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Authorizers/Sponsors are the agencies that support and monitor the schools in this innovative public education sector. They are the elected officials, education leaders and day-to-day managers that determine who may start a new school and which schools are good enough to stay open.
Fifteen years of chartering has resulted in thousands of quality charter schools. Authorizers protect the public interest as these entrepreneurial schools come into being. Authorizers include:
These are the entities charged by law to approve, oversee, and evaluate the performance of public charter schools. The purpose of charter school authorizing is to improve student achievement. A quality authorizer engages in responsible oversight of charter schools by ensuring that schools have both the autonomy to which they are entitled and the public accountability for which they are responsible.
In furtherance of this end, quality authorizers should:
¦ approach authorizing deliberately and thoughtfully with the intent to improve the quality of public school options;
¦ support and advance the purposes of charter school law;
¦ be a catalyst for charter school development to satisfy unmet educational needs;
¦ strive for clarity, consistency, and transparency in developing and implementing authorizing policies and procedures;
¦ be a source of accurate, intelligible, performance-based information about the schools that they oversee;
¦ be responsible not for the success or failure of individual schools, but for holding schools accountable for their performance;
¦ use objective and verifiable measures of student achievement as the primary measure of school quality;
¦ support parents and students in making decisions and staying informed about the quality of education provided in charter schools; and,
¦ make the well-being of students the fundamental value informing all decision-making and actions.
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