P a g e | 1

Bobby Persons

22 November 2014

The Charter School Situation: Injecting Hope into a Hopeless System

One of the largest problems facing America’s decline in world dominance is its relative

underachieving public education system compared to the other countries of the world. In the

2012 National Report, the U.S. ranked 27th worldwide in educational performance and

demonstrated no discernable increase in math and reading among 17 year-olds since the 1970s. 1

At the same time, the U.S.’s top public schools rank amongst the top in world educational

reports, and the best American private schools are hardly matched. This conundrum highlights

the deeper issue in American education: our national problems are not strictly policy mishaps or

failing interest in succeeding educationally but problems of social class inequality. As underlined

in Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein’s study on American educational failures, the U.S.’s

progress is negatively skewed, and for worrying reasons. They assert that “because social class

inequality is greater in the United States than” in any comparable countries, American

performance is comparatively better than it seems when using educational performance versus a

national average.2 Essentially, just as the nation struggles with a wage and race gap, there is a

severe gap in public education. As this stagnant underperformance in struggling school districts

has persisted since the 1990s3, many school districts have looked to charter schools to spark a

1 "Statistics About Education in America." Studentsfirst. January 1, 2014. Accessed November 22, 2014.2 Carnoy, Martin, and Richard Rothstein. "What Do International Tests Really Show about U.S. Student Performance?" Economic Policy Institute. January 28, 2013. Accessed November 22, 2014.3 Flaker, Anne. "School management and efficiency: An assessment of charter vs. traditional public schools." International Journal of Educational Development 38 (2014): 1-94.

P a g e | 2

drastically needed change. While nationwide statistics are still inconclusive, the continued

emphasis on charter schools is necessary. Not only are many charters showing promising signs

outside of standardized test performance, but individual charters seem to have found formidable

answers to public school shortcomings in the areas of graduation and college acceptance. Though

failed charters risk crippling the lives of vulnerable students, stories of charter success instill a

rejuvenating spirit of hope for fixing public education. Therefore, charters must be supported

through funds and legislation as it is better to give hope to some of America’s disadvantaged

youth then to fail them all.

Within the charter school dilemma, some may wonder why drastic changes are often

thought necessary to fix the American public education system. The reason is that the

educational gap is compounding. The modern day educational gap is often attributed to a myriad

of state and localized issues such as property tax, in which the states use nearly half of all their

“property tax revenue…for public elementary and secondary education”.4 This launches a

vicious cycle in which high quality housing in safe neighborhoods pay higher property taxes,

increasing the quality of the neighborhood public school.5 On the other hand, lower income

families move into low income housing, are able to pay far less in property taxes and with

lacking funds and support their school districts performs exponentially worse than high income

districts only miles away.5 The lower income school systems further devolve with “policies [that]

are too often developed based on incomplete analysis” and inconsistencies in state and local

leadership, causing deep seeded issues reinforced over decades of little improvement as

practically unable to be fixed.3

4 Kenyon, Daphne A. The Property Tax, School Funding Dilemma. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2007.5 “Creaming versus Cropping: Charter School Enrollment Practices in Response to Market Incentives.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2002), 145-158.

P a g e | 3

Even with building pressure from American society, attempted curriculum reforms and

increasingly worrying performances internationally, the U.S.’s most struggling states seem

unable to generate change. In 2012, the George W. Bush Institute published a report beginning in

2004 on the progress of America’s public schools. Though the report showed the education

figures for every district in the country, heavy scrutiny was placed on America’s worst 15

performers: Alabama, New Mexico, Mississippi, Hawaii, Louisiana, California, Nevada,

Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Rhode Island6.

From 2004 to 2009, only Kentucky and Hawaii achieved greater than an underperforming 2%

growth year to year in the national math percentile, while six states generated zero or negative

growth.5 In the national reading percentile performance, only Alabama achieved a 2% year to

year growth while nine of the fifteen states returned zero or negative growth.5

The first charter schools emerged in the early 90’s in response to the main challenges

facing the struggling public education systems causing this constant underachieving, namely

“attracting high-quality teachers and successfully educating poor and minority students”.7 They

offer promising potential for change as charters can “operate free from many of the rules and

regulations that apply to traditional public schools” and do not pertain to the same geographic

enrollment limits for students.8 In theory, this allows charters to bypass swaths of bureaucracy

and instill a level of performance aligned with parents and the school’s heads of leadership.

