Is It Time to Reconsider Charter Schools?

The research on charter schools is becoming more rigorous and it says that charter schools work for poor kids.

Charter schools are public schools that are not run by public school districts. Instead they are run by nonprofits, by businesses, or by religious organizations. They have more flexibility than traditional public schools as to how they operate and who they can hire. They tend to pay teachers more, but they can fire them at will. The school day is much longer at many charter schools, and kids are sometimes rewarded financially for good work. Charter schools get almost the same amount of state funding as other public schools, and their students have to take the same state achievement tests.

There are 5,000 charter schools around the country now, almost two decades after the first charter schools opened in Minnesota. Several hundred new charters open each year.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is doing whatever he can to encourage charters, dangling millions of dollars in federal education grants. Washington is one of only 11 states in the U.S. that doesn’t allow charter schools.

“It would be a futile effort,” said Rep. Dave Quall, D-Mount Vernon, when asked this week if he was considering proposing a new bill authorizing the formation of charter schools. “There’s strong opposition from the unions and also from my counterpart in the Senate,” he said, referring to Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, who chairs the Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee.

Charter schools are risky because they are accountable to private boards rather than to the school district, opponents say.

Because the state of Washington does not allow charters, it may forfeit up to $250 million in grants this year from a new federal program called “Race to the Top.”

Three times, he’s out. Three times, Quall has tried to pass a charter school bill in the Washington state legislature. He even succeeded once.

In 2004, the state legislature narrowly approved Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 2295, which allowed 45 charter schools to be established over six years. The schools would be open to everybody, and if demand was high, enrollment would be decided by lottery. Nonprofit organizations would be eligible to apply for charters, as long as they were not religious organizations.

Quall’s victory was short-lived. On November 3, 2004, Washington state voters overturned the new charter school law.

“They would have drained money from existing public schools and there was really no proof they provided a better education,” said Rich Wood, spokesperson for the teacher’s union, the Washington Education Association. The WEA campaigned in 2004 to overturn the charter school law with help from its parent organization, the National Education Association.

Charter school supporters outspent the teacher’s unions by a ratio of 3-to-1 in that campaign. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who was one of the supporters, has poured millions of dollars into charter schools in other states since then, through the Gates Foundation.

November 3, 2004 marked the third time Washington state’s citizens had voted against charter schools.

“It knocked the wind out of me,” said Doug Wheeler, director of Zion Preparatory Academy in Seattle, who was a strong advocate for charter schools. “We tried three times. The union was too powerful.”

That same year, a school called the Promise Academy had opened in a desperately poor and troubled section of New York City.

Recruiters had scoured the East Harlem neighborhood to find students for the Promise Academy, where kids would have very long school days, intensive teacher support and financial incentives to succeed. The school’s founder, Geoffrey Canada, promised prospective parents that if they sent their kids to the Promise Academy, they would be ready for college when the time came.

At the same time, Canada was also building a network of comprehensive community services to support families in this 97-block neighborhood, which he named the “Harlem Children’s Zone.”

Last year two Harvard researchers released a rigorous report on the Harlem Children’s Zone and its (now two) charter schools.

“Harlem Children’s Zone is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children,” wrote Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer in their April 2009 report, noting sizable increases in sixth-grade math scores.

Students at the Promise Academy do better academically than many white kids in the New York City public schools, the report said. The report is called “Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Bold Social Experiment in Harlem.”

With its network of community programs and family support inextricably linked, the Promise Academies in Harlem are not an easily replicable model. But other big cities with less ambitious charter school programs were also reporting success.

In Boston, researchers from Harvard and MIT had just released a report which found that Boston’s charter schools “significantly outperform” the city’s traditional schools. In 2008, “four of the top 10 scoring public middle schools in 8th grade math and three of the top scoring public high schools in 10th grade math were charters,” said the Boston Foundation report, published last January. There are about 60 charter schools in Boston.

And 400 miles away in the nation’s capital, the Washington Post had just published a detailed analysis of D.C.’s charter schools.

“Schools in the District’s charter schools have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools,” the Washington Post said in its December 2008 report.

The Post described the city’s 10-year-old charter school system as “a fast-growing network of schools, whose ability to tap into private donors, bankers and developers has made it possible to fund impressive facilities, expand programs and reduce class sizes.”

Clearly, the students benefit. These days, one-third of D.C. kids attend charter schools.

Who loses? The D.C. teacher’s union.

“The union has lost more than a thousand of its more than 5,000 teaching slots during the past decade,” Newsweek reported in August of 2008.

States which have charter schools have all had to buck the teacher’s union to get them, said Todd Ziebarth, vice president of state advocacy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, on Thursday.

That’s easier in states with Republican leadership, he acknowledged.

“But at some point they had to say, ‘I’m doing this because it’s in the best interest of students in the state,’” Ziebarth said.

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