Daleville Public Schools, a small rural district northeast of Indianapolis, oversees more than 6,000 students statewide who learn exclusively in online charter schools — and the district received a payment of $1 million in state funds last year for doing so.
The compensation is provided to charter school authorizers under Indiana law in exchange for ensuring the schools adhere to rules and perform well academically. But critics are raising questions about the payments to Daleville, and their arguments illustrate ongoing tensions about the state’s foray into virtual education and how authorizers are regulated.
The two online schools overseen by Daleville, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, have shown poor academic performance and questionable financial and operational practices, leading some policymakers to question how successful Daleville has been at holding the schools accountable. Others criticize Daleville for spending some of the payments on students within the district, instead of those in the charter schools they oversee.
Whether the district should receive the funds at all is also an open question among policymakers. Indiana law doesn’t specifically say school districts that authorize charter schools can receive the funding the way university, city or state-level authorizers do — leading some to wonder whether the funding actually provides a financial incentive for authorizers to enroll more students and keep failing schools open.
“It’s hard to believe you need $1 million to effectively oversee (two schools),” said Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust and former Indianapolis charter school director. “Every single authority on authorizing would question if that’s an ethical practice.”
These issues came to a head last week at a meeting of the Indiana State Board of Education’s committee to review virtual charter schools. As online charter schools are drawing the scrutiny of state and national policymakers for their poor performance, Indiana education leaders are also increasingly concerned that school districts might not be able to provide the proper oversight for virtual charter schools that serve the entire state, particularly if they rely on revenue from monitoring them.
Indiana law says authorizers can decide whether to charge charter schools up to 3 percent of their state tuition dollars, which are based on student enrollment. Daleville charges the full 3 percent for each school.
The Indianapolis Mayor’s Office, by contrast, oversees more than 40 charter schools serving about 15,000 kids. It charges its schools 1 percent and collected a little more than $864,000 in 2017.
State law says the fees must be spent “exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling authorizing obligations.”
At last week’s hearing, Daleville Superintendent Paul Garrison said that its oversight fees pay for online course fees for Daleville’s traditional public school students. The fees have also been used to buy computers, pay salaries for district staffers involved with authorizing, and pay for an in-house charter school evaluation tool, among other expenses, he said. It was not clear from Daleville’s state financial reports exactly how the fees were broken down among those costs.
But board member and committee chairman Gordon Hendry said he was concerned that the amount of revenue Daleville was bringing in from authorizing might compromise its ability to make decisions. Indiana Virtual School has received an F grade from the state for two years in a row and in 2017 had the lowest graduation rate of any public school in the state. Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy is still too new to have received a grade, but it already enrolls almost 3,000 students, many of whom came from Indiana Virtual School.
“We’re talking about accountability and success, but you’re making $1 million a year that’s going to fund your school district,” Hendry said.
Garrison defended how the money was being spent, saying it gave Daleville students more opportunities and met the state’s criteria.
But Brown said Garrison’s explanation for how Daleville spent its fees troubled him.
“When I hear about a school district charging 3 percent, it raises red flags around how that money is being used and whether students attending the virtual charter school are subsidizing children who attend the school district,” Brown said. “That seems like a fundamental problem.”
Since last fall, state leaders and Gov. Eric Holcomb have called for action to remedy some of the known problems in virtual schools — high mobility, low academic achievement, and little regulation. The state board’s committee, formed earlier this year, aims to address some of these issues with recommendations to the full board and state lawmakers.
One way the state could change its policy is in how it structures authorizer fees.
Read: Indiana online charter schools need more oversight. These 3 changes could help.
Karega Rausch, vice president of research and evaluation for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said oversight fees should be limited to work that is needed to actually monitor a charter school. If an authorizer has other responsibilities that aren’t related to charter schools, those should be completely separate.
Rausch also previously told Chalkbeat that charter authorizing payments should be based on costs, and states should require authorizers justify the amount they need to oversee schools. One option is for the state to pay authorizers directly, distancing oversight fees from student enrollment.
That could lower the likelihood that authorizing could be seen as a profitable funding strategy.
At last week’s hearing, Hendry raised the possibility that the revenue was creating a perverse incentive to keep low-performing schools open.
“Is it really that realistic that you would consider closing the school for poor performance, for lack of growth or lack of success, if you’re receiving a pretty healthy income stream every year?” Hendry said.
Garrison said the district was prepared to make the decision to close a school, if need be, and that officials weren’t looking at charter authorizing as a “cash cow.”
“It would be a difficult decision, but what I’m going to tell you is we care about kids,” Garrison said. “We want progress, and if it looks like we can’t get progress, we can make that decision.”
The state’s two other district authorizers, Evansville and Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson, are split in how they approach fees. Evansville doesn’t collect them at all, while Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson said it plans to ask for 3 percent. The school it oversees, Indiana Agriculture and Technology School, opened at the end of July.
Read: Facing state scrutiny, Indiana charter school steps back from virtual plan
Districts who want to be involved with virtual schools do have another option that avoids the legal murkiness charter authorizing can bring: Union Township, another small rural district near Muncie, created a virtual learning program within its district in a contract with K12 Inc. that nets them 5 percent of the student funding — more than what they’d get as an authorizer.
Many Indiana school districts, feeling the effects of declining state contributions, property tax caps that limit local dollars that flow to schools, and falling enrollment, have turned to alternative funding sources in recent years.
Having an in-house virtual program means the district is responsible for running the program, not just monitoring it. But using an outside vendor for curriculum and hiring cuts down on the costs of starting from scratch.
Read: A tiny Indiana district is banking on virtual education to survive. But at what cost?
In some cases, Indiana policymakers are questioning whether school district authorizers should be paid oversight fees at all. Indiana law is silent on whether districts can collect such fees like their counterparts at the university, city, and state level.
Indiana State Board of Education member Tony Walker has spoken out against districts collecting fees, especially ones that might be facing low enrollment and declining state funds. State Sen. Mark Stoops, a Democrat from Bloomington, filed unsuccessful legislation last year that would’ve eliminated authorizer fees entirely.
Lawmakers have indicated they want to make changes to virtual school policy, though it’s still far too early to know what those might look like. During last year’s legislative session, Republican legislators called for more information on how district-based virtual programs are funded. Indiana Democrats have also been vocal about bolstering regulations for online charter schools.
Brown said education advocates can’t afford to look the other way on these issues.
“We have irrefutable proof that virtual charter schools are generally not good for kids,” he said. “And as a strong charter school advocate, I think it’s critically important that the reform community step up and make accountability for virtual charter schools a critical issue.”