Most Minnesota charter schools are failing to make good on their promises

The idea, born in Minnesota, was a daring one: Create an entirely new type of public school, independent and unshackled from the constraints of traditional bureaucracy.

These charter schools would be led by teachers and community members. They would be incubators for new ideas and methods. They would boost the academic achievement of students struggling in regular schools.

The model spread quickly after City Academy opened in St. Paul in 1992. Today, 45 other states have embraced charter schools. Major foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have invested billions of dollars in these educational alternatives. Nearly 1 of every 13 public school students in the U.S. attends a charter school.

In some places, especially the Northeast, charters have delivered the kind of results advocates dreamed of decades ago — even for the most economically disadvantaged students and their families.

But Minnesota's charter schools, which cost taxpayers more than $1 billion last year, are largely failing to make good on most of their promises.

The state's charter school students are far less likely to meet grade-level standards for math or reading than their peers in traditional public schools. Just 13 of 203 charters have consistently exceeded the state average in math and reading proficiency since 2016, when regulators began implementing a new accountability system. At 14 charter schools, not a single student was proficient in math in the 2023-24 school year. At nine charters that same year, attendance rates were below 20%.

The Minnesota Department of Education does not include academic proficiency when evaluating charter schools, and financial oversight of these taxpayer-supported schools is almost nonexistent. At least 18 charter schools closed after allegations of fraud or other misconduct on the part of employees. Dozens of other charters, plagued by financial mismanagement, have closed over the past three decades, including four failures this year alone. Some of those schools closed in the middle of the year, forcing students and their parents to scramble.

"They promised these schools would be better," said University of Minnesota professor Myron Orfield, an early supporter turned critic who has been researching charter schools since 2008. "The vast majority are really bad. Many of them are so bad they never should have opened. We shouldn't continue to allow that."

Advocates note that many charter schools in Minnesota attract students who flounder in other schools. Charter school students are twice as likely to be people of color and also twice as likely to be English learners, state records show. More charter school students are living in poverty. The rates of charter school students receiving special education services are comparable to public school districts.

Some charter school advocates admit they are failing the children who most need them.

"Charter schools are day cares," said Don Allen, the outgoing director of LoveWorks Academy for Arts, a Minneapolis charter where more than 90% of the students are Black and just 2% of the students were proficient in math last year. "This is probably the lowest depth that charter schools have fallen."

A 2023 study from Stanford University, touted as the most comprehensive national analysis of charter school students ever conducted, found that academic progress in Minnesota's charter schools ranked in the middle of the 30 states evaluated. Some states saw academic gains up to 10 times that of Minnesota.

Native American students in charter schools fared the worst in Minnesota, actually losing ground academically compared with Native students attending schools in their home districts.

Minnesota's track record is so dismal that many of the large foundations that support charter schools have abandoned them, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into other states.

"They got frustrated with the lack of quality and the lack of growth," said Jennifer Stern, chief executive officer of Great MN Schools, a Minneapolis nonprofit that invests in promising schools.

State officials delegate most regulatory chores of charter schools to the nonprofits and educational organizations that serve as so-called authorizers, who are supposed to hold charter schools accountable for their performance but also guarantee their autonomy.

The state's main role is evaluating the authorizers, but the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has terminated just one of the more than 50 groups that have played this role — and that organization supervised two of the best charter schools in Minnesota.

The academic performance of those schools was not part of the review process, and MDE officials say they do not plan to include student proficiency in the next round of reviews, which began this summer. Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte said state officials were concerned that such evaluations could affect equity by discouraging schools from recruiting poor or diverse students.

"If you are evaluating authorizers based on the academic performance of their charter schools, they are going to be incentivized to authorize charter schools that they know are going to be high performing," Korte said.

Former Anoka-Hennepin Schools Superintendent Dennis Carlson, who has run the state's largest public district and its biggest charter school, said Minnesota is failing at every level, from state officials to school leaders.

"They all bear some responsibility," Carlson said. "To me, there is enough blame to go around."

