US CHARTER SCHOOLS
Too much heat and not enough light in the debate. But too much variability in their performance doesn’t help.
Comment
Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate outside the direct control of local school districts, under a publicly issued charter that gives them greater autonomy than other public schools have over curriculum, instruction, and operations.
The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, in Minnesota and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public schools There are two principles which guide and validate charter schools.
First that they will operate as autonomous public schools. This is effected by gaining waivers from many of the procedural requirements of public schools. Second, that they will use innovative pedagogy.
So, to justify their waivers and autonomy, they must produce results superior to non-charter schools. Evaluations, as the Economist (14 June) recently pointed out, have been broadly positive, but Charter Schools have powerful enemies, including the teachers’ unions who can fairly claim that more research is needed.
Critics claim that the schools create two tiered systems, cream off the best talent and create segregation. All hotly denied, of course, by Charter schools who claim that they are non-selective, many choosing pupils by lottery systems and more often than not they operate in the most disadvantaged areas, not unlike our own Academies.
Indeed, a recent Review by Rand Education (part of the Rand Corporation) ‘ Charter Schools in Eight States Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition ‘found “ no systematic evidence to support the fear that charter schools are skimming off the highest-achieving students. The prior test scores of students transferring into charter schools were near or below local (district wide or statewide) averages in every geographic location included in the study.” On the issue of segregation, the same report found little evidence to suggest that Charter schools helped foment racial segregation-“ Transfers to charter schools did not create dramatic shifts in the sorting of students by race or ethnicity in any of the sites included in the study. In most sites, the racial composition of the charter schools entered by transferring students was similar to that of the TPSs from which the students came. There is some variation: Transfers to charter schools tend to marginally reduce racial integration in Philadelphia and in Texas while marginally increasing racial integration in Chicago.”
Other questions being asked by educationist and policy wonks include- Do charter schools’ pupils do better at tests because they have been coached intensively at the expense of a broad education? Do charters mean the most motivated students cluster in a few schools, to the detriment of the majority? Do they kick out—or coax out—the toughest to teach?
The Economist revealed that work in Newark may well settle many of these questions. Newark has one of the country’s highest concentrations of charter schools. Seventeen schools run by 12 charter-management groups teach almost a tenth of the 48,000 children in its public-school system; by 2015 that share is likely to double.
The Newark Charter School Fund, established last year with money from, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will help new schools navigate the bureaucracy, find buildings and recruit the best teachers. But it will also gather a mountain of data on the performance of every charter school, and pupil, in Newark. So it will then have data to answer these key questions. All Newark’s charter schools admit pupils by lottery, so tracking those who applied but didn’t get in, as well as those that did, should allow comparisons between equally-motivated children of organised parents, but at different schools.
If charter schools are teaching a narrow curriculum and focusing on test preparation that should become clear when data are gathered on high-school completion rates and college destinations. If they are excluding lots of pupils, that will be obvious too. And if the state education department co-operates by giving researchers access to data on its own pupils, it will be possible to tell whether charter schools are leaching talent from state schools—or whether the challenge they pose to incumbents improves performance across the board.
What Charter schools have always had a problem in doing, convincingly is in creating clear blue water between themselves and their neighbouring public schools, in terms of the performance and attainment of their pupils .
Performances of Charter schools in different locations and states, run by different operators, varies considerably.
However, there is some evidence that in certain areas attending a charter high school is associated with statistically significant and substantial increases in the probability of graduating and of enrolling in college.
The Rand report put is as follows: “Our estimates of positive charter-school effects on high-school graduation and college entry are more encouraging than most of the test score–based studies to date (including our own test-score results).” The success of a school though of course is not just down to high test scores, and it is worth noting that Charter schools are much in demand and are rated highly by parents. They are viewed particularly favourably by parents from ethnic minorities who see them as the only chance their child has to escape poorly performing inner city schools, of which there are far too many.
Charter schools are not selective and allegations that they are cream skimming and increasing racial isolation and segregation can easily be refuted by recent evidence ,including in the Rand Report.
Charter schools intakes are in the main from disadvantaged communities, and so their challenges are frequently greater than in neighbouring public schools. Quite often they are less well resourced too, than neighbouring public schools which further handicaps them. But it is also the case that some Charter operators are much better at running schools than others.
The good ones often train their own teachers, ensuring good continuing professional development, disseminate and embed best practice, collect and make good use of data, have state of the art assessment systems, deliver personalised learning , are innovative and utilise integrated technology well ,and so on. But not all of them do. Indeed too many don’t -and this is probably the main reason why the Charter movement has not yet won the argument and put its critics to flight.
Charter operators need to raise their game to compare with the best. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG869.pdf
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