10 Percent Of Charter Schools example essay topic

Much has changed in the education world since the United States was declared a 'nation at risk' in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. We " ve been reforming and reforming and reforming some more. In fact, 'education reform' has itself become a growth industry, as we have devised a thousand innovations and spent billions to implement them. We have tinkered with class size, fiddled with graduation requirements, sought to end 'social promotion, 'pushed technology into the schools, crafted new academic standards, revamped teacher training, bought different textbooks, and on and on. Most of these alterations were launched with good will and the honest expectation that they would turn the situation around. But the problem with much of this reform churning is that the people who courageously addressed this issue in 1983 basically took for granted that the public school system as we knew it was the proper vehicle for making those changes and that its familiar machinery could produce better products if it were tuned up, adequately fueled and properly directed.

In short, requisite changes would be made by school boards and superintendents, principals and teachers, federal and state education departments, and would be implemented either in time-honored system-wide fashion or through equally familiar " pilot' and " demonstration'programs. Yet despite much effort, decent intentions, and billions of dollars, most reform efforts have yielded meager dividends, with little changing for the better. Test scores are generally flat, and U.S. twelfth graders lag far behind their international counterparts in math and science, although our school expenditures are among the planet's highest. On the reports of the National Education Goals Panel which monitors progress toward the ambitious objectives set by President Bush and the governors in 1989, most years we see the number of arrows that point upward just about equaled by the number pointing down. Combining large budgets and weak performance, American schools can fairly be termed the least productive in the industrial world. Many in the education establishment excuse the lack of progress by asserting that the reforms we " ve undertaken still haven't had time to gain traction, haven't been adequately funded, haven't been accompanied by enough 'staff development, have been undermined by complacent parents or retrograde political leaders, and so forth.

Others explain that families are deteriorating, poverty is spreading, morals are decaying, and it's not realistic to expect schools to do a better job until the whole society is overhauled. A few naysayers still insist that the 'excellence movement' is itself unnecessary, that American schools are doing okay as is, and that the whole flap stems from a right-wing conspiracy to bring down public education by badmouthing it. Our sense, however, is that the chief explanation for their failure is the essential incrementalism of many of these 'reforms'-i. e., the conventional reforms of the past two decades don't fundamentally alter our approach to public education in America. They do not replace the basic institutional arrangements, shift power, or rewrite the ground rules.

That is acceptable if one believes the old structures remain sound. But that is not how we read the evidence. We judge that the traditional delivery system of U.S. public education is obsolete. This view echoes the late 1960's claim of the iconoclastic psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose study of the malign effects of school segregation was cited in the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision, Brown vs. Board of Education.

Clark called for " realistic, aggressive, and viable competitors' to the public school system that would strengthen 'that which deserves to survive, ' arguing 'that public education need not be identified with the present system of organization of public schools. ' To be sure, there are today some fine schools within the 'regular's ystem and a number of exceptional ones on its periphery. But the system itself is failing because its basic mechanisms and structures cannot change in the ways needed to meet today's education needs and societal demands. Its many " stakeholders' and interest groups fight every significant alteration. Outside the establishment's fortified citadels, however, an important breakthrough can be seen: widening awareness that the American primary and secondary education system as we know it not only needs radical improvement but also that genuine advances will be made only if we rewrite the system's ground rules, replace many of its assumptions, overturn its structures and transform its ancient power relationships. In other words, the present school enterprise is not just doing poorly; it's incapable of doing much better because it is intellectually misguided, ideologically wrong-headed, and organizationally dysfunctional.

The spread of this awareness we term the radicalization of school reform. At day's end, this radicalization defends the principle and function of public education while arguing for a top-to-bottom makeover of its ground rules and institutional practices. It rejects the Hobson's choice that has long paralyzed serious education reform: the choice between a moribund government-run system and the chimera of privatization. We are, in fact, seeing signs of a new view of education change, one that welcomes decentralized control, entrepreneurial management, and grassroots initiatives within a framework of publicly defined standards and accountability. Charter schools are the most prominent manifestation of the radicalization of school reform (though publicly financed vouchers are the most controversial). In fact, charters are the liveliest reform in American education today.