'Innovation for innovation's sake'

Charter schools were established to spur innovation in education, driven primarily by teachers who wanted the freedom to try approaches that didn't exist in traditional districts.

Because of charter schools, Minnesota students now have an extraordinary range of public school options.

Some charters celebrate the performing arts. Others offer project-based curriculum focused on the environment. Many target specific populations, such as the Somali-American community or Native Americans, and teachers often look like their students.

There are language immersion charter schools in Chinese, German, Hmong, Russian, Spanish and Ojibwe. There are classical academies that prioritize critical thinking and career-oriented schools focusing on science, technology, engineering and math. Some schools cater to students who are at risk of dropping out.

Traditional public schools have adopted some of those ideas, too, with magnet schools boasting language immersion, STEM curriculum or culturally specific themes.

"If you don't have charter schools, you don't have a place to experiment with education," said Ellis Runion, a teacher at the recently shuttered Upper Mississippi Academy in St. Paul. "But there's not a lot of room for experimentation when you're in triage all the time."

From the outset, Minnesota charters have been hobbled by state rules that push many of them to rent second-rate locations — including church basements, strip malls and industrial parks — that turn off parents and hinder enrollment. Unlike other states, where collaboration is common, Minnesota's schools largely operate independently, which means they often don't have the resources they need to survive a crisis. The schools get about 70% of the funding that goes to regular schools.

The state does not require leaders to hold an administrative license, which means many charter schools have been run by inexperienced administrators and overseen by unqualified board members who routinely rubber-stamp bad decisions. Sometimes that means dealing with financial mistakes. In other cases, schools continue to operate after misconduct ranging from fraud and racial discrimination to self-dealing.

Several veteran charter school directors say that in authorizing new charters, Minnesota has put too much emphasis on innovation and not enough on ensuring quality education.

"What is needed most is not a cute new idea," said Brad White, who now works as an education consultant, training school leaders across the country. "What is most needed are quality schools that make sure kids are ready for life after K-12."

White founded a Colorado school in 2013 after spending a year apprenticing with a network that operates more than a dozen charters in the Denver area. His school earned a coveted National Blue Ribbon designation in 2019, the same year White left to begin organizing a new charter school in Minnesota.

But White said Minnesota officials were not interested in seeing him replicate his success in the state. They wanted something different.

In Denver, White had the support of the public school system, which not only steered students to him but also helped him obtain $22 million to renovate his long-empty building.

In Minneapolis, White couldn't even get the school system to meet with him to discuss renting one of the district's three empty school buildings. The district has labeled those buildings — all still on the market — off-limits to charters. The district has said it won't accept purchase offers that "hinder or compete" with Minneapolis Public Schools' mission, goals or operations.

White eventually settled for a vacant church school in St. Paul, which cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in foundation support because his Minneapolis funders were not interested in Ramsey County schools.

Then, a third of his 65 students switched schools at the last minute, the kind of enrollment swing common at many charter schools in Minnesota.

White decided to close the school. It had been open for less than two weeks.

"It shouldn't be easy to start a quality charter school — it also shouldn't be impossible," White said.

This fall, two struggling Spanish immersion schools will merge to improve their odds of survival and hopefully boost their anemic academic performance.

"We are trying to figure out how we can provide academic excellence and academic rigor above everything else," said Katie Groh de Aviña, executive director of El Colegio High School in Minneapolis, where enrollment and test scores have been stubbornly low. "Right now we are not showing it."

Norma Garcés, who ran El Colegio before taking over St. Paul's Academia Cesar Chavez in 2021, said the founders of El Colegio never reached out to the community to see if local families wanted another Spanish immersion school.

"Charter schools fall apart because they don't understand the market they are going to serve," said Garces, a 12-year veteran of charter schools. "Some people are doing innovation for innovation's sake. They think people will come because your idea is great."

Success as the exception

A few Minnesota charter schools have consistently delivered strong academic results and proven financially stable.

