Methodology

In this project, we analyzed nine different standards with which charter schools are responsible for complying. The nine standards we reviewed were: Graduation Rates, Academic Performance (Math and English Language Arts), Postsecondary Enrollment, Chronic Absenteeism, Campus Safety, Financial Efficiency, and Demographic Achievement Gaps (Math and English Language Arts). When analyzing these standards, we used 2023-2024 school year data for all charter and noncharter public schools,  unless otherwise noted. Included in the analysis of noncharter public schools are the nine Maine private schools which receive above 60% in public funding. Additionally, we analyzed the nine charter school districts, which ended up being a total of 10 charter schools due to the makeup of Community Regional Charter School. Overman Academy and Dimensions Academy were treated as their own schools, and since Creative Children’s Academy had no data available under these standards, it was excluded from the analysis leaving us with 10 individual charter schools to measure.

There are several standards that charter schools are reviewed under that we did not include for many reasons. One of these standards was Parent and Community Engagement. While charter schools are required to circulate regular surveys and similar reporting documents to measure these variables, noncharter public schools are not. Since there are no similar reporting forms that noncharter public schools circulate and publicly report, we simply cannot apply this standard to them. It is worth noting that this is effectively an entire regulatory standard with which only charter schools are required to comply. 

Another standard we did not fully review was school social environments. While we did consider campus safety, other social environment standards were not considered. This is due again to a lack of reporting by noncharter public schools and the concerning subjectivity of this standard. We also did not review governing board performance, because while charter schools are expected to maintain a frequency and level of transparency of governing board meetings, noncharter public school boards are not a comparable system. This is because while noncharter school boards are also held to public meeting requirements, the frequency and transparency of those meetings are irrelevant in decisions whether to shut down the schools they govern, while the same is not true for charter schools.

Lastly, we did not analyze student yearly academic growth or multiyear student persistence. While we did discuss year-by-year academic change in the context of achievement gaps, charter schools are measured not only on total academic performance, but also on year-to-year change. Most of these schools must create year-over-year academic growth targets for individual students and may become at risk of non-renewal if these goals are not reached. Thus, a charter school may be flagged even if enough students score far above the state average for two years in a row, but the second highest score is comparatively lower than the first one. No similar measurements are applied to noncharter public schools; thus, we simply could not apply this standard to them. The Maine Department of Education actually reviews only a few of these standards for noncharter public schools, and, unlike the Commission, does not consider shutting down noncharter public schools for failing to meet these expectations. In full, the Commission reviews as many as 55 individual criteria for charter school compliance, most of which have little to no equivalent measurement for noncharter public schools.

In a general sense, a school fails if it would be considered to be in the “not meeting expectations” category under charter standards. The number of failing standards for noncharter public schools is listed within the findings section, in addition to the total number of schools considered under that standard. A school is only considered below that standard if it has enough data to fail or meet the standard. For example, if a school only provided data for two standards, it would not be included in the total number of schools failing three or more standards.

Because so many charter standards are not applied to noncharter public schools, there is no equivalent data reported by noncharters to make a fair comparison. Thus, for several of the nine measured standards, we had to use similar or secondary variables and statistics to estimate whether a noncharter public school would be shut down if held to the same standards. In these cases, we included only schools that egregiously violated these secondary standards rather than those with borderline violations.

Graduation rate is the first standard we comparatively review, and is one of the few standards that noncharter public schools are actually responsible for reporting and keeping high, making this standard quite easy to review. One difference is that while charters are threatened with shutdowns for continual low performance, noncharter schools with similar rates are not. Instead they are typically labelled as “Comprehensive Supports and Improvement/Instruction” or “Targeted Supports and Improvement/Instruction” schools, both labels coming with additional funding and Maine DOE leadership support. While school closure is on the table, it is a last resort and requires a decision by the local school board and then approval by a majority of the voters in the district.

This requirement is, of course, only applied to high schools, and there were 99 noncharter public high schools in the state reporting four-year graduation rates in the 2023-2024 school year. Of them, 29 were below the graduation rate expected for charter schools, which is a concerningly high number of high schools not meeting state graduation goals.

The second and third standards we reviewed were academic performance, one being Math performance and the other being English Language Arts. State-level assessments also test public schools for Science performance, however Science performance is not mandatorily included in the charter school review system. Thus, substandard Science scores don’t count towards a charter being shut down or negatively reviewed by the Charter Commission. This is likely due to less frequent testing for science and less noncharter data for comparison. The one exception to this is Baxter Academy, which volunteered to include their science performance as a custom metric in their Charter Performance Framework reviews. Because charter schools are not reviewed under Science, we do not fail any noncharter schools for poor Science performance.

