Paul A. Herdman, New American Schools
April 4, 2002
In the decade since its birth, the charter school movement has focused on growing the number of these independent public schools. Now that many charter schools have been in operation for several years, the dirty work of evaluating and improving them-and re-appraising the idea behind them-has begun. To that end, Paul Herdman explores the autonomy-for-results swap that lies at the heart of the charter school concept to see if it is working as planned. Through case studies of six charter schools in Massachusetts and Texas-some highly successful and others facing sanctions for poor performance-he concludes that schools are generally given ample autonomy. They need help, however, to increase their capacity to handle the administrative challenges that come with that autonomy, such as facility management and start-up costs. Herdman also observes that existing accountability procedures run the risk of motivating only those schools with test scores so low as to be threatened with closure. The challenge, given that innovation and diversity are central to the mission of charter schools, is to customize their evaluations enough to be helpful to people within the schools while keeping them sufficiently uniform to allow comparisons with other schools. The 111-page report can be downloaded from the New American Schools website at http://www.naschools.org/contentViewer.asp?highlightID=8&catID=408.
