(MintPress) – While pundits, scholars and politicians debate the effectiveness of charter schools at closing racial and economic achievement gaps in American public education, with nearly 6,000 charter schools coming into operation across the United States today in 41 states and the District of Columbia in only two short decades of the movements’ history, one thing is clear: charter schools are gaining popularity.
In this special report, MintPress examines why the schools are gaining such a broad appeal, and what both supporters and critics are saying about the movement.
Charter school movement quickly gains a following
Despite educating more than 2 million students and experiencing 12.5 percent growth in enrollment this year alone, more than an estimated 600,000 students remain on waiting lists to attend public charter schools in the U.S.
The movement began in Minneapolis, Minn. and grew in its first 15 years to reach 1 million students by 2006, taking only five more years to surpass the 2 million student mark.
The schools were originally theorized as a way to provide greater educational choice and innovation within the public school system.
Primary or secondary schools that receive public money may also receive private donations, however, charter schools are not subject to some of the rules, regulations and statutes that apply to other public schools in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school’s charter.
Opened and attended by choice, they operate independently and develop their own curriculum and focus.
Some charter schools are founded by teachers, parents or activists. Others are not chartered by local school districts and are often established by non-profit groups, universities and some government entities, therefore becoming state-authorized. Certain school districts sometimes permit corporations to manage chains of charter schools. The schools themselves are still non-profit, in the same way that public schools may be managed by a for-profit corporation.
The schools are accountable for test scores, state mandates and other traditional requirements that often have the effect of turning the charter school into a similar model and design as the public schools.
The U.S. Department of Education’s 1997 First Year Report found that charters tend to be small (fewer than 200 students) and represent primarily new schools, though some schools had converted to charter status. Charter schools often tend to exist in urban locations rather than rural, tend to be somewhat more racially diverse and enroll slightly fewer students with special needs or limited English proficiency than the average schools in their state.
“The important thing is choice,” said Amanda Rucker, Spokesperson for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in an interview with MintPress. “Instead of being told where their children can go to school, parents have the ability to choose, and that’s why I think they have become so appealing.”
Education Week, a national U.S. newspaper covering K-12 education, reports, “Although they serve only a fraction of the nation’s public school students, charter schools have seized a prominent role in education today. They are at the center of a growing movement to challenge traditional notions of what public education means.”
Charter schools: Pros and cons
Eli Kramer, executive director of Hiawatha Academy in Minneapolis, where the majority of the students are Latino and from low-income backgrounds, says his charter school aims to provide “rigorous academics and a very heavy focus on developing character and the social and emotional skills that we believe students need to thrive in a higher education setting.” This focus has aided the school, which has been around since 2007, in closing the academic achievement gap in reading and math in just a few short years.
But not all schools have had such positive results. “There’s a huge range of quality of charter schools. There are some terrible charter schools. We have to be honest with ourselves about that,” Kramer recently told Minnesota Public Radio.
And charter schools are now coming under fire for causing segregation within urban areas. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of much of the public infrastructure in New Orleans in 2005, Louisiana turned to charter schools to rebuild its battered public school system, launching the nation’s most extensive charter school experiment.
In 2010, the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) evaluated the success of the rebuilding efforts, issuing a study, The State of Public Schools In Post-Katrina New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Equal Opportunity. The study found that “the rebuilt public school system fails to adequately provide equal educational opportunity to all New Orleans students” and also that the state-driven reorganization has created a “separate but unequal tiered system of schools,” which sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective, high-performing schools, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty, low-performing schools.
And another study by researchers at University of Colorado-Boulder and Western Michigan University found that most charter schools were “divided into either very segregative high-income schools or very segregative low-income schools” compared to their districts, and that the pattern had changed little between 2000-01 and 2006-07. They also tended to enroll a lower proportion of special education students and English-language learners.
Recently, the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools board voted to reject an application by Great Hearts Academies, a nonprofit that operates prep-school-like charter schools, for five new establishments within the district. Great Hearts planned to open its first school in a middle- to upper-middle class area in west Nashville, upon requests of parents in the area. However, the board denied the application upon fears that low-income parents wouldn’t be able to easily transport their children across town to a school on the west side, and that this could cause “segregated schools,” Olivia Brown, spokeswoman for the district told the Wall Street Journal.
“Rather than enhance diversity in the district, this would send us in the opposite direction,” said Edward Kindall, one of the board members who voted against the plan was quoted by the WSJ as saying. “I went to segregated schools and this gets us dangerously close to separate but unequal.”
Charter schools have also been targeted by advocates of children with special needs, who say they are not serving the needs of such students. A new report out of Florida found that just 14 percent of Florida charter schools enroll students with profound disabilities, while more than half of district schools enroll similar students.
The issue drew a great deal of media coverage when Miami-Dade school board member Raquel Regalado, daughter of Miami’s mayor, provided a public and personal story in an op-ed published by the Miami Herald where she shared that her daughter Isabela, after being diagnosed with autism, was told she could no longer attend the charter school where she had been a student.
