Jeffrey SilvaA-024 Politics and Policy in the United StatesClass 20 Prompt: Analysis Paper Option 2November 21, 2014

Charter Schools: A Call for Market-based Education

In 1983, A Nation at Risk identified decline in American educational quality, causing among

parents a new round of concerns over public schooling’s inability to “do what is right for their

children.”1 Within the past decade, poor performance on international assessments like the PISA and

TIMMS and the persistence of racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps have perpetuated the

widespread belief that America’s public schools are failing their students. Calls for reforms have

regularly been made, but, unfortunately, efforts to reverse the downturn have not succeeded, for public

schools in the United States have remained largely resistant to change. Milton Friedman, noted

economist, posited that the monopolistic position of public schools and their democratic governance

have caused the virtual elimination of parents and students’ ability to pressure schools to improve.

“Exit,” the ability of consumers to leave one service provider for another, and “voice,” the strength of

consumer’s dissatisfaction in forcing service providers to change their practices have not been reliable

tools for the vast majority of American students (Hirschman, 16).

Within this context, charter schools have emerged as a hopeful solution for many dissatisfied

parents and students. Education pundits have proposed various means through which charter schools

could enact systemic reform. Charters, they say, could act as laboratories of innovation for the

experimentation of new practices or could even wholly replace the system as it stands today.

However, these two ideas are farfetched. When one considers the school governance structures

currently in place, the most feasible utilization of charter schools to improve the quality of American

schooling is to capitalize on their ability to generate market competition within the public education

sector. Locating significant numbers of charter schools within strategically geographic areas would

enhance students and parents’ ability to exercise both “exit” and “voice,” therefore forcing continual

school system improvement. This is already occurring. Policy makers simply have to hold the strategy

steady.

In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert Hirschman notes that the esteemed political scientist and

1 United States. Department of Education. National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk:The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington: GPO, 1983. Print.

economist H.A. Simon once postulated that “firms are normally aiming at no more than a

‘satisfactory’

1 United States. Department of Education. National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk:The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington: GPO, 1983. Print.

rather than at the highest rate of profits” (11). By using this lens on the educational sector, it is

apparent that little incentive exists for public schools to pursue “the highest rate” of instructional

quality. According to Simon’s logic, established public schools do not improve because there is little

competitive threat to their market position. Interestingly, Simon’s logic also explains why charter

schools actively seek comparatively higher levels of instructional quality, for their “satisfactory”

levels are ones that validate their positions within the market. Critics like Diane Ravitch often point

out that many charter schools today only perform as well as or worse than traditional public schools

yet still remain operational.2 It is true that there are presently a great number of low-performing

charter schools. However, this fact should not dissuade policymakers from supporting growth in

charter schooling. Current charter school underperformance is the result of charter schools’ relative

newness and limited number. In any enterprise, setbacks will occur, and lessons need to be learned.

The challenges that many charter schools now face will end with some adapting and others closing.

Charter schools that perform poorly remain now because dissatisfaction with the traditional public

schools in proximate areas is so great that the demand to attend any charter school is high.

However, if allowed to freely increase in number, charter schools will provide the necessary

competition to improve both themselves and traditional public schools by reinvigorating the potency

of parents and students’ “exit” and “voice.” John Chubb and Terry Moe have argued that traditional

public schools are currently not “what parents and students want them to be” but rather are controlled

by “society as a whole” as the result of the democratic process (32). In a scenario in which charters

and traditional schools exist in more approximately equal number, parents and students would wield

more control. Students could “exit” traditional public schools in favor of charters – they could even

switch charter schools if so desired. Even if certain individuals could not gain entrance into the charter

schools of their choice, they would still have strengthened “voice” when complaining to school

officials, boards, or locally elected politicians since the education establishment’s weakened market

position would require it to listen more attentively to the concerns of their consumers or face demise

under free market “natural selection” (Chubb & Moe, 33). The same would hold true for any

underperforming charter school, not to mention the fact that its underperformance would also

2 Ravitch, Diane. “Fordham Institute: Ohio Charters Fare Poorly on NAPE.” Web. 20 November 2014.http://dianeravitch.net/2013/11/19/fordham-institute-ohio-charters-fare-poorly-on-naep/

jeopardize its reauthorization under current accountability systems.

