Charter School Diversity Producing Diverse Results
Feature Story by David Goldberg - 11/24/2004
"The American high school is arguably the least changed public institution in American society," says Larry Rosenstock, principal and CEO of the Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High charter school in San Diego. The sentiment reflects an underlying concern driving the rapid spread of charter schools throughout the nation.The exact definition of a charter school varies from state to state, but all share some basic characteristics. Typically, the schools are released from many of the regulatory requirements imposed on public schools.
In exchange for less regulation, charter schools are generally required to be accountable for improved academic performance. Ideally, the additional flexibility frees school administrators and teachers to experiment with new education models or simply to function more efficiently with a lighter bureaucratic burden.
Charter school attendance is on the rise among the nation's public school students, particularly for students in major cities, where traditional public schools are having the most difficulty. The first charter school was founded in 1992, and there are now approximately 3,300 charter schools serving one million students in 41 states. The increase has generated a higher level of scrutiny from education advocates, media outlets, and state governments.
Examples of successful charter schools abound, giving supporters ample evidence to argue for their continued growth. However, a spate of high profile cases of school failure has captured media attention this fall, leading some to question whether the lack of regulatory oversight allows cases of abuse, mismanagement or poor performance to go unchecked for too long.
In the largest scale failure, the California Charter Academy (CCA) collapsed this summer amidst investigations of corruption and mismanagement, leaving approximately 10,000 students from its 60 charter schools scrambling for new schools.
In stark contrast to California's experience with CCA, the San Francisco-based KIPP Foundation has established 38 schools in 14 states and the District of Columbia, many of which have shown exceptional results. KIPP, which stands for "Knowledge is Power Program," began in 1995 with a school in Houston and one in New York City.
Both of the original schools have been recognized for excellence by their respective states. Particularly impressive is that despite serving the most disadvantaged students, more than two-thirds of the original KIPP middle schools' first graduating classes have already entered college.
Instilling the expectation in all students that they are capable of making it to college is one of KIPP's core goals. "Our students, 99% of whom are African-American and 91% of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, work very hard to prove that all students are capable of achieving at the highest levels and to climb the mountain to college," says Jason Botel, principal of KIPP's Ujima Village Academy in Baltimore.
Ujima Village is one of KIPP's few fully public, non-charter schools, and its fifth grade students have raised their math test scores from 64% passing to 89%, the best in Baltimore.
The controversy over charter school performance grew with an embarrassing episode for the U.S. Department of Education, which delayed the release of a report on its first comprehensive nationwide survey of charter schools. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) accused the Department of burying data that shows charter school students lagging behind their peers at other public schools on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).
The NAEP report, known as the nation's report card, was originally scheduled for release in January 2004, but was delayed until the end of this year. The data in question shows charter school students achieving lower scores than students in public schools.
Students in fourth grade were six scale points lower in math and two points lower in reading. According to NAEP standards, these gaps are significant and translate to children in charter schools being behind their counterparts in other public schools by a half-year.
Outgoing Secretary of Education Rod Paige disputed AFT's interpretation of the data as showing that charter schools are, taken as a whole, failing their students. "It is wrong to think of charter schools as a monolith," Paige explained. "There are schools for dropouts, schools for students who've been expelled, schools serving the most economically disadvantaged families. Charters are as diverse as the children they educate."
William L. Taylor, vice chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, observed that measurements of overall charter school performance might be enhanced if "more states required careful screening of applicants for charters to weed out those that have questionable records or poor educational credentials."
Secretary Paige also denied AFT's assertion that election year politics was behind the delay in releasing the report. AFT's argues that Bush administration fears that poor charter school performance would reflect badly on its signature education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), is the real reason for the delay. Specifically, one of the law's potential consequences for a public school that repeatedly fails to meet yearly improvement goals is restructuring as a charter school.
The Department's justification was that it withheld the report in order to release it along with an analysis of how to properly adjust the data to account for differences in school management. Some doubt the Department's claim, citing the repeated delays and unprecedented nature of the explanation.
The Department's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, has never included analytic adjustments to NAEP data in its official reports. In the past, the Center has followed its governing board's position that such analyses were inappropriate for government reports, would be subject to methodological questions and would damage the agency's credibility.
"Analyses are always welcome, but first things first," said Bella Rosenberg, an author of the AFT report on NAEP's charter school data. Referring to the possible restructuring of a failing school into a charter school, Rosenberg went on to say, "In light of NCLB sanctions, surely the interests of children are better served by timely and straightforward information about whether charter school performance measures up to the claims made for it."
The Department came in for renewed criticism upon the release of a separate charter school report that also shows students lagging behind their public school peers. Like the NAEP report, the study is a snapshot, leaving it unclear whether charter school students are catching up, falling further behind, or simply treading water.
The final version of this report, commissioned in 1998, was delivered to the Department in June but not made public. The New York Times learned of the report and filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it in October. It was released on November 19th.
