Five Ways to Boost Charter Schools

Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham, two of my favorite educational researchers, have inspired me to save the charter school movement with five brilliant if perhaps too far-sighted suggestions for reform.

The Washington-based think tank Education Sector www.educationsector.org has just published their paper, "A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling." They may be horrified by what I have done with their facts and insights, but I think my ideas will push charters in the right direction -- more good ones and fewer bad ones.

In theory, charter schools are a great idea. There are now more than 4,000 of them with more than 1 million students in 40 states and the District. These independent public schools give smart educators with fresh ideas a chance to show what they can do without the deadening hand of the local school system bureaucracy around their necks. They also give public school parents more choice. The problem is, as one former state charter school official told me, there are a lot of loons out there starting charter schools. We don't seem to be able to get rid of their loony schools as easily as the original advocates of charter schools promised. That is one reason why charter schools, despite including some of the best public schools I have ever seen, do no better on average than regular public schools in raising student achievement.

Here are my suggestions for fixing that situation, based largely on what I learned from Mead and Rotherham:

1. Stop letting local school boards authorize charters. Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, used a grant from the Annie E.Casey Foundation to analyze reports they oversaw on charter schools in California, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Florida and Michigan and four cities: New York, Indianapolis, Chicago and the District. They conclude that "perhaps the most significant lesson of the charter school movement to date" is that the number and quality of charter schools depend on who does the authorizing and how well they do it. State school boards, universities and independent bodies like the D.C. Public Charter School Board appear to do a better job of authorizing charters than local school boards, which see charters as competition for students, funds and prestige. California, Colorado and Florida have built strong charter systems with local school boards as the prime authorizers, but only by creating alternative authorizers for charter proposals that get turned down by local school boards.

2. Don't listen to parents about charters. I have twisted Mead's and Rotherham's conclusion a bit, but not much. Here is what they say: "Charter advocates often point to parental choice as the ultimate form of accountability: If schools are not delivering results, the argument goes, parents will go elsewhere. Yet experience has shown that parents choose schools for a variety of reasons, and often, even low-performing charter schools are popular with parents." They are right. Many parents I have spoken with chose a charter for no other reason than it was close to their home, the same reason so many parents like their mediocre neighborhood schools. Since one of the salient points of the charter school movement was to be able to get rid of schools that aren't working, authorizers should put more weight on results in the classroom than how many parents have signed up.

3. Kill laws that limit the number and autonomy of charters. We journalists often describe charters as independent public schools free of the usual state and local school regulations. Mead and Rotherham point out that charters are often not so independent. State laws often limit their number, their location, their pension rules and other matters. "Many of these policies were intended as quality measures," they write, "but the evidence from our sample does not suggest that states that place many regulations and limits on charter schools have better outcomes than those that do not. In fact, some of the limits that states place on charter schools may actually have perverse consequences." As an example, they note that Michigan's requirement that individually-operated charters use the expensive state pension system encourages them to join large charter chains not covered by that rule . But some of the chains are for-profit ventures, vulnerable to bashing from the unions and from Wall Street.

4. Judge charters on individual student gains. Mead and Rotherham endorse the national trend toward improving data collections systems so each state can see how much each child has improved at each school each year. They also recommend collecting measures of charter schools in addition to state test scores, and letting at least one authorizer specialize in serving at-risk students, drop-outs or others with special needs. Such record-keeping would make it much easier to compare charters to each other, thus opening the way for my fifth and last suggestion:

5. Ge t rid of the lemons. Mead and Rotherham don't say this, but their complaints about the difficulty of closing low-performing charters suggest they would not be upset if Jack Welch's rule became law. When Welch was chief executive of General Electric, he tried to remove each year the bottom 10 percent of performers in the company -- the lemons. That seems a harsh tactic to use with human beings, but I think it would work fine with charter schools. Inertia is a powerful force in public education. It helps explain why we have so many mediocre schools. There is not much we can do about closing regular public schools, but charters are different. Pro-charter and anti-charter people could unite on the lemon-removal plan. The pro-charter folks could raise charters' average performance levels and the anti-charter people could get rid of a lot of charters. It would have to be done on the state level, because there are no consistent national measures of charters. But it would shake up the charter universe, I think in a good way.