As independent public schools that are allowed freedom to be innovative, charter schools must be held accountable for improved student achievement. But in issuing charters, authorizers (including states, districts and universities) have all too often failed to ensure that they can enforce accountability. Currently only 64 percent of authorizerseven require a contract with charter operators, and most of those contracts don’t have performance targets.
Put simply, authorizers do a poor job of quality control. One 16-state analysis of charter school performance, conducted by Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) in 2009, found that while 17 percent of charter schools did a better job of educating their students than traditional district schools, a whopping 37 percent delivered learning results that were significantly worse than traditional district schools. A 2010 Fordham Institute report, Are Bad Schools Immortal?, studied low performing charter schools in 10 states over five years. Depressingly, the report found that over 72 percent of the low performing charter schools were still open – and still low performing – five years later.
Authorizers’ failure to fulfill key aspects of their charge – to not only issue charters, but to evaluate school performance, close poor performers and replicate high performers – shortchanges parents, communities, children and the school reform movement overall. So how can we rectify the situation?
At a recent conference, Mike Petrilli and Ty Eberhardt of the Fordham Institute discussed options for improving charter school quality control. Their recommendationsincluded a policies mandating automatic closure for charter schools deemed, by state accountability ratings, to be in a state of “academic emergency” status for three consecutive years. Petrilli and Eberhart position the three-year window requirement as the outside limit of acceptable run time for failing schools and argue that authorizers should act well before the clock has run out.
Writing in EduWonk.com, James Merriman of the New York City Charter School Center provided another recent policy recommendation. Merriman writes that, if poor performing charters are to remain open, states, should at a minimum, “[strip] them of their charter status” and title and “rename the school something else.” He suggests “Option Schools.” This change in name, he writes, would be akin to providing parents with warning label reading “this school is hazardous to your child’s educational health.”
I see a third policy solution: Require that every authorizer issue a limited-term contract that stipulates automatic closure if schools do not hit very specific performance within that term. This requirement would do several things.
- First, it would change the prevailing presumption (which, per the CREDO analysis, is all too often valid) that a charter equates to automatic – and hard-to-revoke – tenure.
- Second, it would create the incentive for authorizers and schools to work together to set performance goals that are both ambitious and realistic.
- Third, it would create the incentive for charter schools to proactively manage their performance by seeking out and acting upon formative and interim performance data.
- Finally, it would realize the promise of charter schooling by institutionalizing a cycle of continuous renewal of schools – the original promise of the movement – until all or most meet a high quality bar.
Public charter schools offer a promising alternative to families unhappy with district schools. But the longer we allow poor quality charters to operate and the more unenforceable charters we issue, the less credibility the entire sector will have. Mandating contracts with consequences would immediately turn the tide in favor of quality.