However, charters have seemingly not performed as well as initially hoped. As charters

are often associated with avoiding legislative restrictions and cutting superfluous costs, they are

often hotbeds for aggressive decision making. Minnesota is the unlikely American birthplace of

6 "District vs. International Education Achievement." George W. Bush National Report Card. January 1, 2012. Accessed November 29, 2014.7 Gronberg, Timothy J., Dennis W. Jansen, and Lori L. Taylor. "The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach." Economics of Education Review 31, no. 2 (2012): 302-317. 8

P a g e | 4

charter schools considering Minnesota public schools continually rank among the top performers

in education by state.6 Peter Cookson, in his book School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of

American Education, recoils at the growing charter popularity in his state:

“If the public school abolitionists in Minnesota have their way,

public education will simply disappear because radical

deregulation and decentralization will remove control from elected

officials and place it in the hands of small, autonomous groups”.9

This separation into ‘small, autonomous groups’ introduces one of the main factors public

education strives to protect: volatility. Public education benefits from solidarity, as major,

possibly rash changes in curriculum and authority need to pass through multiple levels of local

and government supervision. These can set up barriers to positive change which charters can

avoid, but when exploited, raise major ethical issues.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) released a

Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment in 2005. The Association’s main tenet is

to “not harm children” and protect their innocence and rights in all ways and forms.10 In terms of

volatility, the Association states, “When policies are enacted for purposes that do not benefit

children, we have a collective responsibility to work to change these practices”.10 Just as

thousands of charter schools have opened over the years, numerous have closed. The

deregulation of public education into autonomous schools introduces a reality in which parents

may have to choose schools not only on educational value, but on perceivable risk of closing. As

Cookson states, a full-blown charter system is necessarily unethical as “the balance between

liberty and equity…will be radically altered if the…system is deregulated”.9

9 Cookson, Peter W. School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.10 "Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment." National Association for the Education of Young Children. April 1, 2005. Accessed December 1, 2014.

P a g e | 5

Another facet of charter school volatility is varying student populations. Since charter

schools advertise bringing a competitive atmosphere to public education and are not tied to direct

government support, they remain affected by market principles of supply and demand.11 While

public schools benefit from stability as neighboring students are automatically enrolled and must

apply to go elsewhere, charter schools have no similar official student base. Therefore, “a charter

school will only survive if it can attract and retain students” forcing charters to meet certain

faculty and enrollment figures to ‘remain in business’.11 This can cause hysteria in new and

struggling schools to bring in “new entrants…to replace all [students] exiting,” causing a cycle

of continually changing variables and therefore continually changing expectations.11 The

NAEYC asserts a critical component within ethical conduct in the education of young children is

to “use assessment instruments and strategies” to measure performance that is “appropriate” and

“[includes] multiple sources of information”.10 When charters become involved in this status

quo of rapidly changing student bodies, there arises an increasing inability “of outsiders to

evaluate” the school and judge how the “evaluation changes with length of operation”11. This

presents a dilemma in which the volatility of charter schools and their inherent deregulation

could majorly complicate their ability to produce comparable data. This situation is highly

unethical as charters’ inconsistent numbers could appear deceptively good to urban parents who

would have to choose between stagnated growth in their neighborhood public school versus

unpredictable results and life expectancy in nearby charters.

Even when thousands of charters have developed significantly to provide accountable

data, multiple studies both in holistic views of charter effects on regions and their effects on the

nation have produced statistics that suggest charters provide either indeterminable or negative

11 Hanushek, Eric A., Kain, John F., Rivkin, Steven G., Branch, Gregory F. “Charter school quality and parental decision making with school choice.” Journal of Public Economics 91, no. 5-6 (2007): 823-846.

P a g e | 6

change when compared with public school performance. The NAEYC advocates that our ethical

responsibility to children is to “use assessment information to understand and support children’s

development…learning and…instruction”.10 Part of this responsibility to supporting childhood

development is to ensure a level of scrutiny within school performance to track progress,

especially with the growing introduction of charters. First, as found in a study on comparative

charter school innovation published in the Economics of Education Review, “increased autonomy

in areas of control over discipline, curriculum, and staff management has not been found to lead

to increases in student test scores”.12 The study further found that this “increased autonomy”

could not be discernibly linked to greater “innovation in charter schools on the whole”.12

Opponents to mass charter school incorporation cite this failed link between greater autonomy

and test score improvement nationwide as critical, arguing that the cost of “greater autonomy” is

