The charter-school idea is now ten years old. Which is to say, it's completed the "elementary" grades and is ready for "middle school" - and the onrushing storms of adolescence. It's a hopeful but precarious time. And some worrisome issues lie ahead.
Meanwhile, expansion continues. The Center for Education Reform reports several hundred new charters this fall. There'd be more but for "caps" in many state charter laws. Enrollments also keep rising, though less rapidly than before. A handful of cities now have 15-20% of their kids in charters. There is evidence - mostly anecdotal - that this competition is prodding a number of school systems to become more customer conscious. Sometimes it triggers more dramatic policy shifts.
Yet some of the wind is going out of the charter sails. While one might expect that to happen to any maturing reform idea, we must also ask whether the diminished breeze results from a troublesome combination of leaderlessness, bureaucratization, enmity, penury and exhaustion. The question, going forward, is whether the charter movement and its allies can rise to these challenges and find some fresh breezes for their sails.
Six issues are particularly worrying.
First, we see little national or state-level leadership on this front. As I noted in last week's Education Gadfly, charters got dissed at the big IBM-sponsored education summit of corporate chieftains and governors. The Bush administration rarely mentions them and evidently doesn't view them as an important part of its reform strategy. (The Education Department recently announced that the directorship of its charter school office will remain a "career" job; not a good sign.) Congress is mostly silent, too, more apt to regard charter schools as another insatiable "categorical" program to be funded - or an unwanted knot in the ESEA accountability string - than as a bold approach to education reform. In the states, few governors tarry long on this subject. When they turn to it at all, they admit to frustration over statutory caps and "bad apples" in the charter barrel.
Second, the bad-apple problem is not large but is easily exploited by critics and enemies - who seldom note that conventional public (and private) schooling has more than its share of rotten fruit and that this goes largely undetected and unfixed. (In the charter world, at least, people are still capable of outrage over a bad school!) Most states have at least a few charters that never should have been allowed to start, and a few more that cannot sustain the pace. What to do about them? Many states (and other sponsors) are responding in just the wrong way: instead of pulling the plug on these hapless schools and replacing them with better ones (or, say, asking a good one to assume management of a bad one), they're slowing down the whole charter enterprise and putting bureaucrats instead of innovators in charge of the program. Because the foremost goal of bureaucrats is always to fend off future problems, the red tape piles up and the procedural requirements multiply.
Third, even without today's added red tape, it was hard to start a charter school. Gathering the requisite talent to meet a charter's many leadership needs is a tough challenge. That charter schools get, on average, just 80% of the funding of regular public schools makes for extremely tight budgets. Most difficult is finding a suitable place in which to put one's school - and the absence of decent access to capital or facilities. (While I have high hopes for "virtual" charter schools, today most kids still need a building to spend their days in.) Only a few states have nibbled at this bullet.
Fourth, charter enemies are relentless and inventive. Their favorite strategies today are (a) to keep caps tight on grounds that "this experiment hasn't proven itself"; (b) to persuade regulators and legislators, in the name of creating a "level playing field" (or "ensuring accountability" or "preventing further problems") that charters must be subject to ever more of the same requirements as regular public schools (e.g. teacher certification); and (c) to file lawsuits challenging the (state) constitutionality of charter schools as not being truly "public" schools. (In Ohio, for example, both teachers unions are plaintiffs in such suits, joined by nearly every other element of the public school establishment - and they're using the litigation process to harass schools, scare parents and worry teachers.)
Fifth, the charter movement has not been smart enough about "accountability," perhaps because it's divided on the subject. We find libertarians insistent that the marketplace is a sufficient accountability tool and that, so long as people want to attend a school, that school is a success. We find dyed-in-the-wool public educators easily swayed by the "level playing field" argument, even when that leads to enough red tape to strangle innovation. We find people who on principle resist state standards and tests - mainly for the same neo-progressivist reasons that other educators resist them. And we find few who have forcefully insisted on value-added measures of the sort that are most apt to show what good these schools are doing their students.
Sixth and finally, the charter movement cannot quite decide whether it is a "trade association" that's obliged to defend the interests of every school that wears the charter label, or an education reform movement responsible to the public for ensuring that only good schools carry that label.
Maybe "movement" is the wrong word. We're talking, after all, about a grass-roots effort that takes many forms and has many different champions, including people with little else in common. Maybe nebulousness, pluralism and leaderlessness are inherent characteristics of such an enterprise. But we need better than that if charter schools are to have a vibrant second decade. They still hold immense promise. For example, the National Journal's Jonathan Rauch recently profiled Nueva Esperanza Academy, a charter school serving Philadelphia's Latino community, one of as many as fifty such schools being developed by the National Council of La Raza. It's bringing low-income high school dropouts back into education. The school's name means "New Hope." That's how many charter advocates see their movement. But hope alone won't get it through another ten years.
"Charter Schools: A New Hope for America's Latinos," by Jonathan Rauch, National Journal, September 28, 2001.
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