Charter Schools

by
Gerald Bracey

Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
School of Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PO Box 413
Milwaukee WI 53201
414-229-2716

October 12, 2000

CERAI-00-26

An Education Policy ProjectBriefing Paper

Charter Schools

By Gerald Bracey, Ph.D.

The idea of a charter school was first put forth by educator Ray Budde asearly as the 1970’s1 and popularized in the early 1990’s bythe late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation ofTeachers.  As presented by Shanker, the idea was a simple one: someagency, such as a state or school district, would grant a particular school a“charter” to free it from presumably onerous state and district rules andregulations.  In return for these freedoms, the charter school promised toraise achievement.

In retrospect, this was a hopelessly naïve and simplistic notion of the wayschools operate, but it caught many people’s fancy.  It has proved to bethe latest in the apparently never-ending fusillade of magic bullets targetedat the schools.  The early operative word for charters was “hope.” Indeed, University of Minnesota charter advocate Joe Nathan titled his 1996book Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for AmericanEducation.  The preface of this book provides an excellent summary ofhow and why charter school advocates hold out hope:

The charter school idea is about the creation of more accountable publicschools, and the removal of the “exclusive franchise” that local school boardspresently have.  Charter schools are public, non-sectarian schools that donot have admissions tests, but that operate under a written contract, or charterfrom a school board or some other organization, such as a state schoolboard.  These contracts specify how the school will be accountable forimproved student achievement, in exchange for a waiver of most rules andregulations governing how they operate.  Charter schools that improveachievement have their contracts renewed.  Charter schools that do notimprove student achievement over the contract’s period are closed…

The charter idea is not just about the creation of new, more accountablepublic schools or the conversion of existing public schools.  The charteridea also introduces fair, thoughtful competition into public education.2

One of Nathan’s colleagues, Ted Kolderie expanded on the notions containedin the last paragraph, emphasizing that the conversion of a regular school intoa charter school was just a start: the real goal was to use the charter toimprove schools in the entire district.3

Certain assumptions embedded in these paragraphs have provedtroublesome.  The statement implies that people opening charter schoolsknow how to run a school.  This has often not been the case. People oftenopen a charter school because they have a vision of what education shouldbe.  As has been found in several states, though, this vision needs to beaccompanied by skills in fiscal and personnel management and the ability todeal with many different people.  It further assumes that charter schoolsare largely driven by idealism, whereas increasingly charter school operatorsare looking to make money.  It assumes that people running the charterschools, idealistic or not, will be willing to be accountable and willhave a plan for accountability. Finally, it assumes that there will be someentity that is empowered to judge if the school’s goals have been met and thathas the expertise to exercise that power wisely.

Neither assumption has yet been borne out in the real world. As early as1994, George Washington University political scientist Jeffrey Henig found thatcharter schools “show few signs of interest in systematic, empirical researchthat is ultimately needed if we are going to be able to separate bold claimfrom proven performance.  Premature claims of success, reliance onanecdotal and unreliable evidence are still the rule of the day.”4

Two years later, Alex Molnar of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee lookedat charter school evaluations with a more jaundiced eye:  “Charter schoolswill fail, fraud will be uncovered and tax dollars will be wasted.”  But,said Molnar, there will also be no end of testimonials for allegedly wonderfulcharters.5

In that same year, some of charters biggest advocates, Chester E. Finn, Jr.,Lou Ann Bierlein, and Bruno V. Manno lamented that they had “yet to see asingle state with a thoughtful and well formed plan for evaluating its charterschool program.”  Although part of the problem was the generally sorrystate of evaluation in general, “the problem is apt to be particularly acutefor charter schools, where the whole point is to deliver better results inreturn for greater freedom.”6

It has now been nearly five years since the above hopes and reservationswere expressed.  We can begin to evaluate the predictions made forcharters in the light of a half dozen or so evaluations from California,Michigan and Arizona, the three most active charter states, and from Ohio,which has recently experienced a charter boom.  Such an evaluation can beundertaken in light of the qualities alleged, and those observed, in charterschools.

Student achievement.  The essence of charter schools was thatthey would increase student achievement.  Early on, this was measuredlargely through the use of test scores.  Yet it turns out that thisapproach may have been naïve. For some charter schools, standardized testswould be an appropriate evaluation tool, but not for all.  Charter schoolshave been formed to provide an “Afrocentric” curriculum or to try to enticedropouts to return to learning environments.  Other charters are focusedon art or other subjects that are not reflected in test scores.  Whateverthe focus of the school, it is clear that charter-granting agencies are notusing a clear set of guidelines in issuing the charters.