Connecticut Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman writes: 'School reform is no longer an option-it is a necessity. Competition from charter schools is the best way to motivate the ossified bureaucracies governing too many public schools. This grass-roots revolution seeks to reconnect public education with our most basic values: ingenuity, responsibility, and accountability. ' Before these unconventional independent public schools of choice vaulted into the spotlight in the mid-1990's, education reform in the United States was nearing paralysis-stalemated by politics and interest groups, confused by the cacophony of a thousand fads and pet schemes working at cross purposes, and hobbled by most people's inability to imagine anything very different from the schools they had attended decades earlier. Enter charter schools in 1991, a seedling reform that grew into a robust tree, then a whole grove. The trees are still young, to be sure, and the grove attracts plenty of lightning strikes.

But it is steadily expanding and mostly thriving. Even if the charter forest doesn't come to dominate our education ecosystem, the idea behind it has powerful implications for the entire enterprise of public schooling. In what follows, we explain charter schools, provide an overview of their present status, account for where they came from, and conclude by describing their potential to renew and redefine U.S. public education. What, Exactly, Is a Charter School? Few outside the charter movement are clear about the definition of a charter school. A workable starting point is that a charter school is an 'independent public school of choice, freed from rules but accountable for results:' A charter school is a new species, a hybrid, with important similarities to traditional public schools, some of the prized attributes of private schools-and crucial differences from both familiar forms.

As a public school, a charter school is open to all who wish to attend it (i. e., without regard to race, religion, or academic ability); paid for with tax dollars (no tuition charges); and accountable for its results-indeed, for its very existence-to an authoritative public body (such as a state or local school board) as well as to those who enroll (and teach) in it. Charter schools are also different from standard issue public schools. Most can be distinguished by four key features: they can be created by almost anyone; they are exempt from most state and local regulations, essentially autonomous in their operations; they are attended by youngsters whose families choose them and staffed by educators who are also there by choice; and they are liable to be closed for not producing satisfactory results. Charter schools resemble private schools in two important particulars. First, their independence.

Although answerable to outside authorities for their results (far more than most private schools), they are free to produce those results as they think best. They are self-governing institutions. They, like private schools, have wide-ranging control over their own curriculum, instruction, staffing, budget, internal organization, calendar, schedule, and much more. The second similarity is that they are schools of choice.

Nobody is assigned to attend (or teach in) a charter school. Parents select them for their children, much as they would a private school, albeit with greater risk because the new charter school typically has no track record. The 'charter' itself is a formal, legal document, best viewed as a contract between those who propose to launch and run a school and the public body empowered to authorize and monitor such schools. In charter-speak, the former are " operators'and the latter are 'sponsors. ' A charter operator may be a group of parents, a team of teachers, an existing community organization such as a hospital, Boys and Girls Club, university or day care center, even (in several states) a private firm. School systems themselves can and occasionally do start charter schools.

Sometimes an existing school seeks to secede from its local public system or, in a few jurisdictions, to convert from a tuition-charging non-sectarian private school to a tax-supported charter school. They apply for a charter and, if successful, are responsible for fulfilling its terms. The application spells out why the charter school is needed, how it will function, what results (academic and otherwise) are expected, and how these will be demonstrated. The operator may contract with someone else-including private companies or 'education management organizations' (EMOs) -to manage the school, but the operator remains legally responsible to the sponsor. The sponsor is ordinarily a state or local school board.

In some states, public universities also have authority to issue charters, as do county school boards and city councils. If the sponsor deems an application solid, it will negotiate a more detailed charter (or contract) for a specified period of time, typically five years but sometimes as short as one or as long as fifteen. During that period, the charter school has wide latitude to function as it sees fit. At least it does if its state enacted a strong charter law and did not hobble charter schools with too many of the constraints under which conventional public schools toil.

