@ISSUE: What are lessons learned from charter schools?
Charter schools, publicly funded school districts run by independent boards that are aimed at giving parents an option to traditional neighborhood public schools, first began operating in New Jersey in 1997. They have grown from 13 schools to 89, and now educate more than 35,000 students. They are heavily concentrated in urban districts.
Hailed by some as a badly need alternative to failing urban schools, they are criticized by others as a drain on resources for noncharter public schools. During the past three years, 20 new charter schools have been opened in New Jersey and 12 others have been closed for poor academic performance or financial or managerial problems.
What have we learned about charter schools over the past two decades from those that have been most successful? And do those successes argue for expanding them? That’s the question we posed to four experts on charter schools. Their responses follow:
Four lessons learned from charter schools’ successes
By Nina Rees
As with the rest of American public education, the public charter school sector has both star performers and schools that need improvement. What makes charters special, however, is their remarkable ability to raise achievement levels among students who often struggle in traditional schools.
The most comprehensive nationwide study of the impact of charter schools to date, led by Stanford University, found that African-American and Hispanic charter school students from low-income families gained the equivalent of weeks of additional learning in reading and math compared with their peers in traditional public schools.
What makes it possible for public charter schools to have such a positive impact on learning? I see four factors at work.
The first is a no-excuses mentality. You have to believe that all children can learn, regardless of their background. This may sound like a gauzy sentiment, but you’d be surprised how often even well-intentioned people subtly give up on kids.
How many times have you heard the argument that certain students, because they come from a poor neighborhood, or they don’t get enough support at home, or they have a disability, can’t compete with other kids? This leads to a lowering of expectations and a fear of accountability. But if you believe that your students can meet high expectations, you welcome those expectations and you do whatever it takes — more hours in the classroom, personalized tutoring, engaging parents — to help them succeed. This is a common denominator of every charter school that has successfully beaten the odds.
The second key to charter success is a strong culture grounded in order, team work and collegiality. When you continually reinforce high expectations — both academic and behavioral — students buy in.
North Star Academy in Newark says unambiguously, “it is cool to be smart, and … with hard work, smart is something that you become.” At Newark’s Great Oaks Charter School, students live by RISE values — Respect, Integrity, Self-Discipline and Excellence. No surprise that students at both schools are among New Jersey’s top performers, erasing the black-white academic achievement gap.
The third factor in charter success is data-driven decision making. Most successful charters use data to find the gaps in student achievement and target those areas for extra attention. The data comes from annual assessments, but also from monthly, weekly, even daily performance updates.
Rocketship, a charter operator in California, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Washington, D.C., is a leader in using “blended learning,” a mix of traditional classroom instruction and innovative educational technology to support teachers. The technology constantly adjusts to students’ learning patterns, allowing students to progress at different paces, and helping teachers to diagnose emerging problems and quickly address them.
Finally, leadership counts. In schools, that means having a strong principal who is both an instructional leader and an administrative whiz. Charter schools tend to attract strong leaders because charters dedicate a lot of time to teacher development and mentoring, allow teachers to advance into leadership quickly, and offer principals greater autonomy to make decisions about staffing and running a school. Charter principals also contend with less bureaucracy, because they are independent of school districts. That’s a bonus for any leader.
Ultimately, it’s the combination of high expectations for every student, strong school culture, flexibility to make adjustments based on good data, and freedom from excessive bureaucracy that allows charters to succeed where other schools have failed. Charter schools continually strive to get better and welcome opportunities to share successful techniques with colleagues in traditional public schools. As a movement, we believe that by working with traditional public schools, we can improve education for all children.
Nina Rees is president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the public charter school movement.
Answer depends on how one defines success
By Julia Sass Rubin
What does it mean for a school to be successful? There is no simple answer to this question.
Most school comparisons focus on student scores on standardized tests. Some also include a school’s depth of course offerings; student graduation rates; and the ability of the school’s graduates to complete college within four years.
Yet these outcomes are all dependent on the financial resources available to a school and the demographics of its students. Well-funded schools that educate more-affluent students who are proficient in English and do not have significant special needs invariably produce higher test scores, graduation rates, and on-time college completion rates.
Consider the fact that a child whose family makes $40,000 a year averages 100 points higher on the SAT than a child whose family makes $20,000 a year. And, “the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score.”
Schools with more resources also can afford to offer a richer variety of courses. So, unless student demographics and school funding levels are appropriately factored into any analysis of school performance, the results simply reward those already more fortunate.
Failing to adequately factor in student demographics is particularly problematic when evaluating New Jersey’s charter schools, which educate smaller percentages of low-income students, special-needs students, and English language learners than their local district public schools.