Often their student demographics are similar to those of the best-performing traditional public schools, generally white and wealthier. But a few have built successful models to serve a more diverse student body.

Eagle Ridge Academy, founded two decades ago, struggled with some of the same things that doomed other charters, including an unaffordable lease. But school leaders found a way around the problem, creating an affiliate to buy a property — the only way Minnesota charters can own their school buildings.

The school grew slowly, adding grades as enrollment stabilized. It's now one of the largest charters in the state, serving more than 1,500 students. And it's been intentional about attracting more diverse families, building a student population that is now mostly students of color. Nearly a third of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, triple the rate of the surrounding Minnetonka public school district.

Before moving to a sprawling campus in Minnetonka in 2016, school leaders conducted a market study to determine the local community's wants and needs — something lawmakers didn't require of Minnesota charters until last year.

"There was a demand for this type of school so enrollment was never a problem for us," said Jason Ulbrich, Eagle Ridge's executive director.

Demand has remained high, likely because of Eagle Ridge's strong record of academic performance: It has beaten state proficiency benchmarks more than almost any other charter in the state. Eagle Ridge's waitlist is now 1,200 strong, a sharp contrast to the three dozen charters that enroll fewer than 100 students and often struggle to meet enrollment targets.

"It's usually the small charters that are less stable because they are like a small business," Ulbrich said. "Small businesses always just have their heads barely above the water."

Eagle Ridge's authorizer is Friends of Education, which oversees many of the state's other top-performing charters, and has also taken a tough-love approach. No other authorizer has shut down as many schools for failing to meet expectations.

Of the 23 charters approved by the group, half were closed or never opened. Some were terminated because of low academic performance. Others weren't allowed to open because they didn't attract enough students.

"Operating a charter is a privilege, not a right," said Beth Topoluk, executive director of Friends of Education. "And it is a privilege that must be continuously earned."

'Nobody is trying to help them'

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Minnesota operates more independent charters than any other state with a significant number of such schools. That means they don't have partners that can provide the financial safety net and operational expertise that is far more common in other states where large school networks dominate.

It didn't start that way. Initially, only traditional districts could sponsor a charter school in Minnesota, and some were early and enthusiastic partners. But after a wave of charter school scandals forced the state to tighten regulation and increased scrutiny of authorizers in 2009, most traditional districts dropped out.

Just two public districts — Northfield and Chisago Lakes — still supervise charters in Minnesota.

Most regular districts now treat charters as the enemy, drawing away students and state funding.

Teachers unions initially supported the charter school movement. But they've largely soured on charter schools, blaming them for undermining traditional districts while not being held to the same standards.

Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union that represents more than 80,000 educators, has called for a moratorium on new charters, saying the state needs to improve oversight to make sure the schools are meeting "minimum standards."

Bernadeia Johnson said she ran into significant opposition from the teachers union when she tried to help charter schools during her four-year tenure as superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools.

"Any gesture that I made was seen as a way to kill the district that I worked for," said Johnson, who stepped down in 2015. Charter schools, she said, "are allowed to fail. Nobody is trying to help them."

The Stanford study noted that academic progress was "significantly accelerated" for students enrolled in network schools compared with stand-alone charters.

"The institutional knowledge that networks provide can be a critical factor in making sure the kids attending those schools have a better experience," said James Woodworth, who co-authored the Stanford report.

In Richfield, Horizon Science Academy Twin Cities came close to shutting down in 2022 when enrollment fell to 62 students and the school's deficit topped $200,000. But because the school is part of a network operated by Concept Schools in Illinois, it was able to borrow $1.8 million to subsidize its operations while hiring a recruiter to boost enrollment in the Somali American community.

The school expected 250 students this fall when it added a seventh grade and it won't have to make any loan payments until 2029.

"Without Concept, this school would have closed," said Stephen West, who oversees two Concept schools in Minnesota.

Other charter networks have deliberately avoided Minnesota, worried about the state's unusual requirement that all charter school board members be elected from within the school community. Charter advocates say that rule has resulted in weak boards, usually dominated by teachers and parents, who often yield power to ineffective school leaders. Other states allow authorizers to appoint or approve board members.

