Education has been a field in continual evolution. The goal of providing effective schooling while limiting costs has caused policy makers, researchers, and administrators to be in a continuous process of innovation. Schools as a result have become laboratories for determining more effective methods to educate future generations. However, with many states facing large budget deficits and a glaring achievement gap among different ethnicities, a movement to significantly alter traditional public education has been ongoing for upwards of 15 years. The movement has largely been centered on offering the option of a public school in the model of a private school. These “charter” schools have taken off and now account for 5% of the public schools in the country. However, there is not a consensus of the effectiveness of these schools, thus the future of public education remains up for debate.
Critics and supporters alike look toward the teachers that charter schools attract as a referendum on their cause. Since charter school teachers are less likely to be unionized, they are subject to a different level of scrutiny. This gives charter schools more flexibility in personnel decisions and thus they can more quickly eliminate failing teachers, or as a consequence turn off qualified teachers more willing to work in a unionized public school environment. Not all charter schools adhere to the same union policy, and it in fact often depends on the state. Out of the 40 states that have charter schools, half of them exempt charter schools from union requirements. According to conservative education policy expert Chester Finn: “The single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like and pay them as they see fit.” This freedom gives schools alternatives, but those alternatives also influence hiring practices and recruitment.
Charter schools do tend to attract a different sort of teacher, with varying results. Charter schools tend to draw candidates that not the norm for public schools. Charter school teachers are:
- More diverse
- There are almost twice as many black and Hispanic teachers in these schools.
- Less experienced
- Thirty percent were in their first three years of teaching, and 75 percent had taught for less than 10 years.
- Well Educated
- Data indicates they are more likely to have graduated from a competitive or selective college than their public school counterparts.
With these types of candidates, charter schools see more of a turnover with teachers. Programs like Teach for America and other non-traditional routes into teaching provide for younger candidates to enter the teaching profession but have a high rate of attrition. Hence, there is a common concern with alternate licensure programs for recent graduates in that a large portion move on in their careers after their one or two year commitment is over. Evidence shows that teachers with strong academic backgrounds are the most inclined to leave teaching. So, not only does the lack of unionization promote further turnover, so does the type of teacher most attracted to teaching at charter schools. This does of course provide the flexibility to hire new, motivated teachers but it comes with a high price tag. The estimated cost of recruiting, hiring, and training new teachers is approximately $2.2 billion. For a cash strapped public education system, that is a worrying figure.
This can be forgiven if charter schools were shown to consistently and unilaterally improve test scores for all ranges of kids. However with such an influx of newly approved charter schools, the numbers do not back up this assertion. The estimated change in math scores for 7th graders in charter schools versus similar ones in public schools is about 2.6 percentage points. A 2.6 percentage point improvement is not statistically significant for this type of study, and that rate declines when the students are compared again a year later. A Stanford study shows that while 17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, 37% showed gains that worse than their traditional public school counterpart.
If charter schools seem to be so ineffective, then why the recent craze to open more and more new ones?
Charter schools as a whole may not unanimously improve children’s education, but as a consensus they do work very positively for certain populations. Children that are either from low income families or are English Language Learners, have shown to take very well to the charter school environment and have reported significantly better gains than they would have in public school. As the United States continue to have a large achievement gap between minorities and European Americans, it is of utmost consequence that a strategy be employed to close it. It is of course not always the case that minorities fall into the low income or English Language learner bracket, but there is a strong correlation that cannot be ignored. So when studies show that the “typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on almost every standardized test” a new methodology is rightfully implemented to address that gap.
A concern for addressing that issue comes with determining what charter school to fund. On average, a charter school receives 22 percent less federal investment than the average public school. While that number would seem to indicate that due to the lack of funding, charter schools are not able to accomplish as much as they aspire to, but that number is taken as an aggregate with the inclusion of new or failing charter schools. Charter schools are forced to compensate and often stagger the initiation of new grade levels at schools. By opening up a grade level per year, charters can more economically build up their staff, space, and procedures. Meaning that some schools if properly managed are capable of producing quality results, the trick then lies for the states to ensure that schools are run properly.
To examine that theory, a quick examination of a study done by the RAND Corporation provides interesting insights into how the charter school explosion can be managed. The study alleviates concerns that charter schools disproportionately accept high-performing students; therefore achievements by these schools can be compared with public schools. Also, the racial composition at a local charter school was not dramatically different than the local public school counterpart, so again the comparison remains valid. Having established the validity of the study, the results serve as a further indictment of charter expansion without significant reform. In this study the charter schools five of the seven regions produced results that were not substantially better or worse than public schools. For several large populations like Chicago and Texas, charter schools were actually detrimental in comparison with traditional public schools for children in middle school.
However, an advantage charter schools have that is not explicitly found in testing results is that children that attend both charter middle and high schools are more likely to graduate and move on to college. According to the same study as previously mentioned, those children that went from charter middle schools to charter high schools were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to graduate high school. Those same children were also 8 to percentage points more likely to attend college after graduation. This is very promising, but the reasoning for that increase in graduation rates is up for speculation. The suggestion that charter schools holster more academic learning environments or that they have longer school days is of merit but may not be reproducible across all charter schools.
When state legislatures determine how to proceed with granting more access to charter schools, they need to be privy to both sides of the argument in order to make sure new charter schools can hold up to the scrutiny. The states are attempting to do just that, and are coming at the issue from a plethora of angles.
For example a bill proposed in New Jersey would allow parents to create petitions that would facilate the transition of a traditional public school into a charter school, if it contained the signatures of over 50 percent of the eligible households. Mississippi has a bill to counter just that. SB 2189 would “prohibit conversion of private or parochial schools to public charter schools.” In Indiana, the legislature has passed a bill that splits the difference between the two previous bills. HB 1338 stipulates that an existing public school can be converted into a charter school, but only if over half the parents sign the petition and the public school has been rated in the two lowest achievement categories in the state for at least two consecutive years. However, in that bill, the governing body that oversaw the public school would have to be removed the school remained in the lowest categories for four consecutive years.
The massive uptick in creation and enrollment in charter schools have provided new obstacles as to how education should be administered. Even with over 5,000 charter schools created since 1994, there are still large waiting lists to be granted admission into these schools. As movies like Waiting for Superman have shown that missing admittance into charter schools can be devastating for the morale of a student, but perhaps contrary to popular opinion, it may not be inherently a bad option to continue enrollment in public school. Regardless, it will be up to administrators and legislators to create a system that can mitigate the devastation of failing schools, while incentivizing schools that can overcome the obstacles that have plagued other low-performing ones.
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