California's first public charter school opened in 1993. The state now has 982 charter schools with more than 412,000 students. In exchange for being allowed flexibility on rules, and room to experiment, charter schools are supposed to be held accountable for results. Yet local districts vary widely in their oversight.

So the California Charter Schools Association, on its own, has launched an initiative to hold charter schools to higher standards. That's a good thing.

The result, however, has caused a firestorm. For the first time, the association has called for nonrenewal and closure of 10 charter schools.

Clearly, every school on that list deserves close review when its charter comes up for renewal in June. The association's assessment should not be the last word on each school's performance, but it certainly should not be dismissed.

Schools and charter advocates who disagree with the association's conclusion that a school is underperforming should be prepared to show local districts and the state Board of Education how they define student and school success. How do you measure student progress? How do you know if your school is successful with a student?

For its part, the association has built on the state's existing accountability system, which measures the success of schools by the Academic Performance Index. In place since 1999, the API uses student results on the California Standards Tests and other indicators, such as attendance and graduation rates, to score schools on a 200-to-1,000 scale. The target for schools is 800 and they are given growth targets each year to mark progress.

The association begins by identifying schools that show an API of less than 700 and growth of fewer than 30 points over three years.

But that does not take into consideration the population that a school serves. Schools that serve lower-income or non-English-speaking students, for example, should get credit for that.

So the association created a measure, the "Similar Students Measure," to take into account family income, parent education level, mobility, ethnicity and the percent of English learners and special education students. It then comes up with a predicted API score given the student population the school serves – and compares predicted performance with actual performance.

Based on that measure, some charter schools are performing much better than expected. But some are performing much worse. Those are schools that turn up on the association's nonrenewal and closure list.

Certainly, we can and should continue to debate the proper role and weight of testing. But it is not acceptable for charter schools – or any public schools – simply to say that they don't like testing and the API and, thus, they shouldn't be held accountable to any measurable academic benchmarks.

The California Charter Schools Association, in setting its own higher standard for measuring charter schools, has started a lively dialogue centered on the right thing – student performance and how to measure it.

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