Noelle C. Griffin and Priscilla Wohlstetter, Teachers College Record
April 2001
Through a series of focus groups-including charter school founders/directors, administrators and teachers-the authors investigated 17 charter schools and the key instructional and organizational practices that they established in their start-up phase. Specifically, the authors looked at the experiences of these schools-six schools each in Boston and Los Angeles; and five schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area-in developing an instructional/curricular program, an accountability system, and school management/leadership processes. According to the authors (scholars at the University of Southern California), the charter school personnel interviewed found it difficult to develop coherent instructional programs. Many struggled with the "make versus buy" dilemma-should the school create its own instructional program from scratch or buy a pre-existing package that could be implemented quickly? The schools in the study tended to have a "pioneer" ethos that led them to create their own. This was time-consuming of course, and often collided with the realities of running a charter school: budget issues, relevant district, state, and federal policies, insurance, meals, security, custodians, substitutes, special education issues, and bus companies. As one school administrator lamented, "The logistics can kill you. The smallest part of my time goes to teaching and learning issues." As a result, many of these schools lacked a well-developed structure. "We limped through the first year in our approach to math-we had no textbook, no formal curriculum, and no one in charge of making those decisions," observed one school administrator. As for developing an accountability system, the authors discovered that there were strong feelings of informal accountability to the local school community, especially parents and to students. Yet teachers in many of the schools felt outright hostility and derision towards external accountability. One school leader stated bluntly, "We buck the accountability plan. I simply say I don't know state regulations." When it came to developing school management/leadership processes, many of the school leaders exhibited an "outlaw mentality." They saw themselves as fighting what they perceived as the ills of American public education, and this attitude appeared to generate and sustain commitment to the charter school. An elementary school administrator summed it up this way: "We're all here for a purpose...we're all here together because we chose to be." Although this article is more than a year old, it is worth reading if you want to appreciate the challenges facing those entrepreneurs struggling to make charter schools work. To see the report for yourself, go to www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentID=10722.
