[lg policy] The Charter School Express: Is proliferation interfering with quality?

Fri Oct 9 19:49:16 UTC 2009

The Charter School Express Is proliferation interfering with quality? By
Gary Miron & Leigh Dingerson

The latest policy train gathering steam in education focuses on lifting
caps, or limits, to charter school expansion. Currently, 24 states and the
District of Columbia have some type of limit on charter school growth. These
limits, some charter school supporters say, interfere with the goal of a
thriving school marketplace. The latest institution to jump on the expansion
express is the U.S. Department of Education. In its July guidelines for the
$4 billion Race to the Top program, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
announced that funding priority would be given to those states that lifted
or removed caps on charter expansion. In reaction, legislatures around the
country began doing just that.

We believe there needs to be more consideration of the implications of
lifting charter caps before this train leaves the station. A
study<http://credo.stanford.edu/>released in June by Stanford
University’s Center for Research on Education
Outcomes found that, overall, charter schools are performing at levels lower
than traditional public schools. Combined with evidence from an increasing
number of statewide evaluations, the state-level findings from the Stanford
study also suggest that *quantity* is the enemy of *quality* in the charter
marketplace. ("Study Casts Doubt on Charter School
Results,"<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/06/15/36charters.h28.html>June
15, 2009.)
 —Luis Diaz

Charter schools were created nearly two decades ago as a new form of public
school that would improve upon traditional public schools by creating small
learning communities, developing and sharing innovative practices, and
empowering teachers and parents. They won considerable bipartisan support,
and have become one of the most prevalent and most talked-about school
reforms in the nation. Today there are more than 4,900 charter schools in 40
states and the District of Columbia, enrolling 1.5 million students.

Scores of these schools are beacons in a troubled sea of underperforming
public schools. But, overall, the sector has shown little evidence that it
is more likely than a traditional school system to develop innovative
programs or practices. A study released in late September about
oversubscribed New York City charters offers some hope. ("N.Y.C. Study Finds
Gains for Charters,"<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/09/30/05charters-2.h29.html>Sept.
30, 2009.) But repeated studies over the past decade have failed to
find consistent, positive academic change produced by the vast majority of
charter schools.

What *has* changed is the focus of the movement. Once dedicated to
educational quality, today’s charter school movement is increasingly
dominated by powerful advocates of market-based reform and privatization in
public education. The charter school idea was to create better schools for
all children, not to divide limited public resources across parallel systems
that perform at similar levels and suffer from similar breaches in
accountability. Their theory of reform assumes that the market must be
allowed to proliferate because *expansion itself* creates the competitive
pressure to raise the quality of all schools. It also assumes that
competition forces failures. Thus the movement has encouraged rapid growth
in the name of “choice,” and presumed that schools that fail to deliver for
their students will be shut down.

These principles have become the engine of the charter movement. The Center
for Education Reform’s annual ranking of state charter laws, for example, is
silent on academic accountability or performance, but identifies the
potential for unlimited growth as one of four indicators of a strong charter
law. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools lists expansion of the
sector as its top legislative priority, arguing that caps on charter
expansion unfairly limit access to good charter schools for those who would
enroll in them.
------------------------------

The growing body of evidence, however, raises red flags for the
pro-expansion agenda. If, as the Stanford report finds, 17 out of 100
charter schools do indeed improve student outcomes, then opening up 100 *
more* charter schools should result in an additional 17 high-quality
schools. At the same time, however, doing so also would create twice as many
schools—37 out of 100, according to Stanford’s researchers—that actually
worsen student outcomes. The Stanford report identified five states with
positive results for student-achievement growth, six with negative results,
and four with mixed results. Interestingly, states with the most charter
schools were also most likely to be found in the poor-performing group,
while states with few charters tended to cluster among the most successful.
Specifically, states with positive student-achievement growth had only 61.6
charter schools on average, while those with negative growth had an average
of 275 charter schools.

We also noticed in the report a relationship between achievement growth and
the rate of charter school creation. The states that granted the largest
number of charters in their first 10 years are Arizona (which opened 407
schools in 10 years), Florida (326 schools), Ohio (326 schools), California
(308), and Texas (259 schools). Stanford’s data show that four of these five
states posted negative student-achievement results, while the fifth,
California, showed no significant difference in student performance between
charter and traditional public schools. Further, the report reveals a
relationship between state outcomes and the extent to which the charter
schools are operated by private education management organizations, or EMOs.
As it turns out, in the poorly performing states, a much higher proportion
of charter schools are run by for-profit EMOs. With close to one-third of
the nation’s charter schools operated by for-profit or nonprofit private
management companies, a relationship such as this warrants attention.
------------------------------

More research is needed to understand the negative correlations between
charter performance on the one hand, and charter expansion and privatization
on the other. For example, perhaps rapid expansion risks overwhelming
authorizers, who must provide oversight to their schools. One Ohio
authorizer admitted to a journalist that she was “unaware” of gross
malpractice at a school under her auspices, until she read about it in the
news. Another possibility is that, in an atmosphere in which rapid expansion
is the goal, charters are granted more liberally, on the theory that once
schools are up and running, authorizers can sort through the strong ones and
the weak ones. A rapidly expanding sector might also attract inexperienced
entrepreneurs who believe they can take on the complex task of running a
school, or even may think it is an avenue for personal financial gain.
Private management companies play a role, too, because they are often used
as vehicles to propagate charters.

Whatever the factors, the growing body of independent research suggests that
the combination of a rapidly expanding sector and the widely acknowledged
challenge of actually closing charter schools once they have opened seems
likely to create a train wreck. Once dedicated to educational quality,
today’s charter school movement is increasingly dominated by powerful
advocates of market-based reform and privatization in public education. As
the Obama administration considers how to steer and develop charter schools,
it would be wise to articulate a new—or renewed—vision for chartering that
focuses on quality over quantity. Then, as Secretary Duncan wields his
influence, he can persuade states to make revisions in their charter school
laws that reflect those goals and values. Most importantly, such guidance
should reward states that create *successful* charter schools, rather than
states that simply expand the charter school market.

Finally, authorities need to move more aggressively to close poorly
performing charter schools. This will strengthen charter reforms in four
ways: lifting the aggregate results for charters that remain; sending a
strong message to other charter schools that the autonomy-for-accountability
trade-off is real; redirecting media attention from a few scandal-ridden
schools to successful schools; and opening up space for new, carefully
vetted charters. Although these suggestions may be seen as antagonistic by
the charter school establishment, we believe they will help improve and
strengthen such schools in the longer run. The charter school idea was to
create better schools for all children, not to divide limited public
resources across parallel systems that perform at similar levels and suffer
from similar breaches in accountability. Rapid proliferation in the charter
sector appears to be interfering with the original vision for the schools:
to serve as a lever of change, spurring public schools to improve both by
example and replication.
The only way to ensure quality may be to get off the expansion express.

Gary Miron is a professor of education at Western Michigan University, in
Kalamazoo, Mich. Leigh Dingerson is a co-editor of Keeping the Promise? The
Debate Over Charter Schools (Rethinking Schools, 2008).

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/07/06miron.h29.html?tkn=ZVVF8A10fQrG0TvQ7JRSzostAaCqfuli79XQ&print=1

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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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