James Merriman, the new CEO of the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, formerly served as Executive Director of the Charter Schools Institute of the State University of New York (SUNY), the nation’s second-largest university-affiliated authorizer of public charter schools.

In his previous role as authorizer of charter schools, Merriman was responsible for holding charter schools to the highest operational and academic standards. As head of the nonprofit Center, he is an advocate for charter schools, overseeing the Center’s efforts to ensure that charter schools have the freedom and resources to provide a public education to the City’s neediest communities.

Merriman touches on the future of charter schools in New York City, the concept of school autonomy and legal action taken by charter advocates against State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli (D).

What follows is an edited tran scri pt.


Q: What sort of vision do you have for your tenure at the Center?  
A: My hope for the Center is that everything we do is as top flight as the very best charter schools that we were created to serve.  We need to be an absolutely relentless advocate for allowing charter schools to flourish in an environment that supports them, but equally make sure that we’re an advocate for charter schools living up to their promises of delivering not just a good but a great education to the children they serve.
 
Q: Besides advocacy, what else does the Center do for charter schools in the city?
A: The Center provides services to charters, with a focus on those tough technical issues that tend to take them away from the core business that they got into this in the first place -- teaching, and more importantly, learning.  Our theory is that if we can relieve schools of some of the burdens of finding facilities, sorting through the maze that is the Department of Education, providing centralized services on teacher certification, fingerprinting, how to deliver special education services, we have then helped school leaders by giving them more time and energy to serving their students.  Given how much schools are regulated, even charters, we have to remember always that that’s why we have schools in the first place.

Q: Given the decision last year to increase the cap on the number of charter schools, how would you rate the State Board of Regents’ approach towards charter schools?
A: I think the Board of Regents has been a thoughtful partner in moving the charter school movement forward.  It’s pretty clear that I didn’t always agree with them when I was at SUNY and we won’t always agree now.  But it is a constructive dialogue. The one thing I hope the Board fully understands and conveys to the State Education Department is that for charter schools to be successful, the autonomy that allows charter schools the freedom to innovate needs to be jealously protected. At the same time, all of us need to hold charters accountable when they don’t live up to their promises.

Q: Is this idea of autonomy related to your lawsuit against the state comptroller’s office?
A: Yes it is, and I want to be completely clear about this because there’s been a lot of confusion:  charter schools and the Center do not oppose the fiscal audits of charter schools by the Comptroller. Charter schools and district schools have undergone fiscal audits for the past two years after the debacle in Roslyn, and we understand the need for them. We filed our lawsuit only after the Comptroller’s announced that he would conduct “performance” audits on top of the fiscal audits—and then it turned out this additional round of audits was only directed at charter schools, and not a single district school. What got us about these performance audits is that we don’t understand how or why accountants should be judging how teachers and educators are doing their jobs.  Let the Board of Regents and the Department of Education do that work—which they already are.  We also clearly saw a double standard in the treatment of charter schools in this case. Not surprisingly, and as I expected, the usual suspects have tried to portray our lawsuit as a way of escaping accountability. Charters welcome accountability and have plenty of it; but we don’t want it to be duplicative of already existing monitoring and we also want it to be fair.
 
Q: Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been very supportive of charter schools, as has Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. Do you see that extending past 2009 with the current crop of mayoral candidates?
A: It would be hard to improve upon the support the Chancellor and Mayor Bloomberg have had for charter schools, but obviously we’re hopeful that anyone who comes into office will be supportive of charter schools.  Not because they’re a good idea abstractly, but because of the demonstrable success they’ve had in improving student achievement. In fact, this latest round of progress reports from DOE showed that the number one and number two schools in the entire city were charter schools. If you ask me, that’s an argument for more of those schools, not less.

Q: What about the decision to include charter schools in the city’s grading system? How has that worked out so far?
A: Charter schools already have an extensive accountability structure, so there was some hesitation about whether to add another measure. However, the fact is that charter schools recognize that because this measure is likely to be used by parents to decide where to have their children go to school, and because charter schools do very well on this measure, overall we welcome it.

Q: What has been the relationship between your center and the teachers unions?
A: Cordial and respectful. Again, it is clear that we won’t always agree, but my guess is that there may be more common ground than the conventional wisdom out there has it. We have to remember that there are a number of charter schools that are unionized because they were conversions or have subsequently been unionized and we support the choice of employees to work in the setting that they collectively feel is right for them.  And of course, the UFT has its own charter school and is working with a group from California to start more of them.

Q: Are there any sort of noticeable differences between charter schools that are managed by for-profit organizations and not-for-profit organizations?  
A: First, we don’t have a lot of schools in New York City that are managed by for-profits.  With that said, the fact is while the for-profits have had some successes, as a group they have not been outstanding. I think this clearly raises questions in people’s minds fairly or unfairly.  After all, while people might not begrudge someone making a profit if they are hitting the ball out of the park, they won’t understand why a company should make a profit from public education if the results aren’t extremely positive.  And so far, unfortunately, they just haven’t been. So it’s a challenge for them.

Q: You talked a lot about maintaining autonomy and having enough transparency so that people feel comfortable.  What is sort of the appropriate level of oversight that the government should have over charter schools?  Where do you see the line that up to this point it’s appropriate, but past that you’re encroaching on the school’s autonomy?
A: What I think is appropriate is in fact the system that is laid out in the Charter Schools Act, the legislation that created charter schools.  It provides for a comprehensive oversight structure in which charters are overseen not only by the Department of Education or the State University of New York, but also by the State Education Department. The laws and structure in place under which oversight is established and carried out we feel is appropriate.  However, where agencies work somehow to change the charter structure to make it look just like the district structure, and all the constraints of that structure, we feel that crosses the line.

Q: Should there be a cap?
A: No. For the life of me, I can’t understand a legislative veto on having more great schools. Let’s take all the energy that we’re spending on fighting more charter schools and make sure that every one that we start has more promise of being a great school.

Q: Do you feel that especially with a lot of public schools being shut down and consolidated into other schools; do you think that charter schools can fill a gap there?
A: I do think that charters will be an important component of creating new schools and more importantly better schools for the students who have been so badly served by the schools that are closing down. But they are only part of the answer.