“greater accountability for improving student achievement”.12

This concern for test achievement was raised in Case Western Reserve University

Professor Eric Bettinger’s report on Michigan charters and their effects and performances versus

public schools. He found that “charter school fourth graders may score as much as 0.2 standard

deviations lower on the reading and math exams than students from similar public schools”.13

Further, in Michigan State Professor Scott Imberman’s analysis of a ‘large southwest urban

school district,’ he cited the growth of localized charter schools caused decreased growth rates in

math and language in public elementary schools14. Even though proponents of charter schools

advertise that increased competition could raise public school standards and concentrate funding,

12 Preston, Courtney, Ellen Goldring, Mark Berends, and Marisa Cannata. "School innovation in district context: Comparing traditional public schools and charter schools." Economics of Education Review 31, no. 2 (2012).13 Bettinger, Eric. “The effect of charter schools on charter students and public schools.” Economics of Education Review 24 no. 2 (2005) 133-147.14 Imberman, Scott A. "The effect of charter schools on achievement and behavior of public school students." Journal of Public Economics 95, no. 7-8 (2011): 850-863.

P a g e | 7

not only did public school performance in this study drop but public schools in the district lost

“up to 67% of average expenditures from a loss of a student to a charter” which were not

necessarily recoverable.14

Finally, opponents of charter schools argue that they pose a dangerous threat to

“[exacerbating] the problem of racial segregation in public schools”.15 The NAEYC explicitly

states the ethical behavior when dealing with children of different cultures and backgrounds is to

“ensure that each child’s culture, language, ethnicity, and family structure are recognized and

valued in the program”.10 While this and the majority of the NAEYC’s ethical codes are

program-specific, opponents of charter schools will argue a deeper reading of the statement is

required. This ethical conduct could be expanded from individual programs to communities,

insisting that each child’s culture in a district must be accounted for and pandered to, implying

that ethical conduct in education requires diversity. The public school funding dilemma already

indirectly further segregation in which lower income families (disproportionately non-white)

struggle to close the achievement gap when restricted from higher performing, often

predominately white schools.9 Charter schools risk causing a much more direct form of

segregation. As found in the Journal of Negro Education which states black students are

“choosing charter schools nearly double the rate that they are choosing traditional public

schools,” accounting for 16% of the student public school population yet 29% of that of charter

schools.15 Additionally, black students seem to not only choose charters on the whole, but

specifically ones with high minority content. A recent study indicated that “70% of all Black

charter school students attend 90%-100% minority charter schools”.15 This invokes a growing

15 Almond, Monica R. “The Black Charter School Effect: Black Students in American Charter Schools.” Journal of Negro Education 18 no. 4 (2012): 354-365.

P a g e | 8

concern that charter schools may encourage and cement racial tension, while continuing to

subject white and non-white groups to staggered levels of achievement.9

The amount of negativity facing charters is not only legitimate, it is formidable. Charters

on the whole raise a myriad of ethical dilemmas, including a higher propensity when compared

with public schools to be volatile, exhibit rash decision making, contain unpredictable

evaluations, show slumping performance and risk resegregation. However, the reality opponents

of charter schools fail to realize is that a holistic valuation of charter schools is not appropriate.

Charter schools have risen to popularity through their clearly expressed mission to disrupt

crumbling public school performance and instill hope in the future generations. Even the most

scathing reports of charter schools do not fail to mention the massive increase in parental

involvement charter schools generate. The NAEYC maintains that the ethical imperative of

educators is “to develop relationships of mutual trust and create partnerships with the families we

serve” and “to welcome all family members and encourage them to participate in the program”.10

A School and Staffing Survey in 2000 found “that parents are more involved in charter schools

than…in traditional public schools,” and that this difference in greater parental involvement is

directly attributable to “the organizational and institutional characteristics of charter schools”.16

Charter schools offer factors especially enticing to urban parents such as “higher levels of school

level autonomy, poverty homogeneity, and greater efforts to promote parent involvement”.16

Urban public school lacking is often attributed to a “one-size-fits-all approach” in which many of

these “de-facto” segregated schools organize curricula that ignore the cultural backgrounds of

their students in place of a traditional American public school identity.16 Charter schools present

a strong comparative advantage by offering struggling urban families (in this case black

16 Bifulco, Robert and Ladd, Helen F. “The Effect of Charter Schools on Parental Involvement.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct, 2006): 553-576.

