Abstract
Scholars offer their widely differing takes on the success of charter schools, a "twenty-year experiment" in alternative education systems, largely based in for-profit, inner-city programs.
Charter schools were intended to make public education more flexible and democratic. Today, they’re often run by for-profit companies and employ non-union labor. Grading this twenty-year-old experiment in learning.
Katrina Wittkamp
Charter schools were first promoted by Ray Budde, an education professor, in 1988. Later that year, the cause was taken up by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Charters were to be “new public schools,” proposed and run by teachers. But it didn’t take long for the idea of teacher-run schools to give way corporate-run schools.
Today, charter schools are independent schools with privately run administrations (for- and non-profit) and largely non-unionized teachers. Their funding comes both from tax dollars and private, often corporate, donations. Though they take public dollars, because they are privately run, the U.S. Census Bureau classifies them as private schools. They thrive in ghetto neighborhoods, largely serving segregated black and Latino students.
The promise of charters is that they are “innovative,” “flexible,” and “nimble” and can give children a better education than traditional public schools. Whether they actually are better is a critical question. A 2013 Stanford University study found 25 percent of charters had significantly stronger growth than traditional public schools in reading scores, though 19 percent of charters performed worse, and the rest performed about the same. In math, 29 percent of charters performed better, while 31 percent performed worse. Overall, charters performed better than they did in a 2009 report by the same researchers, in large part because 8 percent of the charters in the original study had since closed. But at this point, they are not, overall, better than traditional public schools.
The five articles here examine charter schools from very different angles. Christopher Bonastia traces the “hidden history” of charters in two responses to school desegregation—segregationists creating whites-only schools to avoid integration and the short-lived community control movement that sought to give black and Latino parents more say over their de facto segregated schools. Linda Renzulli and Maria Paino point out the rhetoric of innovation means that if charters do not succeed academically they should close. In their research in North Carolina, they show charters that close do so largely for fiscal and administrative reasons, but none has closed for poor educational outcomes. And in a third critical piece, Diane Ravitch argues that charters threaten the American public school system by taking public dollars while remaining privately controlled. Ultimately, because charters turn schooling into a market activity rather than a public good, they are, Ravitch reasons, a threat to democracy itself.
Two of the writers here have more positive outlooks. Carl Bankston III argues charters have been good for the mostly poor students of New Orleans, where charters are outperforming the traditional public schools they replaced post-Katrina. Michael Petrilli goes further, writing that charters could actually be the way forward for the whole country, helping solve the school segregation problem as gentrification increases across cities.
Petrilli’s point that desegregation is desirable is important. But why? A recent New York Times article, to name just one example, shows how poor kids in Greenwich, CT, who go to school with mostly rich kids do much better academically than those who go to school with mostly other poor kids. This echoes results of a short-lived, class-based busing program in Wake County, NC, which seemed to help raise test scores for poorer black and Latino students. Of course, one conclusion from studies like these is, if you want children to learn and do well in school, it may not be the type of school they go to that’s important, but the type of kids in their classes and schools. If that’s the case, it adds yet another wrinkle in the charter school debate.