By Jack McKay, Ed.D., Executive Director of the Horace Mann League of the USA
Charter schools have a unique history. The idea of charter schools arose, often with teachers’ support, in urban districts in the late 1980s and early ’90s. They were originally conceived as teacher-run schools that would serve students struggling inside the traditional system and would operate outside the reach of the administrative bureaucracy and politicized school boards.
Charters also drew on early rounds of small school experiments initiated by teachers and community activists, often as alternatives to large, struggling, high schools.
A charter school is an independently run public school granted greater flexibility in its operations, in return for greater accountability for performance. The “charter” establishing each school is a performance contract detailing the school’s mission, program, students served, performance goals, and methods of assessment.
The Charter School movement was intended to be a school where the so-called, bureaucracy of traditional public schools is eliminated, to provide a choice for students and parents, to provide a sense of competition with the public schools, improve academic outcomes, and to create an environment for creativity in instruction and organization of the school.
As the charter school initiative grew, some educational leaders became concerned that that charter school advocates were creating tiers of schools serving decidedly different populations with unequal resources. Below is a summary of the intended and resulting unintended consequences of the charter school movement.
Intended and Unintended Consequences of Charter Schools
Bureaucracy
Intention: Reduce the rules and regulations that may hinder the selection of personnel, curriculum, and methods of teaching.
Unintended Consequence: (1) resulted in a lack of due process rights of employees and students. (2) resulted in a lack of policy on the uniformity of personnel regulations, salary, and benefits. (3) Resulted in a lack of structure or procedures to resolve grievances in a fair and efficient manner.
Choice of School
Intention: Provide parents with an alternative to the traditional public school.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in a choice based on race, wealth, and/or other forms of exclusiveness rather than academics, resulting in segregated schools. (2) Created a “duel” system of schooling in the community. (3) Results in a perpetuation of a false sense populist elitism of both parents and children.
Competition
Intention: Provide a sense of competition to find better ways to improve learning.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in no evidence of the benefits of competition to promoted innovation or improved learning. (2) Resulted in a false sense of academic success based on aggressive recruitment (enrolling already talented students) and (3) Resulted in the suspension of the less able students.
Governance
Intention: Reduce the outside influence by appointing rather than electing a board.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in limited or no review of practices by an impartial board. No due process or other appeal procedures for either students or employees. (2) Resulted in a less stable, less secure and less expensive teaching staff. (3) Resulted in less experienced, less unionized and less trained and less certified than those in public schools – the Walmart strategy of low salaries, fewer benefits, no long-term career, no pension plan, nor professional commitment
Innovations in Teaching
Intention: Provide a teaching environment unhindered by structure and standards.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in no evidence to show any significant innovations shared or integrated into the public schools. (2) Resulted in the reverse – most innovations in teaching and learning developed and implemented in the public school are adopted by the charter school. (3) Resulted in unregulated charters that provide the teachers and resources for a few at the expense of the many. (4) Resulted in the draining of the talents, resources, and energy needed to continuous improvement of the public schools where 95 percent of the students attend.
Innovation in Organization
Intention: Provide an environment that nurtures different ways of organizing the school’s learning areas.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in few, if any innovative or organization practice has been proven to be an improvement over the current practices in the public schools. (2) Resulted in charter school practices being more regressive in dealing with instruction and classroom management. (2) Nowhere have charters produced a template for effective districtwide reform or equity.
Academic Improvement
Intention: Provide strategies and practices that result in higher academic achievement.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in no major research that indicates that charter schools have improved the achievement of students during the last 15 years. (2) Resulted in most charters avoid accepting the less academically able, the physically impaired, second language students, or the children of poverty. (3) Resulted in most charters being selective in recruiting the most talented and most motivated learners from the public schools. (4) Resulted in the myth that charters do better than public schools – reality is that when eliminating the bottom half by selective recruiting and timely suspensions, test scores will go up.
Academic Accountability
Intention: Provide methods to hold teachers and schools accountable for academic results.
Unintended Consequence: (1) Resulted in privately operated charters having no obligation to show the effectiveness of teachers nor schools. Studies have found that there no reliable way to measure value-added student achievement.
Fiscal Accountability
Intention: Provide practices that allocate resources that that better address the learning of students.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in privately operated charters having arbitrarily set salaries, bonuses, and benefits. (2) Resulted in accountability is to the stockholders, rather than to students, taxpayers, and patrons. (3) Resulted in investigations indicating high levels of fraud, profiteering due to a lack of transparency, mismanagement with no oversight. (4) Resulted in the higher percent of special needs students left in public schools (5) Resulted in a higher cost-per-student in public schools and lower cost-per-student in charters.
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Intention: A different learning experience based on the freedom to innovate. An alternative to the public school. One that places greater emphasis on academics and strong discipline.
Unintended Consequences: (1) Resulted in skimming already talented students from public schools. (2) While public schools welcome all students. Charters are selective in recruiting students – often using skimming strategies to recruit talented students and motivated parents from public schools. (3) Resulted in a segregated school-based open an elitist and populist sense of entitlement for children. (4) Resulted with the bottom line logic, the market will do for education what it has done for housing, health care, and employment: create fabulous profits and opportunities for a few, and unequal access and outcomes for the many.