CACSA District Board Training Pilot Underway
For Colorado districts it’s worth joining,
and it’s worth modeling in other states
CACSA, in partnership with NN4DA, has launched a training program for district board members that can help strengthen quality authorizing by turning attention to the voting members of authorizers. You can read about the pilot here.
Related, NN4DA’s Alex Medler, and CACSA Executive Director, Mackenzie Khan, penned a brief essay exploring why authorizing staff and boards sometimes diverge and why the pilot was launched, and Medler authored a longer white paper on the topic, providing more detail on board members’ roles and responsibilities.
When boards and staff disagree, sometimes it means something has gone wrong, but it isn’t always because one side or the other jumped the shark. Boards have access to different information and levels of detail, operate under different constraints, ask different questions, and their work is subject to different standards of appeal. All that makes it all the more important board members are up to speed, and that staff are fully aware of what board members really need to play their role effectively.
Medler is helping to design and implement the CACSA pilot program. He is also currently a district board member of the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, which oversees five charter schools. He previously chaired the board of the Colorado Charter School Institute.
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The New Federal Education Tax Credit and Authorizing
What does the federal program establishing Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) have to do with charter schools and authorizing?
The NN4DA Working Group on Changes in Law and Policy recently discussed the new federal education tax credit. The program has been in the news a lot lately. Starting in 2027, it will allow states to identify Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) that can fund scholarships for private and public schools. While many people think about it primarily as a way to subsidize private school tuition, it is bigger than that. It will also support activities in charter schools and in district-operated public schools.
Read below for analysis of why school districts and charter school authorizers may want to start exploring this program and what it could mean for our work.
You can also join the NN4DA Working Group for our monthly calls, on the 4th Friday of each month at 1:00 pm, MDT. Contact Alex for information on how to join. And look for discussion of this issue and other timely topics at the NN4DA Annual Summit, October 26 and 27, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.
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The Federal SGO Program & Authorizers
Charter authorizers could show how to appropriately manage predictable risks of a few bad actors while supporting innovation — most probably won’t
The country is embarking on an innovative, poorly understood, and intentionally ill-defined experiment in education finance and institution building. You can learn about the basics of the new federal tax credit for Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) here, read what the Feds have to say, and explore coverage of which states are likely to participate.
While most public debate of SGOs covers the money private schools could receive, public school districts and charter schools are also discussing ways they can use this opportunity to expand their programming, provide more services, and access much-needed cash. They could use this program to fund things like summer school, after school programs, intensive tutoring, field trips, or additional services for special populations. Depending on how final regulations are drafted, scholarships might pay for student supplies, home internet access, or things that have suffered from budget cuts, like intramural sports, or arts, and music programs.
All these could help students a lot. Meanwhile, I also urge those who can, to take responsibility for minimizing the worst behaviors this program might enable.
This program is likely to attract many people and groups that will do good things for kids. Given human nature and the history of the charter sector, it is also predictable that the program’s ambiguity and lack of accountability could enable a few bad actors to maximize their income without helping students. I personally don’t consider the new federal law good public policy, but I am hoping people use its resources well. In fact, I am encouraging my own school district (where I serve on the school board) to explore how we can further our mission and better serve our local community with these resources if they become available.
Exacerbating the risk, many of the people and groups that could hold the SGOs and their partners accountable probably aren’t going to do much, at least not for a while. This includes charter school authorizers overseeing charter schools that launch new SGO-funded programs and services. If authorizer oversight of virtual education or early childhood education are any indication, authorizers are most likely to sit this one out. If they did engage, authorizers have the skills and knowledge that would be a strong model for others trying to figure out how to instill accountability to protect students and the public interest, without over-burdening everyone and undermining the potential benefits of a new program.
Early Childhood Education (ECE) illustrates why authorizers may decline to oversee SGO activity. Colorado launched state-funded Universal Preschool (UPK) in 2023. As charter schools launched UPK programming, on advice of their lawyers, many Colorado districts decided that charter contracts were not relevant to these activities, and that charter schools’ UPK programming was none of their business. This ignored arguments districts could have used to assert jurisdiction. For example, they might have leveraged contract language around facilities use, safety and compliance, budgeting transparency, and audits.
