After years of inaction, SC lawmakers have reached a deal on charter school reform
With just days remaining in the legislative session, South Carolina lawmakers have reached a deal to bring greater transparency and accountability to the state’s largely unregulated charter school sector.
The compromise legislation, an amalgam of separate charter school reform bills approved earlier this year by the House and Senate, passed unanimously in the upper chamber Tuesday following a week of interchamber negotiations.
It now returns to the House, which is expected to concur with the amended bill.
Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree, the original bill’s sponsor, described the amended legislation as the base Senate bill with a number of improvements.
“Quite honestly,” said Hembree, an Horry County Republican, “we were able to sit down and kind of look at some of (the House’s) ideas and came up with things that we both felt were more beneficial to the overall effort.”
Broadly speaking, the legislation enhances oversight and accountability of authorizers, the entities responsible for opening, closing and overseeing charter schools; increases transparency requirements for authorizers, schools and the management companies that operate them; and clarifies certain terms and processes left vague or undefined in the state’s decades-old law that governs charter schools and their authorizers.
Its passage marks the culmination of a multiyear effort to modernize the Charter Schools Act amid growing concerns about scant oversight and conflicts of interest in the burgeoning sector.
While the General Assembly has long recognized the insufficiency of the state’s charter schools law, it hadn’t made updating the law a priority until this year.
“This is now an issue that has sort of bubbled to the top,” Hembree said in January, after Senate leaders announced that charter school reform would be a focus of the upcoming legislative session.
The Senate, which for the past three years had failed to pass charter school reform proposals, moved quickly this session to approve Hembree’s carefully-vetted bill.
Following the bill’s passage in February, House Education committee chair Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, got to work gathering stakeholder input for a House amendment.
Erickson’s collaborative, two-month process concluded in late April when she introduced a 45-page amendment to the Senate bill.
The lengthy amendment, which the House adopted unanimously, built upon the Senate’s reforms, but also revised the upper chamber’s definition of a charter school authorizer to exclude organizations affiliated with colleges and universities.
That change, which Erickson said was necessary to prevent higher ed authorizers from delegating their responsibilities to “unaccountable” private organizations, would have forced both the Charter Institute at Erskine and the Voorhees University Charter Institute of Learning to reconstitute under the umbrella of their affiliated universities.
Such a restructuring won’t be necessary under the compromise bill approved Tuesday.
The amended legislation permits nonprofit associations directly affiliated with public or private colleges and universities to act as authorizers as long as they “serve at the pleasure of, and be subject to the oversight and control of, the governing body of the institution.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.