The macro trend that will have the greatest impact on the American education system over the next decade or two is our declining birth rate and the resulting enrollment crisis facing many public schools. We have too many schools for too few kids and, as a result, thousands of schools are going to need to close.
With students in short supply, then, one can understand the natural impulse to say that we should slow down or even halt the creation of new schools, including charter schools. Why make the problem of excess capacity even worse than it already is?
But policymakers and those of us in the charter school movement need to resist that line of thinking—indeed, we need to combat it hard and fast. That’s because what’s in even shorter supply than students are high-quality schools. Yes, we have too many school buildings in many communities in America. But we don’t have nearly enough excellent schools. And fixing that should continue to be the mission of the charter school sector.
Not surprisingly, charter opponents see it different. Teachers unions and their allies would love to use this moment to cap the growth of charter schools, even roll them back. And unfortunately, some sensible people are starting to listen to them. In Washington, D.C., for example, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been relatively friendly to charter schools during her two-plus terms in office, published a “boundary and student assignment study” that calls for the D.C. Public Charter School Board to consider the impact of new charters on enrollment in individual D.C. Public Schools before approving them.
This is deeply wrongheaded. Imagine if we had adopted that same line of thinking twenty or thirty years ago, during the last big period of urban school closures. We would have thousands fewer charter schools than we do today, and hundreds of thousands of kids would be worse off. We know that because of the overwhelming and growing evidence that students in charter schools, especially in urban charter schools, learn dramatically more year over year than their counterparts in traditional school districts, and achieve stronger real-world outcomes, too.
If our priority is to remediate learning loss, boost achievement, and improve long-term prospects for low-income students, then creating great schools where students can thrive must be job number one. That means growing the charter school movement.
Charter schools should close, too
That’s not to say the charter sector shouldn’t also take its fair share of lumps. It’s always a good time for authorizers to close low performing charter schools, but being aggressive makes more sense now than ever. Rather than showing patience while time and the marketplace take their course for schools in a downward spiral of declining enrollment and/or weak achievement, authorizers might step in and close schools more urgently. Not only will that put failing charter schools out of their misery, but it will free up market share, and potentially free up buildings, for other higher-performing charter schools to tap.
We at Fordham recently released a study by Sofoklis Goulas of the Brookings Institution which identified almost 500 public schools that are both low achieving (according to their own states) and which have seen enrollment drop significantly in recent years. As we wrote in the report, not all the schools on that list should necessarily be closed, as the way states define quality is not always ideal, and there might be local context that needs to be considered. Still, the 500 schools should at least be candidates for closure.
And guess what: Some of these are charter schools—sixty-three to be exact, although subtracting the “dropout recovery schools” that wound up on that list due to their low graduation rates brings down that number to thirty-nine.
Closing some of these schools would demonstrate that the charter sector is serious about quality and would underscore the principle that school effectiveness should be a factor when deciding which campuses to shutter. That would also give the charter movement the moral high ground to demand that districts also prioritize school quality when making these decisions.
But let’s not be naïve. Charter opponents will scream bloody murder when they see authorizers approving new schools or growing or replicating existing ones at the same time that districts are shuttering campuses. We shouldn’t be shy about defending such a course of action, especially since charter school growth is not the primary reason that district schools are emptying out. That might have been the case in the 1990s or 2000s, when the charter sector was growing like gangbusters, but as a brand-new analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools illustrates, only some of recent district enrollment declines are connected to charter growth. No, districts have mostly themselves, plus demographic trends, to blame. And the longer they wait to take action, the more painful it will become.
We know it’s been easiest for the charter sector to grow in places where public-school enrollment as a whole was also growing. It’s no accident that Arizona was the fastest-growing charter state for many years, given that the Grand Canyon State as a whole was attracting families at a record clip. Its districts couldn’t possibly keep up and, as a result, the charter sector enjoyed much support and relatively little opposition.
But now we face the opposite dynamic, at least in much of the country. That creates a zero-sum political environment, one where we should expect sharp elbows to be more common than open arms.
Let’s remember what we stand for, charter community: quality choices for families. As long as those are scarce, we need more great charter schools, not fewer.
