Do you favor charter schools? Why are we still asking?

That’s the wrong question. Instead we should ask why we allow deep inequities to persist.

When we tell people that we work in education — one of us as a superintendent and the other as a professor — charter schools often emerge in the discussion. After the usual opening chitchat, the conversation shifts to the unsettling state of city schools. As Margaret Raymond’s article (2014) illustrated, the charter school debate is heated, polarized, ideological, and strays far from evidence on charter school quality.

Our answer? We support good schools for all kids. We believe we can learn much from the charter school experiment. But charter schools are no silver bullet for what ails American public education.

Lax oversight

Charter school research is inconclusive. Most studies show that simply being a charter school is no guarantee of quality. Examples abound of charter schools with poor financial management, outright theft by administrators, inadequate facilities, and incompetent teachers. But there are also excellent charters producing good outcomes among the most disadvantaged populations who have been ill-served by the traditional system.

Charter schools were designed as a resource for traditional schools, but they’ve become a thorn in the side of school districts. They’ve siphoned off precious resources, increased workloads for already overburdened districts tasked with approving and overseeing charters in addition to improving their own schools. Not surprisingly, oversight is lax. Into this vacuum, ill-prepared administrators and fly-by-night charter operators have set up camp. Without a strong system of checks and balances, financial mismanagement and poor educational practice can and do occur. Strong oversight is essential to any system; without it abuses will occur.

Limiting bureaucracy

Charter school advocates argue that bureaucracy weighs down traditional public schools. Cut free, the argument goes, school leaders and teachers will have the autonomy necessary to innovate and improve. Here, perhaps, we can learn from charter schools.

Size matters. As one teacher at a high-performing Philadelphia charter school said, “The thing about a charter school is that if you want to make a change, it’s easier to do because it’s one little entity . . . so that change can happen fairly quickly.” In our forthcoming study, we found that smaller environments allowed teachers and administrators to more easily make real changes.

A broken system

Early in the charter movement, market advocates (Chubb & Moe, 1990) argued that school choice would force all schools to improve. Twenty years later, either education markets are not functioning as predicted, or public schools are not actually a marketplace.

This market-based ideology is flawed because school choice is not like buying a pair of socks or breakfast cereal. The marketplace for families looking for a school is influenced by complex factors: the sophistication to effectively select, the ability to get kids to their school of choice, and, above all, access (Sattin-Bajaj 2014). As a result, choice has not eliminated underperforming schools.

Our answer — that we need good schools for all kids, charter or public — often catches people off guard. Rather than discussing the merits of charter versus public schools, let’s ask if we favor good schools for all kids. Are we ready to talk about why it’s acceptable to provide a world-class public education to kids in well-funded suburban schools while city kids work to bootstrap into the American Dream in Third World conditions with far fewer resources than their suburban peers? Rather than discussing the merits of one organizational approach over another, a better conversation would untangle our tolerance for this inequality and generate solutions that level the playing field.

References

Chubb, J.E. & Moe, T.M. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

Raymond, M.E. (2014). To no avail: A critical look at the charter school debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (5), 8-12.

Sattin-Bajaj, C. (2014). Unaccompanied minors: Immigrant youth, school choice, and the pursuit of equity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Citation: Horvat, E.M. & Baugh, D.E. (2014). Backtalk: Do you favor charter schools? Why are we still asking? Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (4), 80