"Charter school boards are not doing their jobs," said Ember Reichgott Junge, a former DFL state senator from New Hope who wrote Minnesota's pioneering charter legislation. "They don't understand fiduciary duties. They don't understand that if a school is not performing on tests, the board is responsible for that, not just the executive director or the principal of the school."

In Green Isle, southwest of the Twin Cities metro, leaders of the small town's only school — a charter that opened in 2004 — decided the best way to boost enrollment was to open a day care center in 2018, figuring it would funnel students into the elementary program. But the move backfired and school enrollment dropped to just 39 students.

The board of Green Isle Community School decided to close this year after two years of mounting deficits, which they linked to day care costs. Last year, the school spent more money on administrative costs than teacher salaries.

Green Isle Mayor Shane Sheets, whose two stepchildren attended the school, blamed the closing on "really poor financial oversight." Sheets said he's saddened that the town is losing its largest employer and worried about the community's future.

"If we are closing our school," he said, "who is going to want to have a business here?"

State rules enable 'imprudent decisions'

Minnesota is also the only state that bars charter schools from using state money to buy school buildings. That means most schools have to rent space, but with many districts refusing to lease empty schools to charters, administrators often have to take whatever they can find.

That was a problem at Rise Academy in St. Paul, which agreed to move into an industrial park far from the families it wanted to serve, according to board Vice Chair Karen Tarrant. The school — formerly known as College Prep Elementary — was able to survive for years under the direction of its popular founder, but it entered into slow decline when he left, Tarrant said. It closed this spring.

School officials said they expected more help from their authorizer, the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, when the school's finances started to unravel in 2022.

Records show the guild kept renewing the school's contract despite expressing concerns about its "lack of financial sustainability." The organization, in a 2021 state review, had one of the lowest ratings among Minnesota authorizers, triggering state-mandated action to address its deficiencies.

Meanwhile, Rise Academy continued to flounder.

"They came to the meeting when we voted to close and I asked, 'What kind of help could you give?'" Tarrant said. "They kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, 'You'll figure it out.'"

Jim Zacchini, executive director of the guild, said the organization warned school officials for five years about the potential consequences of "declining enrollment and high teacher attrition." Zacchini said the guild also offered to pay for the services of a fiscal planning consultant in February, but he said administrators "chose not to act upon this offer."

"Despite multiple warnings from the Guild, the board failed to recognize the financial issues that were their own duty to oversee," Zacchini said in a written response to questions. He also noted that the guild addressed the weaknesses cited by the MDE and was removed from corrective action in late 2022.

Other authorizers said that state law requires them to give charter school leaders wide latitude over how the schools operate — and the state has penalized them for infringing on a school's autonomy.

"Charter school autonomy allows charter schools to make imprudent decisions as long as they are not illegal," said Topoluk at Friends of Education, Minnesota's highest-rated authorizer. "Everyone has good intentions, but that doesn't mean they have the capacity to do this."

One of the biggest mistakes charter schools make is renting more space than needed. Hiawatha Academies in Minneapolis closed two of its five schools in recent years to save money when leaders realized their enrollment projections were off by more than 1,000 students.

But Hiawatha continues to struggle. In April, more than 100 students walked out of Hiawatha Collegiate High School to protest the firing of seven teachers and other personnel moves aimed at closing a $1 million budget hole. The schools' authorizer also put it on probation this year after four years of declining academic performance.

"I don't want to see the school get shut down or go downhill," said Sarah Ragoonanan, a senior who led the protest. "But I don't think the board is making decisions right now that are in the best interests of us."

Charter advocates wish more authorizers would hold schools accountable for their academic failures and help school leaders find ways to deliver on charters' original promise.

"We should not let schools fail kids indefinitely," said Stern at Great MN Schools.

Click here to read more of this investigation and watch a video about charter schools.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the rates of charter school students living in poverty and qualifying for English language learner services.