Where test scores are available, there is little evidence to indicate thatcharter schools have led to improved achievement Evaluations in California andMichigan, two of the most charter-active states in the country, have failed tofind evidence that charters produce higher achievement.7

Accountability.  Charter schools would be more accountable, theadvocates argued, because they had promised to increase achievement and if theydidn’t, they would go out of business. Yet this academic accountability has yetto be enforced. To date, charter schools that have gone out of business havedone so for mismanaging money, whether from criminal activity orineptitude.  A fairly rigorous fiscal accountability seems to beoperating, but not academic accountability.

In some instances, accountability has been compromised by confusion over whois accountable to whom and for what.  For instance, in Ohio, many charterschools did not file forms and reports as required by law.  The schoolssaid that they were unaware of the requirements and even if they had complied,it is not clear that Ohio had a monitoring structure sufficiently large and organizedto review the reports adequately. 8

In a related vein, some charter schools have seen themselves as accountableto more than one constituency.  Some staffers felt accountable to thefounder, some to the parents, some to the students.  As a result “theclaim of greater school-level accountability for student outcomes via charterschool reform has not yet truly come to pass in California.”9 This is due in large part to the fact that charter schools answer to manydifferent audiences, and thus are sometimes torn between being accountable todifferent people.

Innovation.  Charters, it was said, would become laboratoriesfor curricular and instructional innovation.  This appears to not to havehappened.  It is true that some things might be considered an innovationby contrast to the local public school.  For instance, if the publicschools were emphasizing a whole language approach to the teaching of beginningreading, then a phonics-oriented program might seem innovative to those whoadopted it.  

Innovations in the broader sense of the word, though, are rare.  InMichigan, for instance, evaluators did not find any program or approach thathad not already been tried in the public schools.  Jerry Horn and GaronMiron, who directed on evaluation of Michigan charters out of Western MichiganUniversity, put it this way:

In summary, there are many opportunities for charter schools to learn aboutinnovative practices.  Since all of these schools are newly developed withthe exception of the relatively few converted private or parochial schools, onemight expect that innovative practices would be frequent and widespread. However, such is not the case.  We found unpredictably few innovations,which would not suggest that transportability is an immediateexpectation.  In fact, we found the charter schools to be remarkablysimilar to the regular public schools.10

Choice.  Since charters would be diverse, the argument went,parents would have more choices for their children.  This has taken placewithin limits, but there are some disturbing trends on the horizon.  Asnoted, if a whole-language school district gets a phonics-oriented charterschool, that increases the range of parental choice.  Clearly such schoolshave appeared.

On the other hand, the increased diversity might disappear quickly. Many of the schools that the Michigan evaluations labeled “Mom and Pop” schoolshave found that running a school is a great deal more work than they hadcounted on, and an increasing number of such schools have been turned over tofor-profit Educational Management Organizations such as Mosaica Education,based in San Rafael, Calif. Yet Mosaica and other such companies  appearto have schools that resemble each other in cookie-cutter fashion, eliminatingthe very diversity and innovation that these charter schools’ founders hadenvisioned.

Moreover, while a few new programs such as Edison, TesseracT, or Sabis,might offer some diversity when compared with what else is available in thedistrict, these schools tolerate no diversity within a school.  Theprogram is tamperproof.  This generates friction among manyteachers.  For instance, more than half of the teachers at one Edisonschool in San Francisco are not returning for the 2000-2001 school year. Teachers felt demeaned by the hyper-rigid curriculum.  “They literallygive you a script with what you’re supposed to say,” said one teacher.11When teachers complained, school administrators and officials in the  NewYork headquarters of Edison Schools Inc. had a pat response: “Maybe our designis not for you.”12

One study found that public schools in suburbs were more responsive toparental input than private schools in those same suburbs.13 Suburban public school parents think it is both their right and responsibilityto get involved with their children’s education. Charter schools operated bychains might well remove the opportunity for that involvement, however. Thesechains rely heavily on applying particular models in their schools -- Edisonschools, for instance, use the Success for All and Chicago Math curricula --and show great reluctance to alter them, as the San Francisco teachersdiscovered. Yet if teachers are unable to alter the model, it seems likely thatparents would have even less of a chance for input.