P a g e | 9

families), “culturally relevant learning that is specifically catered to the needs, desires, and assets

of Black children”.16 Therefore, the above mentioned mass movement of educationally

disadvantaged urban black students to charter schools with high black student populations is as

good of an indicator as any that charter schools are slowly injecting hope into a previously-

thought doomed outcome for struggling urban families.

Additionally, studies opposing charters due to statistics derived from national or large

region charter performance are heavily misguided. First, charters in urban areas attempting to

close the public education gap naturally have negatively skewed test scores as they enroll and

“attract students with worse behavior and lower test scores”.14 The amount of high-poverty

charter schools (schools with more than 75% of their students qualifying for free or reduced-

price lunch) has more than doubled to 31%17, (compared to 19% of public school students18)

indicating that charters are increasingly accommodating educationally disadvantaged children.

Second, although the percent of charter school composition in the U.S. has increased roughly

350% and student enrollment has experienced a 600% growth from 1999 to 2012, charters only

make up 5.8% of all public schools with only 2.1 million enrolled students.17 Many charters are

not firmly established and are constantly facing adversity unaided by the solidarity of state run

public education systems. They face faltering funds, unpredictable student enrollments and

varying teacher experience, causing assessment statistics to be unreliable and potentially unfair

when compared to eras of infrastructure in neighboring public schools.14

Despite all this adversity, there are multiple examples at both the regional and especially

the individual level of charter expansion successes. Massachusetts, while struggling with an

17 "National Center for Education Statistics Fast Facts." Institute of Education Sciences. Accessed December 2, 2014.18 “Concentration of Public School Students Eligible for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch.” Institute of Education Sciences. April, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2014.

P a g e | 10

underperforming urban public school system, is an unlikely candidate for charter success

considering its fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores rank best in the nation.19

Georgetown University Professor Anne Flaker based her evaluation of Massachusetts charters

versus TPS’s (traditional public schools) on efficiency. Flaker decided it was not enough for a

charter to solely perform well or lower per-pupil spending—both must be obtained

simultaneously. Through her study, she found that 62.1% of urban charter students achieved

math proficiency versus 33.3% of similar public school students, and that urban charter students

outperformed public students in reading proficiency 68% to 43.1%.19 All the while, urban

charters spent between $1600 and $2200 less per pupil than their public counterparts.19 Flaker

noticed significant gains by charters versus TPS’s in notably rougher parts of Boston especially

in English proficiency, citing a 33% increase in South Boston, a 45% increase in Lawrence and a

60% increase in Roslindale.19 Flaker concluded that “the largest impact of charter schools will be

felt in urban settings, where charter schools significantly outperform their TPS counterparts at a

lower cost per pupil”.19 Massachusetts is not alone. Though not a representation of all

educationally disadvantaged urban students, black urban students enrolled in K-8 charter

programs in New York could close 86% of the “Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap” in math and

66% in reading, black urban charter schools are matching TPS’s in Illinois, and in California,

Los Angeles and Oakland charter schools “do a better job of closing the Black-White

achievement gap than traditional public schools”.15

Despite proven regional success in multiple cases, individual charter success stories—

especially in areas unpopulated by charters—are often the most inspiring as they hold the

answers to fixing the errors of their region’s public schools. One particular success story is the

LEAD Academy charter school in Nashville, Tennessee, the city’s only charter program. Last

19 Flaker, Anne. "School management and efficiency”

P a g e | 11

April, Bill Clinton delivered a speech to the LEAD Academy High School’s first graduating

class since opening in 2007, which “boasted 100 percent college acceptance this spring among

its 44 seniors”.20 This academic success is inspiring considering that 92% of its students are

enrolled in a free or reduced lunch plan (20% higher than Nashville public schools) and 83% of

its students are of ethnic or racial minority (19% higher than public average).21 LEAD Academy

dedicates itself to a driven college-going culture, and has achieved a higher proficiency in all but

two major courses than city and state average.21

LEAD is the epitome of charter achievement gone right. LEAD uses its greater financial

and legislating freedom to directly help students in need, and achieved 100% college acceptance

in its first fifth through twelfth grade graduating class. While some charters nationwide may

underperform, it makes little difference in the grand scheme of things as long as there are also

successful programs like LEAD. Charter schools should be seen as regional challenges to fix the

peril facing public schools without overhauling the whole system. Insanity is doing the same

thing over and over again and expecting different results. As concluded in the earlier Hanushek,