Key features of the charter idea include waivers from most state and local regulations; fiscal and curricular autonomy; the ability to make its own personnel decisions; and responsibility for delivering the results that it pledged. If a charter school succeeds, it can reasonably expect to get its charter renewed when the time comes. If it fails, it may be forced to shut down. And if it violates any of the un waived laws, regulations, or community norms during the term of its charter, it may be shut down sooner. Where Are We Today?

As of early 2001, there are about 2,100 charter schools, located in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly 518,000 youngsters are enrolled in these schools, slightly more than 1 percent of U.S. public school students. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have enabling legislation for charter schools and several more are considering it. Fifty nine charter schools have, for various reasons, ceased operation. Future growth in the number of charter schools depends in considerable part on state legislation, especially whether limits on the number of charters that can be granted by charter sponsors remain in effect. There is a heated debate now underway in several states (e. g., Kansas, Michigan) over raising these caps, while other states (e. g., Alaska, California, Massachusetts, Texas) have already loosened them due to demand-side pressures.

Clearly, the fuel for charter growth will have to come either from amending state laws to lift those caps or from states without real limits (such as Arizona and Texas) or with high limits (like California and New Jersey). Largely due to these statutory constraints (not lack of interest or demand since 70 percent of all charter schools have waiting lists) charter schools are distributed unevenly. Eleven states account for over 80 percent of them. Arizona alone had 352 in 1999-00; there were 239 in California, 173 in Michigan, 167 in Texas, and 111 in Florida. A large proportion of charters is concentrated in the three states of Arizona, California, and Michigan, but that percentage decreased from 79 percent in 1995-96 to 45 percent in 1999-00. Charter schools are found in all types of communities: cities, suburbs, and rural areas; industrial towns, deserts, and Indian reservations; ethnic neighborhoods, commuter towns, even in cyberspace.

A tour of the charter landscape does not stop at the U.S. border as similar developments can be found around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Chile, and Pakistan. Numerous cities across the United States have been profoundly effected by charter schools, and in a few we are beginning to glimpse what a system of public education based on the charter principles of autonomy, choice, and accountability might look like. In Washington, D.C. nearly 15 percent of public school students are now enrolled in charter schools; in Kansas City, Missouri, the total is 18 percent; and in Arizona, 4 percent of all youngsters are in charters-which comprise one-fifth of all the state's public schools. Still, when compared with the vastness of American K-12 education, charters are a flea on the elephant's back, representing 2 percent of all public schools and less than 1 percent of total enrollments. There are about 15 times as many private schools as charter schools.

But thus far, the number of charter schools exceeds voucher schools: as of spring 2000, there were only about 150 publicly funded voucher schools compared to nearly 2,000 charter schools. Charter schools are much studied and intensively scrutinized, so a great deal is known about them. According to the major federal study of these schools, 72 percent of them are new schools, 18 percent are pre-existing district public schools that converted to charter status, and the remaining 10 percent are pre-existing private, non-sectarian schools that have converted. What's more, the percentage of newly created schools is increasing over time: 85 percent of charters opening in 1998-99 were newly created, compared with just over half of the schools that opened in 1994-95 and earlier. Moreover, most charter schools are relatively young-Le., the average charter school at the end of 1999-2000 was less than three years old. One can obtain ample information on charter enrollments, demographics, laws, curricula, founders, sponsors, staff, missions, funding, and facilities.

According to the Center for Education Reform, over half of all charter schools are in urban districts, one-quarter have a back-to-basics curriculum, 40 percent serve dropouts or students at risk of dropping out, and one-quarter are geared to gifted and talented youth. About 10 percent of charter schools are managed by for-profit EMOs, such as Edison Schools, Advantage Schools, and Charter Schools USA. Most charter schools are small. The federal study estimates their median enrollment at 137 students, compared to the 475-pupil public school average in 27 charter states. Almost two-thirds (65.2 percent) of charters enroll fewer than 200 students. (just 17 percent of regular public schools are that small.) With small scale comes intimacy and familiarity that are often missing from the larger and more anonymous institutions of public education. Unfortunately, some schools called 'charter schools' are in fact Potemkin charters, displaying the facade but not the reality.

