Here’s a small detail that could easily got lost in the shuffle of recent education news. After Indy STEAM Academy had its charter revoked by the Indiana Charter School Board (ICSB), their founder Yvonne Bullock indicated an intention to “seek accreditation for Indy STEAM Academy to become a private school.”

The astute observer will recall they would not be the first school to do so after The Genius School successfully switched to private status with a shocking absence of pushback from the State Board of Education.

This charter to private pipeline is no longer a one-off. There’s no such thing as a two-off (and it may be too soon to call this a full-blown trend) but the forbidden forest of such a decision doesn’t look so forbidden now that The Genius School hacked away the low-lying branches, shedding light on a new possibility. Indy STEAM Academy noted the opening and seems poised to widen the path for perhaps even more to follow.

This looks like yet another accountability dodge. It undermines the bargain at the core of the charter school movement: increased autonomy for increased accountability. Without accountability, it’s like taking out the rungs of a ladder. You just have a pole that gets you nowhere.

What can we do to fix this loophole?

It’s perhaps misleading to call this a loophole. After all, it’s not as if any school can magic itself from being a public charter school to a private school. Doing so requires accreditation from the state board of education. The state board can and should use their discretion to stop charter schools from avoiding accountability by applying for accreditation.

But they didn’t in the case of the Genius School. And if Indy STEAM Academy follows through on their pronouncement, there’s no indication the state board would stop them either. By the state board’s reasoning, it would actually be hypocritical to do so as they were unanimous in approving the Genius School, which displayed a host of red flags that should have made a denial vote simple.

This pathway is aided by a 2017 change in the law that made it easier for private schools to gain eligibility for accepting state-supported vouchers (and if you’ve been paying attention, legislation since then also enormously expanded the pool of families eligible to receive vouchers). Essentially, once a school receives accreditation (like the Genius School did), it can begin accepting vouchers right away.

There’s a long-running myth that somehow charter schools aren’t public schools. That they cherry-pick who gets to attend. That they aren’t free. When it comes to charter schools, all those things are myths. They are false.

But you know which type of school they do apply to? Private schools. And now, it’s increasingly clear that charter schools facing accountability see gaining accreditation and switching to a private school as a viable pathway, at which point they will have validated all the bad-faith attacks and myths.

Those who follow this path do a disservice to the charter school sector as a whole. Worse yet, kids are likely to suffer in the process. There are valid reasons The Genius School and Indy STEAM Academy were facing accountability from their authorizer. They just weren’t up to scratch.

The state board needs to put a stop to these bad faith efforts. If they won’t, I have an idea for how the legislature might amend that 2017 law. It goes something like this: “Don’t allow schools to switch from public to private just so they can dodge accountability from their authorizer or another governing body.” They can even copy/paste my suggestion for an amendment. I don’t need co-author credit or anything.