Kain, Rivkin and Branch study:

“It is precisely the poor performance and inertia of large numbers

of regular public schools that provide much of the impetus for the

growth of the charter sector, and the protection of the status quo

does not provide an attractive policy choice”. 22

The ‘status quo’ is the propagation of the American education gap, suppressing the futures of

millions of children and threatening America’s future atop the global podium. While charters

today cannot guarantee success, they can guarantee change in an utterly uninspired urban public

20 "Bill Clinton to Speak in Nashville at LEAD Charter School Event." The Tennessean. April 24, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2014.21 "LEAD Public Schools Information and Outcomes." LEAD Academy High School. Accessed December 2, 2014.22 Hanushek, Kain, Rivkin, Branch. “Charter school quality and parental decision making with school choice.”

P a g e | 12

school system. Charter schools’ strongest asset is hope and they must be supported—because

they may be America’s last.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Almond, Monica R. “The Black Charter School Effect: Black Students in American Charter

Schools.” Journal of Negro Education 18 no. 4 (2012): 354-365).

Bettinger, Eric. “The effect of charter schools on charter students and public schools.”

Economics of Education Review 24 no. 2 (2005): 133-147.

Bifulco, Robert and Ladd, Helen F. “The Effect of Charter Schools on Parental Involvement.”

Journal of

P a g e | 13

Public Administration Research and Theory Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct, 2006): 553-576.

"Bill Clinton to Speak in Nashville at LEAD Charter School Event." The Tennessean. April 24,

2014. Accessed December 2, 2014.

Booker, Kevin, Scott M. Gilpatric, Timothy Gronberg, and Dennis Jansen. "The impact of charter

school attendance on student performance." Journal of Public Economics 91, (2007):

849-876. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2006.09.011.

Carnoy, Martin, and Richard Rothstein. "What Do International Tests Really Show about U.S.

Student Performance?" Economic Policy Institute. January 28, 2013. Accessed

November 22, 2014.

"Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment." National Association for the

Education of Young Children. April 1, 2005. Accessed December 1, 2014.

“Concentration of Public School Students Eligible for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch.” Institute of

Education Sciences. April, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2014.

Cookson, Peter W. School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1994.

“Creaming versus Cropping: Charter School Enrollment Practices in Response to Market

Incentives.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2002),

pp. 145-158.

Dahlberg, Gunilla, and Peter Moss. “Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education”. London:

RoutledgeFalmer, 2005.

"District vs. International Education Achievement." George W. Bush National Report Card.

January 1, 2012. Accessed November 29, 2014.

P a g e | 14

Flaker, Anne. "School management and efficiency: An assessment of charter vs. traditional

public schools." International Journal of Educational Development 38 (2014): 01-94.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2014.07.001.

Gronberg, Timothy J., Dennis W. Jansen, and Lori L. Taylor. "The relative efficiency of charter

schools: A cost frontier approach." Economics of Education Review 31, no. 2 (2012): 302-

317. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2011.07.001.

Hanushek, Eric A., Kain, John F., Rivkin, Steven G., Branch, Gregory F. “Charter school quality

and parental decision making with school choice.” Journal of Public Economics 91, no. 5-

6 (2007): 823-846.

Imberman, Scott A. "The effect of charter schools on achievement and behavior of public school

students." Journal of Public Economics 95, no. 7-8 (2011): 850-863.

Kenyon, Daphne A. The Property Tax, School Funding Dilemma. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln

Institute of Land Policy, 2007.

"LEAD Public Schools Information and Outcomes." LEAD Academy High School. Accessed

December 2, 2014.

"National Center for Education Statistics Fast Facts." Institute of Education Sciences. Accessed

December 2, 2014.

Opposing Viewpoints in Context. "Charter Schools." Accessed November 4, 2014.

Preston, Courtney, Ellen Goldring, Mark Berends, and Marisa Cannata. "School innovation in

district context: Comparing traditional public schools and charter schools." Economics of

Education Review 31, no. 2 (2012): 318-330. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2011.07.016.

"Statistics About Education in America." Studentsfirst. January 1, 2014. Accessed November 22,

P a g e | 15

2014.

Winters, Marcus A. "Measuring the effect of charter schools on public school student

achievement in an urban environment: Evidence from New York City." Economics of

Education Review 31, no. 2 (2012): 293-301. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2011.08.014.