So-called " weak'charter laws place constraints on schools' educational, financial, and operational autonomy-e. g., teacher certification requirements, uniform salary schedules, and collective-bargaining agreements. And many charter schools receive less than full per-pupil funding, with no allowance for facilities and other capital expenses. The upshot is that some charter schools are pale shadows of what they are meant to be. Where Did Charter Schools Come From?

Most charter experts agree that the phrase 'charter schools " was first used by the late Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a 1988 speech to the National Press Club and a subsequent article. This is ironic, in view of the teacher unions' initial hostility and continuing skepticism to the charter movement. But it was not unusual for the brilliant and venturesome Shanker to suggest education reform concepts well in advance of their time. Basing his vision on a school he had visited in Cologne, Germany, Shanker urged America to develop 'a fundamentally different model of schooling that emerges when we rethink age-old assumptions-the kind of rethinking that is necessary to develop schools to reach the up to 80 percent of our youngsters who are failing in one way or another in the current system. ' He contemplated an arrangement that would 'enable any school or any group of teachers... within a school to develop a proposal for how they could better educate youngsters and then give them a 'charter' to implement that proposal. ' 'All this, Shanker wrote, 'would be voluntary.

' No teacher would have to participate and parents would choose whether or not to send their children to a charter school... The school... would have to accept students who are representative of other students in the district or building in terms of ability and background. Charter schools also would have to conform to other civil rights guarantees. For its part, the school district would have to agree that so long as teachers continued to want to teach in the charter school and parents continued to send their children there and there was no precipitous decline in student achievement indicators, it would maintain the school for at least 5-10 years.

Perhaps at the end of that period, the school could be evaluated to see the extent to which it met its goals, and the charter could be extended or revoked. Shanker was echoed in a 1989 article by Ray Buddy called 'Education by Charter. ' Then a Minnesota legislator named Ember Reich gott Junge resolved to launch this idea in her state, the first to pass charter school legislation in 1991. Yet that scrap of history doesn't do justice to the many tributaries that fed into the charter idea, both in the education environment and the wider culture. Within the world of education, these ideas include the hunger for higher standards for students and teachers; the realization that education quality would be judged by its results rather than its inputs (e. g., per pupil spending or class size) and its compliance with rules; the impulse to create new and different schools designs that meet the needs of today's families; and the movement to give families more choices of schools. In addition to changes in the education realm, developments in other domains of U.S. society helped clear the path for charter schools.

In the corporate sector, traditional bureaucratic arrangements were being restructured, dispensing with middle management and top-down control. In the public sector, the effort to reinvent government was spawned. Both these sectors moved in the direction of a 'tight-loose' management strategy: tightly controlled with respect to their goals and standards-the results they must achieve, and the information by which performance is tracked-but loose as to the means by which those results get produced. Besides transformations in education, business, and government, other societal changes helped create a hospitable climate for charter schools. Beginning in the 1960's, there was the broad liberalization of American culture, what political scientist Hugh Hello grandly terms an 'awakening... to a plurality of.

' Its elements have included, for better or worse, the decline of traditional authority, the exaltation of personal freedom, the rise of tolerance as a supreme value, and the spread of pluralism, multiculturalism, and diversity. Accompanying these changes has been rekindled interest in the vitality of 'civil society, ' with the civic order recognized as a third path-neither nor strictly private-to meet human needs and solve community problems. Mediating institutions-e. g., churches, Neighborhood Watch groups, and organizations such as the Red Cross and the Girl Scouts-can help solve intractable social problems while strengthening community bonds. These many tributaries have fed a river of change in public education, which we term 'the radicalization of school reform. ' Charter schools are today's most prominent expression of that process. They change the emphasis from inputs to results by focusing on student achievement.

