Education Law

Do charters = reform?

Edu-watchers know that the big news tomorrow will be about the second round of Race to the Top winners, but another report on charter schools popped up recently and with all eyes on anything that has the terms reform, turnaround, and national standards, we thought we’d look at old favorite, a classic, if you will–charter schools.

Charter schools are a blessing and a curse, depending on where you live, and the verdict is still out on whether they will solve all of the woes in education or cause more problems.  Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that there are both good and bad charter schools out there and the bad need to be shut down.  Often, those involved in the debate have something to lose or gain when the findings of a new study come out.  Let’s just say that the funders of charter schools make interesting partnerships with those doing the studying (sometimes).

A randomized study would be really beneficial in a situation like this, and our friends at EdWeek’s Inside School Research wrote a blog about the results of a study that say there really isn’t that big of a difference in student achievement in charter schools, except in urban areas.  According to their blog and the study:

For instance, several studies show that charters are more successful with disadvantaged students in urban school systems and less effective with suburban populations…”From the perspective of a researcher, that’s encouraging,” Gill [study's researcher] said, “and it suggests that maybe, in fact, we can conduct nonexperimental studies that can replicate the experimental findings.”

This made us start to wonder a bit about the emphasis put on “choice” in many suburban public schools.  The emphasis on charters is often in urban districts, because that’s where achievement is very low, but in many districts, the line is blurry between urban and suburban, and the school board has to make the difficult choice about where to place charter schools.  If charters are helping students in urban districts, maybe the emphasis on innovation and experimentation should reside in a select few urban districts, then studied, before duplicating.  What’s clear now is the “Race to be Different” (i.e. charter schools) can sometimes blow up in the face of the well-intentioned adults making decisions, and then you have a group of students who are steps behind their peers instead of steps ahead.  And that is an injustice to students in urban districts who cannot afford to be left behind.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on July 26, 2010 (boomark / email).