Competition.  One might infer from the previous two sectionsthat the public schools find that charters offer healthy competition that theycan benefit from.  In Michigan, Eric Rofes of the University of Californiaat Berkeley found that some schools vowed to “out-charter the charters,” butmuch of this response focused on issues other than quality ofinstruction--making playgrounds safer, putting more guards at crosswalks,etc.  Outside of Michigan, Rofes found that “The majority of districts hadgone about business-as-usual and responded to charters slowly and in smallways.”14

In fairness, it should be said that demographic changes in the populationhave likely rendered the public schools less interested in the charters thanthey might otherwise be: the school-age population is growing and increasedenrollments offset the loss of students to charter schools.  In addition,many charter schools are too new to have a stable program that could beexamined by other schools.  Still, the promise of competition has not asyet been met.

Problems foreseen and unforeseen.  Early on, fears wereexpressed that charters would “skim” better students away from publicschools.  Some evaluations have found evidence for such skimming.

A study in Arizona turned up evidence that the charter schools there weremuch more ethnically segregated than were nearby public schools.15 A Michigan evaluation also revealed evidence for such segregation.16 However, a recent survey of charters in 23 states found the evidence mixed andinconclusive:  “A closer analysis suggests that charter schools may beproliferating at both the low and the high end of the race/ethnicity andaffluence/poverty continuums.  Whether this tendency will exacerbateracial isolation, or create more isolation by social class among students,remains to be seen.  It is likely that some schools serving highpercentages of students of color are responding to legislation that asks charterschools to serve at-risk students.” 17

Another recent paper, though, concluded that while there were chartersserving at-risk students, “charter schools serving low-income children of colorare less likely to provide an academic curriculum, and are generally not asrich in educational resources, as charter schools serving white middle-classstudents.”18

In sum, establishing and maintaining charter schools has proved to be a muchmore complicated undertaking than initially thought.  Charter schoolsenthusiasts seem to view them as a “magic bullet” that would offer immediateand major improvements in education.  The actual outcomes have been muchmore modest.  It is too early to draw firm conclusions about the ultimateusefulness of charters. 

1 Ray Budde, personal communication, September2000.

2 Joe Nathan, Charter Schools: CreatingHope and Opportunity for American Education.    San Francisco:Jossey Bass, 1996 P. xxvii

3 Ted Kolderie, The Charter Idea: Updateand Prospects, Fall, '95: Public Services Redesigns Project.  St Paul:Center for Policy Studies, 1995.

4 Jeffrey Henig, Rethinking School Choice:Limits of the Market Metaphor.  Princeton: Princeton University Press,paperback edition, 1995. Page 234. (The quoted passage did not appear in theoriginal hardcover edition.)

5 Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business:The Commercialization of America's Schools.  Boulder: Westview Press.1996. Page 167.

6 Chester E. Finn, Jr., Lou Ann Bierlein andBruno V. Manno.  “Charter Schools in Action: A First Look.”  HudsonBriefing Paper,.  Indianapolis: Hudson Institution. January 1996.

7 Amy Stuart Wells, Beyond the Rhetoric ofCharter School Reform.  LA: UCLA, 1998.

  Jerry Horn and Garon Miron, Evaluation of the Public SchoolsAcademy Initiative, Final Report.  Kalamazoo: The Evaluation Center,Western Michigan University, 1999.

8 Dennis J. Willard and Doug Oplinger,"Charter Experiment Goes Awry: Schools Fail to Deliver."  AkronBeacon Journal, December 12, 1999, p. A1.

9 Wells, pp. 26-27.

10

Horn and Miron, p. 77

11 Tali Woodward,  "Edison Exodus:Will a Teacher Revolt Spell an End to the School PrivatizationExperiment??  SF Bay Guardian, July 19, 2000, p. 1.

12 Ibid.

13  Richard Rothstein, Martin Carnoy, andLuis Benveniste.  Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2000.

14 Eric Rofes, How Are School DistrictsResponding to Charter Laws and Charter Schools?  Berkeley, CA: PolicyAnalysis for California Education, University of California at Berkeley, April,1998. Page 13.

15 Casey Cobb and Gene V Glass, "EthnicSegregation in Arizona Charter Schools," Education Policy AnalysisArchives, January 14, 1999. Available athttp://epaa.asu.edu/v7n3.html

16 Horn and  Miron.

17 Carol Ascher, Robin Jacobowitz, and YolandaMcBride, Charter School Access: A Preliminary Analysis of Charter SchoolLegislation and Charter School Students.  Institute for Education andSocial Policy, New York University, February, 1999, p. 13.

18 Carol Ascher and Nathalis Wamba.  CharterSchools: An Emerging Market for a New Model of Social Equity? Delivered to the "Conference on School Choice and Racial Diversity,Teachers College, Columbia University, May 22, 2000.