Hint…it’s not the one that limits the number of charter schools
One of the biggest policy controversies in the North Carolina K-12 education world these days surrounds the issue of charter schools. Are charters the answer to what ails public education or a wedge designed to undermine it? A network of laboratories in which innovators and entrepreneurs develop all sorts of new and creative ways to teach our kids or a collection of quasi-private institutions that siphon off some of the best teachers and parents? A beacon of success and hope for all or a quiet and guilt-free path to voluntary re-segregation?
A charter, of course, is a unique type of publicly-funded school that operates largely outside of the traditional school system. The basic idea is that public money is made available to groups of individuals, parents, and/or nonprofits who apply to create a new school or convert an existing one. Rather than being a cog in a large system, the charter is essentially a free-standing entity. Unlike a private school, admission is free. Unlike a traditional public school, great autonomy is given to the individual school to establish its curriculum, priorities and target populations.
For some well-meaning folks, charters are a way to bypass broken schools and education bureaucracies. For many of their allies on the right, in contrast, charters are the first step toward implementing their dream of a fully privatized/”voucherized” school system.
Charter skeptics, on the other hand, question the long-term benefits. They argue that while many charters do fine and well-meaning work, the overall impact has not yet proven to be helpful to the public education system as a whole. Indeed, they say, the main impact may actually be detrimental.
The battle joined
The issue of what to do about charters has been much in the news of late with the recent announcement of awards in the federal government’s “Race to the Top” competition – a contest in which states competed for extra federal education dollars. The Obama administration’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is a charter schools proponent and helped make the friendliness of each state’s environment toward charters a factor in the competition.
Some charter supporters have blamed North Carolina’s failure to prevail in the competition (ultimately, the feds selected just two states, Delaware and Tennessee) on its longstanding state law that caps the number of charters in the state at 100. Indeed, for some people – particularly those on the ideological right – it has become almost an article of faith that the charter cap is the most significant roadblock to continued progress for the state’s education system.
A look at the facts “on the ground,” however, provides convincing evidence that these concerns are off-base.
On the question of Race to the Top funding, cap critics are almost certainly wrong. Indeed, Dr. Bill Harrison, Chairman of the State Board of Education told a legislative committee this week that North Carolina received the same number of points in the competition as Tennessee when it came to innovation and charters. This makes sense because Tennessee has a comparable, if not more restrictive, charter law. So obviously, the charter cap was not the deciding factor.
On the broader question of charters generally, there is also little evidence that North Carolina’s toe-in-the-water approach is holding the state back. Indeed, there appear to be several reasons that the cap continues to make good sense. Here are some of them:
Overall, charter performance is nothing special – When it comes to performance – that is, the performance of charters in lifting student achievement – the results are mixed at best. The most recent and thoroughly researched national report on the matter was released last June by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. It found that there is “a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.”
According to the study, “17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.”
The report noted that North Carolina was among the states in which “reading and math gains…were either mixed or were not different from their peers in the traditional public school system.” This comes as little surprise given the fact that a large percentage of North Carolina charters have become racially and socioeconomically segregated along the lines of some of the state’s least integrated and least successful traditional schools systems.
Systemic benefits are lacking – Of course, even where charters are doing well (and the Stanford report acknowledges that are several examples worth lifting up and exploring) the real issue is not just charter performance, but overall system performance. Unless one buys into the far right vision of completely dismantling the American tradition of a common public school system, the ultimate goal of charters is to serve as places in which replicable models for success can be developed, i.e. “laboratories of success.”
On this count there is even less evidence that charters have any kind of measurable positive impact. This is almost assuredly due in large part to the fact that a lot of charter success is, by definition, extremely hard to replicate – that is, it is not a byproduct of how and what the schools teach, but of who attends the schools and who runs them.
It’s one thing to build a successful school with a unique leadership team and a group of parents and children who want to be there and to be involved. But the real trick is to build schools that are successful educating the mass of students – whoever walks in and out of the door – on a huge scale. In light of this reality, of what systemic value is it, for instance, to have a successful charter high school that limits its attendance pool to college bound children capable of algebra in the ninth grade and that has no free lunch program?
Anecdotal success is of little value -The systemic impact issue also serves to highlight another hard and related truth about charters: it is simply not that useful to hold up examples in which heroic and charismatic principals or teachers have wrung out miraculous results under incredibly difficult circumstances. Heartwarming and inspiring as these instances may be, they are of little practical use to school system administrators who must deal with dozens of schools and tens of thousands of children on a tight budget. Once again, the trick is to find solutions that are replicable for the masses.
Failure shouldn’t be an option – This fact, in turn, leads to another and related hard truth: many charters are faring very poorly. In many instances, this is because, as any person who’s ever tried to care for another’s child over an extended period can attest, it’s one thing to critique another’s parenting (or teaching) performance, it’s quite another to do it yourself. In other words, running a successful school is hard work – a lot harder than it looks.
Ultimately, enthusiasm is no substitute for experience and training. Research indicates that for every charter that’s doing great, there’s at least one that’s failing. This figures – it’s what you might expect from an entrepreneurial model based on the business world. The problem, however, is that running a school system is not (or ought not to be) like running a company. Risk of a catastrophic failure may be acceptable to investors looking to make a big profit, but it shouldn’t be an option in the education world.
The cap that should be lifted
Despite the good intentions of many good folks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that charter schools are but the latest in a long line of faddish, “quick fix,” “on-the-cheap” solutions to the daunting challenge of building and sustaining a mass, public education system capable of educating millions of children – many of them very needy – in a hard, complex and competitive world. Seen in this light, it’s clear that the real need is not to do away with North Carolina’s cap on the charter experiment, but to do away with the cap on its commitment to building a world-class education system.
For all of its current problems and challenges, our traditional public education system is already educating more kids, more effectively than at any time in its history. For the most part, our administrators and principals and teachers know what to do. Their biggest need is not “competition” or “entrepreneurial innovation,” it’s resources – the resources it takes to attract, develop and keep good teachers, to provide one-on-one tutoring, to construct and maintain top-flight facilities, and to successfully integrate hundreds of thousands of kids spread across scores of far flung and segregated communities. When North Carolina lifts this “cap” – the cap that has allowed even the state’s wealthiest communities to fire teachers and raise class sizes in recent months – that will be the time that the state gets serious about dealing with what ails the public schools.
