different rules than traditional districts. I know that is going to make some charter folks upset, but I’m not advocating for additional regulations writ large. I’m not steeped in the exact details of every regulatory area TASA cites or how charter and traditional public law differ in each one; that’s an entire conversation I’m not equipped to have.
But one thing I can speak to: charter schools should absolutely have the same transparency requirements as public schools. So when another TASA legislative priority is “support requiring charter school board meetings to be held in person in each community they serve at least once per year,” I give a hearty amen to that. Because transparency isn’t a regulatory burden. Without it, accountability is just a word — and that’s why I founded bookreport: to increase both transparency and accountability in K-12 schools.
On the accountability front, I left TASA having been impressed by a woman running a small district who is innovating just as fast as any charter, held accountable by a board of neighbors who will see her at the grocery store. That’s not nothing. I’ve spent a decade thinking accountability-through-choice was the whole answer. I’m not sure it is anymore.
On the transparency front, both charters and districts have a lot of work to do. Public, in-person board meetings can only provide so much transparency when the financials presented are organized in a code structure only an accountant understands, when school leaders never know what’s left in their budget, when no one has seen the data organized in a way that reveals a school is unintentionally spending more on cheerleading than math (as Marguerite Roza documented in Educational Economics).
True transparency has to be grounded in both reality and understanding. It’s every teacher, principal, board member, parent, and taxpayer actually understanding where the money went. That’s what we’re building at bookreport — for every school with a leader and board that shares that goal.