Quality Control?
When the Maine Legislature was considering the proposal to indefinitely extend the cap on charter schools, one of the prominent arguments in support of the move was that it promoted a “high bar” for charter school performance by giving the Maine Charter School Commission (MCSC) “the impetus to decide which schools are meeting the mission of the law.” Although this is certainly a noble aim, maintaining a cap on charter schools is not the best way to go about achieving excellence in the public charter school system.
Removing the cap on charter schools would in no way reduce the standards to which charter schools would be held, but rather it would save authorizers from having to arbitrarily pick one equally-qualified charter school over another. Holding charter schools to a high standard is one thing, but suggesting that there is an absolute limit on the total number capable of meeting such a standard is another. In 2019, the President and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) testified to the Maine Legislature’s Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs that the MCSC had recently “voluntarily underwent a rigorous evaluation” by the NACSA which found that Maine takes a “thoughtful approach…focused on school performance,” demonstrating that it is clearly well-equipped to effectively evaluate charter schools on the basis of “school quality and performance.”