The situation, and her quest to find a school for her daughter, is what prompted Regalado to run for school board. “As if by magic, Isabela’s empathy not only shattered the autistic box that all the tests had created for her and for me but it also gave me hope that one day she could thrive in a world without my constant protection and supervision. In the months that followed I met with parents of other autistic children who were not as functioning as my Isabela. I learned about the limitations of the McKay scholarships for special needs students, about the lack of options in the urban core and soon found myself meeting with parents of all sorts of special needs children, hoping to find answers and to find in their stories hope, strength and inspiration,” she wrote.
“Charter schools are not turning away students because of disability. To imply that is wrong,” said Rucker, when asked about the controversy.
School vouchers have also been an issue drawing heat to both private and charter schools. Some worry that charters unfairly divert resources and policy attention from regular public schools. However, charter school supporters say that charters improve existing school systems through choice and competition.
Charter school advocates gather, rally for more schools
More than 3,000 public charter school leaders gathered at the Minneapolis Convention Center in June to commemorate the 20th anniversary of charter schools at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools annual convention. Minnesota was also the birthplace of the movement, as the first charter school in the country, City Academy in St. Paul, opened its doors in 1992.
The group, consisting of educators, policy leaders and and others, met to exchange ideas on education.
Nina Rees, the newly named president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools spoke at the event, saying she hopes the movement will grow in the next 20 years, and charter schools will secure more funding and support from the federal government.
Rees worked at the U.S. Department of Education as head of the office of innovation and improvement and as an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney. She stepped down as an education policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to accept her new position.
Rees said that the movement has “broad bipartisan support” in Washington, and this seems to ring true given that in May President Obama issued a proclamation establishing National Charter Schools Week.
“Whether created by parents and teachers or community and civic leaders, charter schools serve as incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country. These institutions give educators the freedom to cultivate new teaching models and develop creative methods to meet students’ needs. This unique flexibility is matched by strong accountability and high standards, so underperforming charter schools can be closed, while those that consistently help students succeed can serve as models of reform for other public schools,” the president said in the proclamation.
Charter schools and the achievement gap
One example of a charter school defying the odds and functioning effectively to close the achievement gap is the YES Prep School in Houston. The school won this year’s inaugural Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools is YES Prep Public Schools in June.
YES Prep Public Schools, a system of 10 middle and high schools that serves almost all low-income and minority students, has eliminated nearly all income and ethnic achievement gaps. In addition, YES Prep’s students are outperforming their higher income and white peers statewide. One hundred percent of students who graduated from YES Prep last year went on to a four-year college.
YES Prep Public Schools received $250,000 for college readiness efforts for low-income students. The school has been extremely successful in closing the achievement gap, as its African American students boast an average SAT score of 1556, compared to the national average for African American students of 1273.
The goal at YES, and many other charter schools across the country, is to “ensure every single graduate is accepted into college,” said U.S. Department of Education Secretary Tony Miller, at a ceremony in Minneapolis where the Broad Prize was presented to administrators from the school.
“American education is in an unprecedented area of innovation right now,” Miller said. He challenged educators and administrators at the convention to “learn from those organizations that are defying the odds and succeeding.”
“Innovation is as critically important in education as it is in the private sector,” Miller commented.
Jennifer Hines, Senior Vice President of YES, said much of the schools’ success has to do with the teachers themselves. “We are creating the teachers we put in our classrooms,” Hines said. “We invest in a full year of training our teachers on the culture of the school, and expectations we have for students,” Hines added.
Proponents of charter schools say another reason they are appealing is because students get more individual attention in smaller class sizes, compared to public schools.
“One of the things we do is look at individual scores and performances, on local assessments and standardized tests,” Damian Romero, principal of the Roberto Clemente charter school in Allentown, Penn. told MintPress.
Teachers and administrators are involved in the process of ensuring that each student is succeeding. And this strategy has apparently paid off at Roberto Clemente, where over 80 percent of the school’s 320 students graduate and go on to college. For the state of Pennsylvania, 63.9 percent of graduating high school students go on to college on average. The U.S. national average is 63.3 percent, according to the National Center for Higher Educational Management Systems (NCHEMS).
“We try to put it all together and analyze it and find a solution for an individual’s needs. We design a class for an individual.”
Still, the question of whether charter schools overall are doing a better job of closing the achievement gap and educating students remains open for debate. As Education Week reports, “The research is highly mixed—in part due the complexities of comparison and wide performance differences among charters.”
Comedian Bill Cosby was also present at the convention in Minneapolis, serving as a keynote speaker. Known widely for his role in the iconic American television program The Bill Cosby Show, which chronicles the experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family, Cosby also holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
When asked by MintPress about his thoughts on the ability of charter schools to close the achievement gap, Cosby admitted that while all charter schools “are not perfect” he was hopeful about their ability to do so.