As
a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools,
especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public
schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race
and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges
that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly
history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices
to the troubling present.
The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private
entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school
desegregation after
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The
desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white
schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases
decided in
Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.
Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline
for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white
county leaders’ strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt:
“We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools,
sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated
schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic
financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated
schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To
hell with 'em.”
Though the county ultimately refused to sell the public school
buildings, public education in Prince Edward County was nevertheless
abandoned for five years (1959-1964), as taxpayer dollars were funneled
to the segregated white academies, which were housed in privately owned
facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge. Federal courts
struck down this use of taxpayer funds after a year. Still, whites won
and blacks lost. Because there were no local taxes assessed to operate
public schools during those years, whites could invest in private
schools for their children, while blacks in the county—unable and
unwilling to finance their own private, segregated schools—were left to
fend for themselves, with many black children shut out of school for
multiple years.
Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states
and localities also enacted “freedom of choice” plans that typically
allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but
forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not
infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they
entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to
acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable
legally, they sought other means to eliminate "undesirables."
Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on
school strategy, reasoned, “Negroes could be let in [to white schools]
and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not
maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases,
etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal
courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t
possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of
bellyaches.” (Mays vastly underestimated the determination of individual
black families and federal officials.)
These nefarious motives may seem a far cry from the desire of many
charter school operators to “reinvent” public education for students
whom traditional public schools have failed. In theory, these committed
bands of reformers come with good intentions: they purport to bring in
dedicated teachers who have not been pummeled into complacency; energize
their students by creating by a caring, rigorous school environment;
and build a parent body that is inspired (in some cases compelled) to
become more involved in their children’s education both inside and
outside the school. And in some cases, charter schools deliver what they
promise. In others, however, this sparkling veneer masks less
attractive realities that are too often dismissed, or ignored, as the
complaints of reactionaries with a vested interest in propping up our
failed system of public education.
The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that
market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste —
providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare,
is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a
disincentive to accept or retain “clients” who require intensive
interventions to maintain desired outcomes—in the case of education,
high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in
business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete
for the “good risks,” while the undesirables get triage. By design,
markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.
Charter school operators (like health insurers who exclude
potentially costly applicants) have developed methods to screen out
applicants who are likely to depress overall test scores. Sifting
mechanisms may include interviews with parents (since parents of
low-performing students are less likely to show up for the interview),
essays by students, letters of recommendation and scrutiny of attendance
records. Low-achieving students enrolled in charters can, for example,
be recommended for special education programs that the school lacks,
thus forcing their transfer to a traditional public school. (More
brazenly, some schools have experienced, and perhaps even encouraged,
rampant cheating on standardized tests.)
Operators have clear motives to avoid students who require special
services (i.e., English-language learners, “special needs” children and
so on) and those who are unlikely to produce the high achievement test
scores that form the basis of school evaluations. Whether intended or
otherwise, these sifting mechanisms have the ultimate effect of
reinscribing racial and economic segregation among the students they
educate -- as the research on this topic is increasingly bearing out.
A 2010 report by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, "
Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards," uncovers
some troublesome facts in this regard. “While segregation for blacks
among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades,
black students in charter schools are far more likely than their
traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely
segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter
school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools
(which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority
backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated
black students in traditional public schools.”
In the first decade of the 2000s, charter school enrollment nearly
tripled; today around 2.5 percent of public school students are enrolled
in charters. Blacks are overrepresented in charter schools (32 percent
vs. 16 percent in the entire public-school population), whites are
underrepresented (39 percent versus 56 percent), and Latinos, Asians and
American Indians are enrolled in roughly equal proportions in charters
and traditional public schools. These snapshots mask considerable
variation. In the West and some areas of the South, it appears that
charter schools “serve as havens for white flight from public schools,”
according to the Civil Rights Project.
There are also preliminary indications that some charter schools
under-enroll students qualifying for free lunch and English-language
learners, thereby reducing the enrollment of low-income and Latino
students, but data is limited in these areas, as it is on
non-test-related factors such as graduation rates and college
enrollment. How can we compare the performance of charters versus
traditional public schools if we don’t know whether they are enrolling
the same types of students? At the national and state levels,
policymakers are pushing for the rapid expansion of charter schools on
the basis of hope rather than evidence.
