Milton Friedman once warned that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
When the education of children is at stake, such a mistake is costly indeed.
Tennessee’s SB 2441 is the latest in a growing wave of legislation that promises to hold virtual schools “accountable” by mandating their automatic closure when test scores remain low.
The logic sounds unassailable: if a school is failing, shut it down. But this tidy reasoning conceals a troubling reality. “Default closure” rules consistently punish the schools that serve the students most in need, harming the very students the law is intended to help.
Consider what happens in practice.
A virtual school enrolls students who are already years behind: teenagers recovering from illness, kids fleeing bullying, young people with disabilities or unstable home lives who have already bounced through multiple traditional and nontraditional schools. These students arrive far below grade level. The school meets them where they are and begins the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding their confidence and their academic foundations.
Then the state’s accountability formula kicks in, compares these students to statewide benchmarks, and brands the school a failure. Under a default closure regime, the school is shuttered, and the very students it was created to serve are sent back to the system that already failed them.
This is not a hypothetical. Rainshadow Charter High School in Reno, Nevada, lived it.
Rainshadow’s mission was to serve the hardest cases: students other schools had given up on. Three-quarters of its transfer students arrived credit deficient. Because Nevada calculated graduation rates on a four-year timeline, students who needed a fifth year to finish were counted as dropouts. The school earned the state’s lowest rating, and Nevada law required closure after three consecutive years at that level.
But when district staff recommended shutting Rainshadow down, it was students and parents who fought back.
One student described going from a 0.0 GPA at his previous school to the highest grades he had ever earned. Another, who is dyslexic and had been bullied relentlessly at her prior district school, said that Rainshadow was the first place she felt welcomed.
As education policy expert Max Eden explained, “a charter school that looks awful on paper might be exceeding all expectations with the students it serves, and therefore charter school accountability can be a double-edged sword that makes it harder for those schools to exist.”
Fortunately, in Rainshadow’s case, the local school board listened to families and declined to close the school. But under the kind of automatic closure provision in Tennessee’s SB 2441, the families’ voices would be irrelevant. The formula would decide.
This is the central flaw of default closure laws. Such laws are premised on the idea that political pressure from parents should not be allowed to prevent or delay accountability.
But stripping parents of any say in whether their children’s school survives is not accountability. It is the opposite. It is a system that is accountable to no one except a spreadsheet.
The Center for Education Reform has documented how this top-down, test-score-driven approach to accountability has produced what scholars call “institutional isomorphism,” the tendency of schools to look and act more and more alike.
When the only metric that matters is standardized test performance there are only so many ways to make test scores go up. Schools that might serve students differently—through vocational training, therapeutic support, project-based learning, or flexible pacing—are either deterred from opening or forced into a cookie-cutter mold that defeats the purpose of school choice in the first place.
The better alternative is bottom-up accountability—a system in which parents, not bureaucrats, decide which schools deserve to survive. Arizona provides a useful model. Despite granting 15-year charters with relatively light regulation, the vast majority of charter school closures in Arizona happen within the first five years—not because a state official pulled the plug, but because families voted with their feet. Schools that fail to serve their students lose enrollment and close naturally. Schools that serve students well, even if their test scores are modest by statewide standards, retain the families who chose them for a reason.
The net result is that the performance of Arizona’s charter school sector on the National Assessment of Education Progress not only far exceeds Arizona’s district schools but also outperforms every other state.
This is not an argument against accountability, but rather for real accountability.
Real accountability is bottom-up, not top-down. It entails trusting parents, who see their children come home from school every day, more than distant officials who see only data points.
Parents know things that standardized tests cannot capture: whether their child is safer, more engaged, more hopeful, more likely to get out of bed in the morning and go to school. These things matter. They matter enormously for students who have already been written off.
Tennessee lawmakers should ask themselves a simple question before adopting a default closure policy: if a virtual school is the last option standing for a student who has failed everywhere else, and that student’s parents believe the school is working, on what moral basis does the state override their judgment?
Some states, such as Arizona and South Carolina, categorize traditional public and charter schools that serve students in persistently low-performing areas or children with unique needs (students who had dropped out of school but are now returning, for example) as “alternative schools.”
State officials can then evaluate schoolwide performance at such schools on a different scale than other traditional or charter schools.
However, the most effective approach to improving quality is to expand the quality options available for families to select. Instead of imposing technocratic rules, Tennessee lawmakers should dramatically expand access to the Tennessee Education Freedom Scholarships.
Default closure rules are built on a seductive but false premise: that we can regulate our way to quality. We cannot. Quality comes from freedom, experimentation, and a competitive market that evolves organically based on the decisions of the parents who make decisions in the best interests of their children.
If Tennessee truly wants to help struggling students, it should empower their parents, not silence them.
