The Promise and Perils of Charter Schools
The May 10, New York Times editorial regarding student achievement in charter schools has set of a predictable firestorm of charter opponents applauding the Times, with proponents vigorously challenging the accuracy of the piece and the data presented therein.
The incredible variance in the quality of charter schools across the country has allowed both sides of the debate to cherry pick data results, so that depending on who you listen to, data proves that charters are either the greatest development in the history of ed reform or the single greatest danger to student learning the nation has ever faced.
While the truth likely lies somewhere in between, unfortunately, the force of the debate continues to take the attention away from the most important point of the Times editorial. The Times rightly points out that states where the Charter movement is faltering often suffer from less than stellar authorization and oversight processes. Many charter supporters will agree that more stringent authorization processes could dramatically improve the performance, standing and future of the charter movement.
CTQ believes that much of this oversight should focus on the quality of teachers within charter schools. According to an ever growing body of research, prescribed to on both the left and even increasingly on the right, teaching quality has the single greatest impact, among school factors, on student achievement. And yet, edu wonks and pundits argue endlessly about student achievement in charter schools relative to public schools, while doing precious little to consider or research the root causes for charters’ actual level of achievement.
Within the context of the almost undeniable significance of teaching quality, the uniqueness of charter schools presents both potential and peril. Because of their autonomy from legal and regulatory structures, charter schools could potentially benefit from increased freedom to hire the best teachers, design effective professional development, and promote a strong professional culture. However, these practices are not currently guaranteed to happen in any particular charter school and do not occur systematically across all charter schools. In all likelihood, adoption will vary across the charter sector, with some schools engaging in top-notch teaching quality practices and others falling far short of these goals.
What teaching quality looks like in the charter “sector” is likely to be widely divergent. Any attempt to generalize by describing “the typical charter school” is likely to hide this underlying variation. What is needed is the kind of fine-grained research that documents the different experiences of charter schools, accounts for those divergent paths, and yields recommendations about how the schools and those who hold them accountable can achieve better teaching in the future. CTQ and Public Impact have proposed a comprehensive research study to jointly document the scope and magnitude of the teaching quality challenges facing charter schools. We would conduct a set of exploratory case studies in order to collect detailed data from a range of divergent schools within the sector. No takers to date, but as soon as folks see through the mess of student achievement arguments to consider the real teaching factors influencing the achievement variations, we look forward to taking on the important work.
UPDATE – Never mind the well-researched, and widely-accepted belief that teaching quality matters for student learning – in all schools, including charters. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has fired back at the Times editorial, with this mind-blowing argument, “the editorial makes the antiquated, condescending claim--the type you'd hear from someone slurping a martini at a high class dinner party--that "the only way to improve public schooling is to provide well-trained teachers and orderly schools." So, the thousands of brilliant people who've spent decades of energy and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fix schools were just wasting their time! They just should've asked the Times editorial staff what to do.”
Sorry, but decades of research says that the way to improve schools is in fact well-trained teachers. No, that does not mean that the brilliant people spending billions and decades to consider the organizational structure of schools, learning communities, school choice, community engagement, or any other education reforms are wasting their time. It simply means that all of these reforms matter within the context of who is teaching in the classroom. The best designed learning communities, small schools or charter schools will still be only as good as their teachers. The National Alliance for Charter Schools could have learned that teachers matter most by asking the Times editorial board, anyone “slurping a martini at a high class dinner party,” any parent having a drink after work, any educator who has ever been in a school building, or any researcher who has ever looked at teachers’ influence on student learning.
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