American School Board Journal: 'After 10 Years, Reports on Charter Schools Still Mixed'

10/29/2002

From: Sally Banks Zakariya, 703-838-6231 Glenn Cook, 703-838-6234 Both of the American School Board Journal http://www.asbj.com

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 29 -- Charter schools, the most heavily debated and publicly funded aspect of the school choice movement, still have many of the same problems that plagued them when they started more than a decade ago, according to the November issue of 'American School Board Journal.'

Ten years after Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law, almost 500,000 students attend 2,400 public charter schools across the nation. In all, 39 states and the District of Columbia have passed charter school legislation, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. Still, the problems that charters faced in the early '90s -- funding, administration, facilities, staffing, governance -- remain issues today.

And, despite a noticeable rise in federal funding, evidence is scant that charters effectively boost academic achievement and close achievement gaps among minority students and students at risk, researchers say. The reason: Because charter school legislation varies enormously from state to state, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of the movement as a whole.

"There's just been a lot of ink spilled on this topic," said Catherine Merseth, a Harvard University professor who describes the research on charter schools as "scarily thin."

Eric Premack, co-director of the Charter Schools Development Center at California State University-Sacramento, said researchers are in the "pre-Bronze age" when it comes to data to compare charters to other schools.

"It's a statistical crapshoot," he said. "You have to look at schools one charter at a time. And you have to ask, 'What's this school doing for kids?'"

Federal funding for charters, however, continues to increase under the Bush administration, which provided the schools $200 million last year and is expected to request an additional $100 million for 2003. Of this year's funds, $25 million was designated to buy, build, or renovate facilities -- one of the biggest challenges facing charters.

The commercialization of charter schools also concerns some researchers, who worry that they are such a daunting enterprise that only a small number of grassroots and community groups will have the wherewithal to survive. And they worry that for-profit firms, especially large education management organizations (EMOs), will take the place of community schools, homogenizing the charter school movement while turning a profit.

"If the original vision of charter schools was to provide small, community-based opportunities, that's not happening," said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University. "Increasingly, in some states -- Arizona, Michigan, Florida -- we're seeing the opportunity for some firms to make a large profit."

Amy Stuart Wells, a charter school researcher at Teachers College/Columbia University, notes the slowdown in the rate of growth among charters. In 'Where Charter School Policy Fails,' released this summer, she points out that 500 new charter schools opened their doors between 1999 and 2000. Only 372 schools were added in 2001, however, even though the number of states with charter legislation increased from 32 to 38.

Wells said the slowdown points to the difficulty and energy required to run a public school. "It seems there are a limited number of people with the knowledge and experience to educate children, the business acumen to keep an autonomous institution running, the political connections to raise the private funds needed to keep schools afloat, and the ability to forsake virtually all of their personal life in order to work 6 or 7 days a week for 12 to 14 hours a day."

------ 'American School Board Journal' (www.asbj.com) is the award-winning, editorially independent education magazine of the National School Boards Association in Alexandria, Va. Founded in 1891, ASBJ covers a broad range of topics pertinent to school governance and management, policy making, student achievement, and the art of school leadership. In addition, regular departments cover education news, school law, research, and new books. Opinions expressed in the magazine do not necessarily reflect positions of the National School Boards Association.