Instead, districts preferred not to know about or have anything to do with something that could go wrong, especially if knowing what was going on might make them more responsible for anything that was later determined to be problematic. Fortunately, in this case, a state-level agency oversees the program and a quality rating system promotes transparency so parents have some sense of what they are getting. While thus far Colorado UPK has not devolved into large-scale misdeed, it still demonstrates dynamics that discourage districts from accepting responsibility for new and innovative programs not explicitly described in charter contracts.
The examples of California charter schools defrauding the state with sham virtual education provides a more sobering example. In two high-profile cases, other state- and county-level accountability mechanisms that could have identified and acted on malfeasance when it became obvious, also chose not to get involved. California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP) studied these cases deeply, and published recommendations for changes to authorizing and state policy to address systemic weaknesses.
Collectively, as CCAP explained, the state attorney general, the state department of education, and county offices of education provided little or no back-up to negligent district authorizers when things went seriously sideways. Two cases alone generated nearly $600 million in misappropriated funding.
The charter networks double-counted students and claimed funding under multiple state programs for the same services; provided little or no services to enrolled students; ran programs that did not meet program or eligibility requirements while still drawing down funds; served students outside of K-12 grades without charter contracts authorizing them to serve older students; and exchanged valuable gifts (like I-pads or amusement park tickets) to families in exchange for parents allowing their kids to be listed as students in schools that drew down a lot more money than the items cost, without providing much more to families. Yet no one thought it was their role to act.
Many related and predictable risks could emerge under SGO programs. Three examples are:
- Double dipping, i.e. schools and providers getting paid twice for the same service from various funding streams, including using SGO funding to pay for programming that is already covered by fees, tuition, or formula or grant funding for districts and charters.
- Framing donations as a quid pro quo in which the family pays or donates money in exchange for their own child’s scholarship. Unscrupulous operators might try to condition enrollment in a school or program, or access to a scholarship, on families contributing to the fund. The federal SGO authorizing statute clearly prohibits this, but it will be difficult to police. And even well-intentioned schools and service providers are likely to inadvertently conflate the donations and the scholarships, as well as the dual roles of parents as both funders and recipients of funding.
- Maximize income while minimizing services and education. Operators interested primarily in money will easily figure out how to direct a lot of money to themselves without adding proportionate services or programs. Creating new programs with wildly inflated tuition rates will be among the easiest strategies.
The SGO approach faces these risks with fewer oversight bodies and the same incentives for authorizers to avoid responsibility. Ironically, each shirking oversight body in California had a degree of “plausible deniability” precisely because so many “responsible” entities could all assert that it was the others’ job to act. A couple of greedy players exploited the state’s diluted accountability for years after it was known they were doing so.
The SGO approach is going to become an attractive and easily manipulated mechanism that can generate a lot of money. This misbehavior will potentially generate acrimony and eventually a political backlash for everyone else in the SGO world, and in the charter sector to the extent the charter-based SGO programming is involved.
We should try to avoid that misbehavior and the subsequent reaction (or at least lessen its impact) by being thoughtful about transparency and quality control. We should discuss minimum expectations. Admittedly, charter school authorizers could either enforce standards, or sit this out with little short-term political or reputational risk. By launching a discussion of oversight, transparency, and quality control, we might avoid the bad stuff and see the good stuff more often.
Obviously, we must also avoid over-responding, and creating unnecessary burdens on charters, authorizers, SGOs, their partners, or parents. I know of no authorizers looking for more work to do.
But strong charter school authorizers are experts at balancing how to provide independent actors with the freedom it takes to innovate, while protecting students and the public interest. That is a skill-set that could be very valuable in the next few years nationwide.
Rather than sitting this out, I encourage authorizers to actively and appropriately oversee charter school participation in SGO-funded programs. While I am sadly resigned to some untoward stuff eventually happening, it doesn’t have to be that way now, and we could try to decrease the risk without burdening good actors trying to do the coolest things. Authorizers can show others the way.
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NN4DA Annual Summit
Hold the Dates!
October 26 and 27, 2026
Nashville, TN
NN4DA is convening the NN4DA Annual Summit on October 26-27, in Nashville, TN. Hold the dates! Join us as we meet with all our state partners to discuss our shared work and important topics for district authorizers. Our Annual Summit is held in conjunction with NACSA’s annual meeting and addresses a mix of ways we can support each other and substantive issues affecting district authorizers.