(From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 5, 2009)
By ALAN J. BORSUK
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 theycould 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.”