Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? 4,000 charter school leaders, teachers, advocates, and policymakers will gather in Atlanta later this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is now larger than many long-standing traditional education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state’s supreme court just ruled that the arrangements for charter schools are unconstitutional. Welcome to town!
First created in 1992, charter schools are public schools that are open to all students but are run independently of local school districts. There are now more than 5,000 of them educating more than a million students. Charter schools range in quality from among the absolute best public schools in the country to among the absolute worst. That variance in quality is proving a political Achilles heel for charter schools and is fueling a serious backlash.
In New York City, the NAACP joined the city’s teachers union in a lawsuit that would have the effect of curbing charter school growth. That sparked a remarkable counter-protest by families in Harlem and the NAACP was roundly criticized for its bizarre stance, which apparently owes more to politics than kids.
In Rhode Island, Cranston Mayor Alan Fung wants to bring the highly successful charter organization Achievement First to his city, yet he’s run into a buzzsaw of political opposition from teachers unions and officials.
Meanwhile in Ohio — a state with a troubled charter school sector since their legislation was passed in 1997 —Republicans are trying to weaken oversight and accountability, preferring to leave these issues to the marketplace. It’s a surprising strategy because most analysts agree that shoddy oversight is in large part to blame for the mixed record of charter schools in that state. Many Ohio charter school advocates are fighting the proposed changes, but are facing an uphill battle.
Some of this brouhaha is understandable. In many ways, charter schools are the most visible aspect of today’s education reform “movement” — and have therefore become a convenient target. The call for accountability is still more bark than bite, but when a lot of students in a community choose charter schools, the threat to traditional public schools is real — in funding and often in jobs. That gets attention. It’s also hard to find any industry that embraces competition, so some of the debate is the natural byproduct of change in public education. But it’s become hard to find a measured conversation about charters — and that’s what’s worrisome because the issues are complicated and nuanced.
I’ve had a front row seat for the charter movement’s growth. I was a founding board member for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, was a trustee of a charter school for seven years, and led a research project into charter school quality from 2000-2005 when quality was still a nascent issue. In 2003, Sara Mead and I convened a national summit on charter school quality in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a state board of education member in Virginia, I watched established interests strangle charter schools at every opportunity by seizing on the worst ones as representative of the whole. And my organization, Bellwether, counts some charter schools among its clients.
Now, watching the current controversies, two lessons stand out.
First, with 5,000 charters ranging from very traditional to completely online, the term “charter school” is increasingly meaningless. After all, what does a network of schools like Achievement First really have in common with the mostly low-performing online schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio — the force behind the proposed deregulation there?
Second, the public can’t be expected to parse those distinctions, so the quality issue has more potency than many charter advocates seem to realize. The education marketplace is not an economic one with the best ideas winning out. Rather it’s a political one with the loudest or most organized voices usually carrying the day and the most compelling examples winning the public debate. So one spectacular charter screw-up counts more than 100 quiet successes, and the good and great schools can’t overcome the headwind created by the laggards.
Most people in the charter movement thought some of these issues would be more settled by 2011 — especially around the importance of opening new schools and giving parents more choices as well as the need to better police quality. That things are instead so unsettled and fragile should occasion at least as much soul-searching as celebration.
Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.
