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| Students at a New Orleans Charter School |
People with views on charter schools often seem to be
divided into two opposing teams. Supporters tend to argue that charter schools
can completely transform American education and provide a remedy for every real
or perceived ill in our system of public schooling. Opponents portray the
charter school movement as an unmitigated disaster. I think this polarization
is odd because the evidence on charter schools is quite mixed. Most recently, the Center for Research on
Education Outcomes (CREDO) of Stanford University followed
up an earlier 2009 study (which showed mixed results) and
found (1) progress in the charter school sector has been slow, but
generally better than among traditional public schools, (2) some charter
schools show worse results than traditional public schools, but the percentage
of charter schools showing better results has increased since an earlier 2009
study, (3) there are still many charter schools that have poor outcomes in
general and compared to traditional schools, (4) charter schools have learning
gains across the 27 states included in the study, even after controlling for
student characteristics, (5) charter schools that had been included in the 2009
study showed modest improvements since
that time relative to traditional public schools, while outcomes for new
charter schools looked similar to those in the earlier study, and (6) charter
schools are especially helpful for low-income students, black students, and
English language learners. This presents us with a generally optimistic view of
the charter strategy and suggests that the strategy can be especially helpful
for the disadvantaged, but it certainly doesn’t indicate that charter schools
can cure every ill or that they free of problems of their own.
This report is particularly interesting to me because I have
just published a short piece in the magazine Contexts, as part of a forum on
charter schools. There, I point out that charter schools have presented
many challenges in New Orleans, where charters now make up the majority of
schools, but that educational results appear to have improved since the
adoption of charters, and that the evidence, while inconclusive, suggests that
the improvement is due to the charter system. I caution against expecting too
much from this strategy, and suggest that local school districts should
consider the setting and alternatives in deciding whether to turn to charters
or retain traditional public schools.
The other authors in the forum, only one of whom favors
charter schools, raise good points. Diane Ravitch, an educational expert whom I
greatly admire, acknowledges that the effect of charters on educational
outcomes is mixed, but takes a position of strong opposition because she sees
charters as legitimizing the privatization of education and undermining the
idea of schooling as a public responsibility. This is a reasonable concern. If
we want schools to be controlled by local voters and the property-tax payers
who provide the backbone of support for schools, then the removal of control
from locally elected school board members, either by private corporations or by
larger governmental entities, should give us cause. In the case of New Orleans,
the introduction of the charter system followed a state takeover of much of the
school district. However, given the disastrous state of the city’s traditional
public schools and the staggering incompetence and corruption of local school
officials, I’m inclined to say that both the state seizure of control and the
charter experiment were warranted by circumstances. In locations with
functioning district administrations, I
suggest that the voters and their elected officials should be deciding whether
to retain traditional schools or try charters, and they should do so based on
their own circumstances. Since the CREDO report indicates that charters work
best in disadvantaged, minority school districts, these are the places that
could benefit from charters. Where the traditional public school system is
working reasonably well, radical experimentation is probably not desirable.
Michael J. Petrelli, executive vice president at the Thomas
B. Fordham educational think tank, supports charter schools, which he believes
can desegregate our schools. Others have also argued that charters can promote
desegregation by giving whites and the economically advantaged programs that
draw them in to minority-dominated school districts. Again, I would caution
against expecting too much. It may indeed be the case that some middle class
white, black, or Hispanic families will send their children to schools in
districts with large proportions of disadvantaged minority members if this
means superior educational opportunities for their children. But while we can
point to individual schools in which this happens, we should recognize that it
is extremely unlikely that there will be a large-scale reverse white-flight or
reverse middle class flight to take part in charter schools. In most cases, no
program, whether charter or magnet or other, can offset the consequences of
concentrated socioeconomic disadvantage enough to provide incentives for those
who can avoid this concentrated disadvantage. If a charter can bring in a more
heterogeneous student body, that’s fine, but don’t count on it.
Linda A. Renzulli and Maria Paino, sociologists at the
University of Georgia, base their criticisms of charter schools on the
instability created by charter school closures, and they cite evidence from
North Carolina that this state’s closures have been due to fiscal and
administrative reasons, not for academic reasons. Again, this is a serious
concern. I’m not as confident as
Renzulli and Paino that North Carolina represents the nation, but one does have
to think about what the creative destruction of market economics means for students. However, once again, there is no perfect
system and we cannot judge a school strategy by pointing out specific drawbacks.
Ultimately, the question must be whether students benefit, and the evidence
does suggest that charter schools, with all their instability and shortcomings,
especially benefit the most disadvantaged.
Finally, Chris Bonastia, a sociologist at Lehman College,
takes a view opposite that of Petrelli and argues that charter schools share
similarities with segregationist schools of an earlier historical period and maintains that most charters today are
highly segregated racially. Bonastia’s historical comparison seems far-fetched
to me and I can’t see the connection between old segregationist efforts and
contemporary charter schools. He is right that charter schools are generally
segregated de facto, but this is
because the charters largely serve the interested of localities where minority
students predominate. In my comments on New Orleans, I observe that the
district in 2011-2012 was about 90 percent African American and 85 percent low-income
(as measured by free and reduced lunch status).
This is not in any way a consequence of charter schools: the public
schools of New Orleans were almost entirely African American before the charter
experiment. Similarly, inner city school districts across the nation, whether
they have charters or traditional public schools, simply do not have enough
white students for any kind of meaningful desegregation. Bonastia laments the fact that “the choice of
quality, integrated schools is rarely even on the table” for minority students.”
Of course it isn’t. You cannot provide choices that do not exist. Given the
demographics of American school districts, the real issue is whether charter
schools offer minority students better options than they would otherwise have.