They flip the structure from rule-bound hierarchy to decentralized flexibility by allowing individual schools to shape their own destinies. They constitute education's version of civil society, a hybrid that draws on the best of the public and private sectors. They introduce enterprise, competition, choice, community, and accountability into a weary system. Reinventing America's Schools We often think of charters as 'reinventing public education. ' Traditionally, Americans have defined a public school as any school run by the government, managed by a superintendent and school board, staffed by public employees, and operated within a public-sector bureaucracy.

'Public school' in this familiar sense is not very different from 'public library, 'public park, 'or " public housing' project. Now consider a different definition: a public school is any school that is open to the public, paid for by the public, and accountable to public authorities for its results. So long as it satisfies those three criteria, it is a public school. Government need not run it. Indeed, it does not matter-for purposes of its 'publicness'-who runs it, how it is staffed, or what its students do between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Tuesdays. Charter schools are the farthest-flung example today of a reinvented-a radicalized-public education.

But it is important to bear in mind that they are part of a bigger idea: public education in which elected and appointed officials play a strategic rather than a functional role. Public support of schooling without governmental provision of schools. What is the nature of the charter approach to radicalizing school reform? Some see the charter idea as a dangerous predator in the education ecosystem, one that will gradually consume and thereby destroy public education. But that isn't the only way to view this dynamic change. Stephen Jay Gould's discussion of the 'cropping principle' in evolution offers a different perspective.

The conventional wisdom about the appearance of a new plant- or meat-eating animal-a'cropper'-into a territory is that it shrinks the number of species in the area. But science has found that in nature precisely the opposite occurs. The cropper actually tends to enrich, not decimate, the ecosystem. In Gould's words, 'A well-cropped ecosystem is maximally diverse, with many species and few individuals of any single species. Stated another way, the introduction of a new level in the ecological pyramid tends to broaden the level below it' We believe this is the effect that the charter idea will have-indeed is beginning to have-on public education: enriching and broadening the entire ecosystem. Charter enthusiasts and opponents both tend to depict these schools as a revolutionary change, a policy earthquake, an unprecedented and heretofore unimaginable innovation.

The boosters seize on such colorful rhetoric because it dramatizes the historic significance of their crusade. Enemies deploy the same terminology for the opposite purpose: to slow this reform's spread by scaring people into seeing it as radical, risky, and unproven. Both groups tend to stand too close to the objects they are describing. Viewed from a few inches away, charter schools do represent sharp changes in the customary patterns and practices of today's public school systems, especially the large ones. But with more perspective, we readily observe that charter schools embody three familiar and time-tested features of American education. First, they are rooted in their communities, the true essence of local control of education, not unlike the village schools of the early 19th century and the one-room schoolhouses that could be found across the land through most of the 20th century.

They are much like America's original public schools in their local autonomy, their rooted ness in communities, their accountability to parents, and their need to generate revenues by attracting and retaining families. Creatures of civil society as much as agencies of government, charter schools would have raised no eyebrows on Alexis de Tocqueville. Second, charter schools have cousins in the K 12 family. Their DNA looks much the same under the education microscope as that of lab schools, magnet schools, site-managed schools, and special focus schools (e. g., art, drama, science), not to mention private and home schools. Much the same, but not identical. The Bronx High School of Science is selective, while charter schools are not.

Hillel Academy and the Santa Maria Middle School teach religion, while charter schools cannot. The Urban Magnet School of the Arts was probably designed by a downtown bureaucracy and most likely has carefully managed ethnic ratios in its student body, whereas most charter schools do not. Yet the similarities outweigh the differences. Third, these new schools reveal a classic American response to a problem, challenge, or opportunity: institutional innovation and adaptation. In that respect, they resemble community colleges, which came into being (and spread rapidly and fruitfully) to meet education needs that conventional universities could not accommodate.

As an organizational form, then, charter schools are not revolutionary. They are part of what we are and always have been as a nation.