By Fawn Johnson

If there is one education-related issue that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on, it's charter schools. The House last week easily passed legislation to update the nation's 14-year-old charter school program, which would give more power to states and local communities to promote charter schools and add more incentives for quality. The bill would consolidate two federal funding streams and increase the annual allotment for the entire program from $250 million to $300 million annually. A similar measure was introduced in the Senate last week. Both bills are bipartisan.

"This is an example of a bill that has gotten better every step of the way," said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., on the House floor. Polis, who founded two charter schools before he came to Congress, said he understands first-hand how charter schools' "freedom to innovate" in terms of scheduling, instruction, time on task, etc., changes the landscape for public education generally.

Not everyone is happy about the bill. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., protested that it favors states that don't have caps on charter schools. He argued that the federal government shouldn't have that kind of power over states.

Still, it was a rare moment of bipartisan comity in a House that spent most of its time last week squabbling over Benghazi, former IRS official Lois Lerner, and even budget technicalities on tax extenders.

Charter schools, it would seem, have grown up. They have become more familiar to the public than when they first appeared on the scene some 20 years ago. Today, about 2 million students attend charter schools.

But there is still a lot to discuss about charter schools. There are 600,000 students on wait lists, Polis said. (That number is debatable, as students often apply to multiple charter schools.) Also, the concern that charter schools take students away from the traditional public schools still resonates. The very freedom that charter schools utilize to innovate also opens the door to mismanagement. I was struck by this cynical take by a teacher on how to make money on charter schools. The students are profit-makers! It's a scary read.

I predict there will be nothing but a growth in charter schools over the next several decades, but most educators would say that's only a good thing if they are accomplishing the same things, and more, as traditional public schools. But how do you measure their performance? That's a tough enough question for traditional schools, let alone schools that are supposed to be free to experiment. This opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes a compelling argument about why it makes no sense to evaluate and compare these schools. But with 2 million students and counting, most people would agree there needs to be some assurance that these kids are all getting the essentials.

Even charter school authorizing is evolving. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers put out their annual report last week, which noted the differences in how authorizers evaluate charter school applicants. NACSA lists 12 practices that it says are "essential to authorizing." They include interviewing the applicant, using expert panels to review the applications, and giving an annual report to schools on their performance. Yet a lot of charter school authorizers do not use these "essential" practices. Almost half of the authorizers surveyed by NACSA said they don't use expert panels, about one-third said they don't provide annual reports, and 30 percent said they don't interview applicants.

Authorizers, like the charter schools themselves, have a wide berth. That's probably a good thing, but it might be worth keeping score on all these fronts as the movement continues to grow.

For our insiders: How have charter schools changed the public school system in the last 20 years? What are the best characteristics of charter schools? The worst? Does the legislation pending in Congress go far enough? What can be done about the kids who want to get in to a charter school but can't? What can the federal government or states do to ensure high quality charter schools? Are they doing enough of that now?

Kevin Welner comment:

The waitlist numbers cited by Rep. Polis are too weak to even qualify as estimates. To his credit, he does use the numbers that have been discounted to attempt to reflect multiple applications, but the original number as well as the discount factor are not sound. Last week, NEPC released an analysis of this, titled “Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me! Nine Reasons to Be Skeptical About Charter Waitlist Numbers”. I'm pasting the press release below (online at http://tinyurl.com/k2no7mw), which has a link to the full policy memo.


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Charter School “Waitlist” Numbers Call for Skepticism

Contact:

William J. Mathis, (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net

Gary Miron, (269) 599-7965, gary.miron@wmich.edu

BOULDER, CO (May 5, 2014) – Later today, as part of National Charter 
Schools Week, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) 
will release its much-publicized annual estimate of the number of 
students on charter school waitlists. The number will likely be well in 
excess of a million students. But, according to a new policy memo from 
the National Education Policy Center, the number will also very likely 
be erroneous.

While there are undoubtedly many students who wish to enroll in 
popular charter schools and are unable, the overall waitlist numbers are
 almost certainly much lower than the NAPCS estimates. The Policy Memo 
published today by the National Education Policy Center outlines nine 
reasons why policy makers, reporters and others should be skeptical of 
the NAPCS waitlist numbers.

As explained by co-author and NEPC director Kevin Welner, “The NAPCS 
estimates are apparently based on a survey of charter schools, but the 
estimates are offered on a ‘trust us’ basis. To the best of our 
knowledge the organization simply announces their interpretations of the
results, never providing any of the key information needed to verify or
understand their bottom line number.”

Red flags abound when considering the NAPCS survey and the reported 
findings: it is impossible to know the survey response rate, whether 
there is any skew or bias to the data, what the exact questions asked 
were, the methods of data collection, or even the basics about the 
analysis of the data or how the estimated number or students on 
waitlists was derived.

Non-transparent methods and non-verifiable results account for just 
two of nine reasons for skepticism offered by Welner and his co-author, 
Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University. Among the others
are: unreliable waitlist record-keeping, counting as “waiting” 
applicants who apply to enter into grade levels for which charters 
provide no entry, imbalanced oversubscription (a small number of very 
popular charters disproportionately accounting for the waitlists), and –
since traditional public schools are not generally allowed to turn away
students – the lack of a meaningful comparison for the waitlist data.

Another complication, which NAPCS has acknowledged, is that their 
headline “waitlist” number needs to be trimmed considerably because 
“families often apply to multiple charter schools hoping to increase 
their odds.” Last year, the NAPCS suggested that the number might be 
reduced by 43.5% because of these multiple applications, but it is 
unclear how this reduction factor was derived.

The NAPCS announces its estimates as part of an annual advocacy 
effort to encourage elected officials to remove “barriers that exist to 
ensure that every child has the option to attend a high-quality public 
charter school,” according to Nina Rees, NAPCS president and CEO. Rees 
is the former chief education analyst for The Heritage Foundation and a 
former official in the White House under President George W. Bush.

However, as Welner and Miron conclude, the policy implications are 
murky. “Oversubscription at a given charter school is a sensible 
indicator of that school’s popularity in relation to its size. If 
trustworthy and reliable waitlist data were available nationally, 
aggregation of those data could provide a rough indicator of overall 
popularity of charter schools in relation to the size of the sector, 
although such aggregation could lose important information about how 
many popular schools are driving the total number. There’s an 
interesting debate to be had about the policy import of such aggregated 
numbers, but we’re not at that point: we simply do not have trustworthy,
reliable waitlist data. Until we do policymakers would be wise to set 
aside NAPCS’s claims and wait for verifiable data and sound transparent 
analysis.”

The NEPC policy memo, Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me! Nine Reasons to be Skeptical about Charter Waitlist Numbers, can be found on the NEPC website at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publi....

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and
disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education 
policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic 
governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based 
on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.