Now is the time for charter schools, advocate says
By Alan J. Borsuk of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: May. 5, 2009
The stars are aligned for good things to happen for the charter
school movement in America, the president of the National Alliance
for Public Charter Schools recently told a couple of hundred
leaders of such schools in Wisconsin.
"We have a moment in front of us like none other," Nelson Smith
said, a chance to increase quality and the impact of charters as a
whole.
Now, he said, if they could just get more people to understand what
charter schools are.
So it is for charter schools - growing, providing both exciting and
unsettling results, and still trying to establish themselves, both
in practice and in the public mind.
In Milwaukee and nationwide, some of the most successful and
attention-worthy schools are charter schools. So are some of the
schools at the bottom of the spectrum. And a lot are in-between,
with achievement results on a par with most other schools and with
programs that are not particularly innovative.
Statewide test scores released last week showed strong results for
schools such as Milwaukee College Prep on the north side and the
new Carmen High School on the south side, both charters serving
low-income minority students who are not screened for academic
ability before admission.
On the other hand, the Milwaukee School Board took action in March
to close or take away the charter designation from a half dozen
schools, and there has been a fairly steady trickle of such actions
in the city for years. Some charter schools have been just plain
bad - although charter advocates would add that the fact they could
be closed fairly easily is one of the virtues of the movement.
Leaders in the charter school movement are eager to seize the
advantages of being in the spotlight to push more schools to the
point of earning favorable judgments.
The signs are clear that charters are hot:
• President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
have gone to lengths to make it clear that they support charter
schools and want to see more of them (provided they offer quality).
In last fall's presidential contest, both Obama and Republican John
McCain praised charter schools.
• The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association conference in Waukesha,
where Smith spoke, drew appearances by Gov. Jim Doyle, who had
never attended one of the organization's conferences before, as
well as Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton and incoming state Superintendent
of Public Education Tony Evers. Doyle, who has not been
particularly close with charter advocates, praised the schools for
bringing more innovation and accountability to the state school
scene.
The turnout of politicians was taken by participants as a sign of
growing acceptance that charters are here to stay and play a
significant role on the state's educational scene.
• The number of schools continues to grow - more than 220 in
Wisconsin, about 4,600 nationwide. More than 1.4 million students
are enrolled in charters in 40 states and the District of Columbia
this year.
• Education officials both in the Obama administration and in
Congress say they want charter schools to get a cut of the action
as billions of dollars of federal economic stimulus money is
dispersed over the next two years.
Movement leaders such as Smith and Joe Williams, a former
Milwaukeean who now is executive director of a group called
Democrats for Education Reform, said at the Waukesha conference
that they believe politicians will put their weight behind making
that happen.
"We have to work every day at getting across the notion that
charter schools are public schools," Smith told the audience.
As a general description, charters are schools that operate
separate from the conventional public school system. They are run
independently and often have more innovative or unconventional
programs. They are given permission to operate and a contract -
that's what a charter is - by a public agency, most often a school
board.
They receive public money to support educating every student,
whether low income or not. Some are staffed by unionized teachers,
but many are not. Unlike schools in Milwaukee's private school
voucher program, they cannot be religious schools. Teachers have to
meet state licensing standards. And, unlike the voucher schools,
charters take the state's standardized tests and have to make
public schoolwide results.
There are more than 50 charter schools in Milwaukee, enrolling well
over 5,000 students this year.
National research projects over recent years have not found big
differences between the overall outcomes for students in
conventional schools and charter schools.
In an interview, the charter association's Smith agreed that the
evidence on the success of charters was mixed but said more recent
studies have shown positive effects overall. "The evidence is
moving pretty strongly in our favor," he said.
In a report last December, the National Charter School Research
Project at the University of Washington concluded, "National
charter school achievement is promising overall, but highly
varied."
The report said, "Charter school performance and practices continue
to be very difficult to summarize. Chartering turns out to be less
of a cohesive movement than a collection of distinct local efforts
with diverse approaches and results."
The report said that might be good - too much centralization and
uniformity would run contrary to the whole notion of charter school
independence and innovation. But it means it's hard to know what to
think when someone refers to a charter school without knowing
specific information about that school.
A RAND Corp. study, released in March, included results from
Chicago and Florida that students who attended charter high schools
were more likely to graduate, go on to college and succeed in
college than other students, even if their high school test scores
were not much different.
John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who has
studied charter and voucher schools extensively, called the results
on graduation and college success "eye-popping."
The studies put the chances of graduation at 7 to 15 percentage
points higher for charter students than non-charter students.
Witte and a colleague, Stephanie Lavertu, studied charter schools
within MPS as part of the RAND project. They concluded, "Charter
school attendance is associated with higher scores on mathematics
exams than attendance at traditional public schools, but there is
no statistically significant relationship between charter schools
attendance and performance on reading exams."
"We conclude that while charter school overall may help the
education of urban youth, our study of Milwaukee indicates that
they should not be expected to be the silver bullet some reformers
seek," they wrote.
They found that switching schools "has a strong, negative and
statistically significant impact on all students, whatever the type
of school from which and to which they switch." That was a better
predictor of student performance than charter or non-charter
enrollment, and the researchers suggested policy-makers put a
priority on reducing school switching.
At least within MPS, charter school leaders are concerned about
being given mixed messages. On the one hand, they are in business
to be different and innovative. On the other, MPS is moving to
centralize decision-making on many issues related to what things
are taught and how, especially in lower-performing schools.
Under orders from the state Department of Public Instruction, MPS
is supposed to limit choices in reading curriculum in coming years
and put more time into teaching reading.
If there is too much control from the central office, the purposes
of a charter school are stifled, advocates argue.
At a hearing before a School Board committee recently, a parade of
charter school leaders repeatedly used the word "autonomy" when
describing what they need to succeed - while at the same time
agreeing they should not be allowed to continue if their schools
aren't doing well.
At the Waukesha convention, Nelson told participants, "We're
turning the corner as a movement."
What is around the corner are issues related to quality and
innovation, he said.
If, in a few years, the number of charter schools has not
increased, but the quality overall has risen, that will be a sign
of success, he said. And if that happens, charters can be "a really
powerful engine for changing the way we think about education."
