Speaking on The Education Exchange podcast recently, 50CAN president Derrell Bradford argued that charter schools have lost sight of their early promise as a “vehicle for experimentation” in public education. We have “lost the spirit to try new things,” Bradford contends, calling on the charter sector to recommit itself to innovation.
I agree with Bradford that innovation is important, in that we should continually seek to innovate how we operate the public schoolhouse—which charter schools are perfectly positioned to do. In charter terms, innovation can rescue us from the archaic way school districts operate—the “grammar” or “invisible architecture” of schooling: how students are grouped into classrooms, how those classrooms are physically organized, or how assessments are designed and delivered.
But when it comes to pedagogy, the charter movement should be careful not to confuse “innovative” with “experimental.” Against the backdrop of our students’ veritable academic crisis, now is not the moment for charters to experiment with educational models. Instead, charter operators and authorizers should commit themselves to what we know will steer students toward academic recovery.
There are many examples of programs designed to attract “innovative” schools to districts across the country, from Indiana’s Innovation Network Schools to New York City’s Innovation Zone. Yet these are rarely a panacea for improving educational outcomes. I worked at a Public School of Innovation myself in North Charleston, South Carolina. Like many “innovation” schools under increased pressure to produce academic results, we resorted to the familiar reform playbook: a high-expectations culture, frequent teacher coaching and professional development, more testing, and the relentless pursuit of student data.
These measures were certainly not innovative, but for administrators facing the budgetary and operational constraints of all low-income public schools, sticking to what works is the more sensible path. I doubt my principal would have sought more “experimental” solutions to improving our students’ outcomes.
Bradford is right to suggest that charters aren’t living up to their potential for innovation, but is that such a bad thing? When it comes to the education they deliver, the best charter schools can hardly be said to be “experimental.” Instead, they generally stick to the tried and true, such as strong teacher development and high-quality curricula. Rick Hess put it more bluntly, suggesting that “students would benefit if we simply banned adults involved in education from using the term ‘innovation’ and insisted they be specific about what’s not working and what needs to change.”
In fruitful charter environments, “specialization” might be a better watchword than “innovation.” Classical charter schools, for example, aren’t “innovative” in an experimental sense—they harken back to a once-ubiquitous pedagogical approach that emphasizes knowledge-rich curricula rooted in the Western literary canon. The leader of a Florida classical charter school recently winced when I referred to district schools as “traditional.” “We’re the ones who are traditional,” she told me. Yet classical charters have exploded in popularity and have been enormously successful in states like Florida and Texas.
Florida also has the largest number of specialized charter schools for students with disabilities in the country. I have yet to meet a parent of a student with special needs, however, who is seeking a more experimental school for their child. Like with all parents, they want the best education and the best services for their children—something many feel they are not getting in district-run schools.
Indeed, the problem with American education is not that it hasn’t been “innovative” enough in the education it delivers to students. American public schools, E.D. Hirsch has long argued, have pursued a pedagogical model loosely descended from the “child-centered” and very much untraditional ideas of John Dewey. The pursuit of faddish approaches to education—such as the abject failure of the whole language theory of literacy instruction—contributed to the decline of American public education in the first place. Paulo Freire, who authored one of the favorite texts of professors of education, never had to run his own school, after all.
Although charters should always innovate how schools are operated, innovation as “experimentation” is not the remedy for America’s pedagogy problem. Education is, at its core, a backward-looking institution—the transmitting of knowledge and skills from one generation to the next. In fact, what’s old is frequently new again in education, be it the rediscovery of phonics, of background knowledge, or of vocational education. If policymakers and charter authorizers want to look for the “next big thing,” they would be better advised to read E.D. Hirsch or Booker T. Washington than to take a chance on the latest experiment.