Notably, charter schools significantly outperformed noncharters in science, and Baxter did so well that it asked for science performance to be included in its school-specific custom review standards. Because of this, and Science’s overall role in the comparative academic performance in these schools, we still compare charter schools to noncharters in the academic performance section of the report, although we fail no noncharters for substandard science academic performance, because charter schools aren’t held to that standard.

We also review chronic absenteeism rates, which is the percentage of the student body that misses at least 10 percent of school days during a school year. This is one of the standards with the worst performance from noncharter public schools, with more than one-in-three not meeting the standard to which charter schools are held. 

Campus safety is another standard we measured, and this is one of the standards in which noncharter public schools comparatively performed better. While there is no official public “safety measurement” that these schools release, we estimated overall safety by considering total incident rates in Maine noncharter schools and compared these statewide data to the safety rates in Maine’s charter schools, accounting for grade level. We considered a school to be failing this standard if they had a total incident rate higher than the highest total incident rate of a charter school, which is Maine Academy of Natural Sciences.

The sixth standard we measured was financial efficiency, because, unlike noncharter public schools, charter schools can get shut down in part due to poor financial outlook. Charter schools will be assessed on the following financial standards:

  • Current assets to liabilities ratio of 1.1 to 1
  • At least 30 days of unrestricted days cash on hand (enough unrestricted cash to survive for 30 days on assets alone) (Unrestricted cash divided by ([total expenses minus depreciation expense]/365))
  • Actual enrollment within 5% of projected in approved budget
  • School meets all debt and real estate led obligations
  • The aggregated three-year total margin (Net Surplus divided by Total Revenue) must be positive, and the most recent year’s total margin must be positive
  • Debt-to-asset ratio of less than 90%
  • Charter district leadership must keep a positive cumulative two-year cash flow
  • Charter district leadership has to be capable of paying current debt principal, interest and lease payments from the current year surplus
  • The school must publish a three-year annual financial plan that includes a two-year annual budget and a one-year projection for year three that is board-approved

Almost all of these substandards can’t be applied to noncharter public schools because they don’t publicly report this information through the DOE in any comparable centralized method. However, this report measures the dollars spent per pupil in noncharter public schools and compares that to charter schools with similar or better academic performance to estimate the overall financial efficiency of noncharter public schools versus charter schools. 

We create this financial efficiency metric by taking total per-pupil spending (total expenditures divided by number of enrolled students) and dividing it by the percent of students at or above the state’s expectations for a given academic subject. This financial efficiency metric equates to the cost per successful student outcome in a given academic subject. Thus, a school with a high financial efficiency metric doesn’t get great test results in relation to their spending, making a lower financial efficiency metric more optimal.

We analyze this financial efficiency metric across the three academic subjects: English Language Arts, Math, and Science scores. Although this report did not present science proficiency as an isolated academic performance measure, science outcomes are included in our academic efficiency standard because this standard is designed to assess cumulative student achievement across multiple core subjects, combining the scarcer data with data from other categories. We then look for schools with poor fiscal performance in at least two of these categories to identify the most egregiously inefficient schools. To measure failure in an individual category, we look for the charter school with the worst financial efficiency metric in that category and use that as a benchmark for noncharters. 

In effect, schools are only labelled as failing the financial efficiency standard if they are less efficient than the least financially efficient charter school in at least two of the three measured standards. For English Language Arts, the most financially inefficient charter is Ecology Learning Center, with a cost per successful student outcome of $30,252.68 for English Language Arts. For Math, the worst performing charter school was Overman Academy, with a cost per successful student outcome of $91,810.95. Finally, the least financially efficient charter school for Science was Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, with a cost per successful student outcome of $53,929.47. 

Lastly, we analyze the achievement gaps of various demographics at noncharter public schools. Under Maine Regulations 90-668 Chapter 2.10, the Commission reviews the achievement gaps at charter schools, including the achievement gaps affecting English language learners, special education students, male and female students, economically disadvantaged students, and ethnic or racial minority students. In short, an achievement gap is when a particular demographic performs on average significantly worse than the overall population. While charter schools are expected to follow these achievement gap standards, they are not rigorously applied to Maine noncharter public schools. 

In particular, this section focuses on noncharter public schools that had significant growth in achievement gaps from 2020 to 2024. If these gaps grew substantially over this period, then the schools measured were clearly failing to close their experienced achievement gaps. While certain demographics like ethnicity were impossible to measure due to small sample size and high DOE redaction rates, achievement gaps for sex, economic background, and special education status all had enough data to measure. We did not analyze the achievement gaps for charter schools, as there was simply not enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions. Instead, we focused on which noncharter schools were outliers in comparison to the rest.