Some have argued that, given the flexibility enjoyed by charter schools under their

agreements with charter authorizers, charter schools should serve as laboratories of innovation, from

which new and effective practices could emerge. However, the unusual autonomy given to charter

schools by their authorizers makes replication of many of their practices unfeasible in traditional

schools. A good example of this is many charters’ freedom to staff nonunionized teachers. Since these

teachers do not have tenure rights under collective bargaining agreements, charter school

administrators, unlike those at traditional schools, can maintain greater control over the quality of

their instructional staff by dismissing incapable teachers when needed. Another reason charter schools

should not act as laboratories of innovation is that most that outperform traditional schools do not do

so in novel ways. A quick perusal of U.S. News & World Report’s list of the nation’s best charter

schools reveals that AP and IB curriculum-centered schools dominate the top rankings.3 This fact

illustrates an interesting irony which demonstrates why charters as places for experimentation is

unfeasible under current governance structures. Charter authorizations allow for flexibility, but at the

same time, because of strict accountability measures for reauthorization, successful charter schools

are risk averse to experiment, and as a result, default to the tried and true.

One last view of charter schools’ solving the widespread academic failings of public

schooling is for charter schools to replace all traditional public schools. The resulting charter-only

system would then, hypothetically, be varied enough to fit the needs of a wide spectrum of students

and parents, thus providing the maximum amount of school choice possible. The most likely lever to

accomplish this vision is rooted in No Child Left Behind’s provision for an education authority to

restructure a public school not satisfying “adequate yearly progress” by “Entering into a contract with

an entity, such as a private management company, with a demonstrated record of effectiveness, to

operate the public school.”4 This vision is not rooted in how charter schools currently function. Chubb

and Moe point out that “…it should be apparent that schools have no immutable or transcendent

purpose. What they are supposed to be doing depends on who controls them and what those 3 U.S. News & World Report. “Best High Schools.” U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News & World Report LP.

Web. 20 November 2014. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/nationalrankings/charterschool-rankings

4 United States. 107th Congress. “H.R. 1 — 107th Congress: No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” 2001.

controllers want them to do” (30). Sally Bachofer at the CUNY Institute for Education Policy

elaborates in detail, “charter school boards are wary of the dismal accountability status of the

chronically failing schools and the threat this can pose to their charter renewals in the future.”5

Consequently, for a system wholly reliant on charter schools to succeed, authorization contracts will

have to inevitably include more and more conditions (e.g., forcing charters to takeover failing schools

or obligating them to have admissions quotas), lest large swaths of traditionally neglected groups such

as special education students, limited English proficiency students, and remedial students be again

disenfranchised. Ultimately, a system built solely on charter schools would resemble the system that it

once replaced.

Although the path of least resistance is not always the path we should tread, in the case of

charter schools, the status quo of strategically increasing their numbers for the purpose of driving

competition between them and traditional public schools is currently our best bet to better overall

schooling. By placing greater power in parents and students’ ability to exercise “exit” and “voice,” we

capitalize on free market forces to improve quality of instruction systemwide. The two other options

outlined above do not fully account for how existing authorization contracts hamper their

effectiveness. Parents and students will never directly control schools; the best we can do for them is

bolster their influence. “The key question facing civic and education leaders, then, isn’t whether

school choice will shape city school systems, but how. If leaders want to make school choice work for

all families, they need more than just studies of whether charter or voucher programs are

outperforming district schools; they need to know whether their city’s overall supply of schools is

getting better quickly, and whether parents are happy with their choices and can navigate them

easily.”6

5 Bachofer, Sally. “How Charter Schools Can Help Districts and Change the Debate.” CUNY Institute forEducation Policy. Web. 18 November 2014. http://ciep.hunter.cuny.edu/how-charter-schools-can-helpdistricts-and-change-the-debate/

6 DeArmond, Michael, Ashley Jochim, and Robin Lake. “Making School Choice Work.” Center on ReinventingPublic Education, July 2014. Print.

References

Chubb, John, and Moe, Terry. Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Brookings Institute Press,1990. Print.

Hirschman, Albert. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Response to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.Harvard University Press, 1970. Print.