This points to a larger historical issue. The widespread enthusiasm
for and rapid proliferation of charter schools also appears to mirror a
persistent issue in American education: expanding new programs before we
know if they work, and how successes might be replicated on a larger
scale.
As the historian Charles M. Payne observed, “Perhaps the safest
generalization one can make about urban schools or school districts is
that most of them are trying to do too much too fast, initiating
programs on the basis of what’s needed rather than on the basis of what
they are capable of.” As charter schools face the uncertainty of
contract renewal (which occurs typically at the three- to five-year
mark), they may be tempted to overlay a multitude of seemingly
innovative instructional strategies without sufficient monitoring of
effectiveness.
Some schools do adopt approaches that seem to help students make
demonstrable gains in achievement tests. (There are ongoing debates
about the extent to which increases in test scores reflect authentic
hikes in skills and knowledge, as opposed to a mastery of test-taking
techniques.) But even when we identify charter schools that appear to
improve performance in relation to students with similar characteristics
in the public schools, the question becomes one of scaling up. The
concept of charter schools is that they will all be distinctive, with
different mixes of students, teaching philosophies, school environments
and so on. In theory, other schools—traditional public and other
charters—will learn what works, and replicate these innovations.
This has proven terribly difficult to do with successful public
schools; doing so with a small, idiosyncratic charter school geared
toward students who love the cello poses even greater hurdles. When
researchers from the RAND Corporation studied charter schools in
Philadelphia, they noted that “with so many interventions under way
simultaneously…there is no way to determine exactly which components of
the reform plan are responsible for [any] improvement”—though ultimately
they found that privately operated schools produced no more successful
outcomes than their traditional public counterparts.
As important as applying successful techniques to other schools is an
issue at the other end of the spectrum: when to conclude that a charter
has failed. Policymakers such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who
have sold charters as the route to educational salvation may be
reluctant to pull the plug on failures. The Big Apple has closed roughly
4 percent of charters
since its first one opened in 1999, well below the national closing
rate of 15 percent. The appropriate rate of charter revocation is
anyone’s guess.
By all appearances, charters will remain on the educational landscape
for the foreseeable future. While charter skeptics can’t merely wish
them away, they can push for greater accountability—after all, isn’t
this the whole point of charters? Anyone who blindly accepts that
competition will improve education for students in charters and
traditional public schools alike should remember that other articles of
faith about the market—like cutting taxes on the rich will make all of
our yachts and rafts rise—have proven illusory.
The market is not a self-regulating mechanism: players need rules to
guide their behavior. Educational history offers some valuable lessons
to keep in mind. First, when public schools have great influence in
selecting their student body, this can either lead to greater diversity
and opportunity while retaining choice (as in some magnet schools), or
it can exacerbate persistent problems of racial and economic
segregation. Businesspeople respond to incentives, and the impetus for
charter-school operators is to “skim the cream” and avoid undesirables.
Tangible rewards for charter schools to offer free transportation and
lunches, and to craft racially and economically diverse student bodies,
could be a step in the right direction.
Educational history also teaches us to be wary of the deep and
authentic desire to find the “secret sauce” that produces hard-working,
high-achieving students and committed teachers. It is not easy to
identify the factors that make a school great, and it is even harder to
disseminate these reforms widely. If, for example, we discover that
Charter School X produces exemplary outcomes because of exceptionally
talented, committed teachers and unusually industrious students, how do
we go about replicating that -- and at what cost? Are all teachers and
students capable of reaching these heights, or is there a limited pool?
It would be nice to think the former, but evidence for such optimism is
scarce.
There is no magic elixir that will fix our educational system. Of
course, we should continue to be open to fresh ideas about improving
school organization, teaching and learning. But if we continue to ignore
important historical lessons about the dangerous consequences of
educational privatization and fail to harness our desire to plunge
headlong into unproven reform initiatives, we may discover that the cure
we so lovingly embraced has made the patient sicker.