Many school comparisons also include selective and non-selective schools, pitting neighborhood public schools that accept all students against magnet schools that use admission exams or other means of identifying the easiest to educate, or against those charter schools that push out the more challenging students through rigid behavioral codes and harsh disciplinary policies.
So what do we find if we look only at open enrollment schools and consider student demographics and school funding levels? Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker performed such an analysis, examining changes in standardized test scores over four years at all K-8 publicly funded schools in New Jersey. To ensure validity, he used only publicly-available data, so his work could be replicated by other scholars.
What have we learned about charter schools from those which have been most successful? We have learned that, as with most things, the answer depends largely on how you define the question.
We also have learned that the highest-performing schools are district public schools, and that charter schools that perform well are not necessarily the ones receiving the most public recognition.
More fundamentally, charter versus district is a useless comparison that encourages competition and self-promotion and does not serve our children well. Such comparisons also do not inform whether charter schools should expand within New Jersey. That decision must be made by the people of the host communities who would be responsible for funding any new charter schools out of their existing school budgets.
Julia Sass Rubin is an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University and one of the founding members of Save Our Schools NJ, an all-volunteer advocacy group whose members believe that every child in New Jersey should have access to a high-quality public education.
Waiting lists for charters indication of their success
By Rick Pressler
Charter schools are public schools that offer parents and students excellent educational opportunities in many New Jersey communities — most notably in high-need districts such as Newark, Camden, Jersey City, Paterson, Plainfield and Trenton.
Over the past 20 years, many charters have demonstrated a high level of academic achievement on state assessments, extraordinary graduation and college matriculation rates, and a fundamental commitment to responsiveness and respect towards students and families.
Charters are making a huge difference and we need more of them. This is clear from the demand — there are more than 10,000 students on waiting lists — as well as from the remarkable results they have produced in closing the achievement gap and helping their students reach college.
The demand for charter schools reflects the reality that they are often the most accessible high-quality public school option for families in certain ZIP codes. Increasingly, New Jersey is a state with two distinct systems of public education — one for the haves and one for the have-nots. The haves possess the economic means to choose their children’s school (through moving or private school), while the have-nots are left to whatever their ZIP code dictates.
New Jersey’s charter schools represent a diversity of approaches, but there are practices and program elements that are common across many successful schools:
• A well defined, student centered mission. Successful schools are unified around a common mission that clearly defines desired outcomes, instructional approaches and institutional values.
• Well-trained, effective instructional leaders. All successful schools have leaders who demand and support strong instructional practice, regardless of the educational approach. The best schools construct administrative schedules with deliberate attention to time spent in classrooms and in direct contact with teachers.
• Well- trained, deeply committed teachers. A school is only as good as the talent and dedication of its teachers.
• Use of assessment data to drive individualized instruction. The collection and analysis of interim and formative assessment data informs instruction on a regular basis. Information about student progress is shared, allowing teachers to respond to student needs quickly.
• Engagement of parents. Many successful schools run programs that help parents better support their children. Some also provide valuable community services such as ESL and parenting classes, access to other social services, technology access, and so on.
• Longer school day and year. Charters, especially in disadvantaged communities, provide students with more instructional and recreational time in school.
In one sense, there is a growing set of public school options available in New Jersey, including district magnet schools, county vocational programs and career academies, choice district schools, Urban Hope schools, open enrollment district schools, and charters.
However, some of the most high-performing public options, such as district and county magnet programs, handpick their students, thus restricting this as a widely accessible option. For many disadvantaged families, charter schools represent their only option for a safe, effective public school.
Given these circumstances, charter schools must play a major role in addressing the educational inequities institutionalized in New Jersey’s system of public education. It is difficult to see how we achieve educational equity, especially for our most disadvantaged students, without significantly more charter schools.
Rick Pressler is interim president and CEO of the New Jersey Charter Schools Association.
The lessons and limits of successful charter schools
By Alfred Chris Torres
Public charter schools are among the nation’s most polarizing educational reforms. Critics suggest that they privatize public education and drain resources from other public schools while supporters argue that they provide families with choices, particularly in high-poverty communities that have few high quality schooling options.
The debate about charters is often centered on whether they’re a good idea or not. In spite of this, they have nearly doubled in growth nationwide in the last eight years. Since they are arguably not going anywhere soon, it is sensible to start discussing what we can learn from the most successful charters and the limits and possibilities of expanding those schools.
Several rigorous evaluations of charter school networks such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) claim that the most successful charters have significantly raised the achievement and college attainment rates of low-income, minority students.
According to different reports and studies, their success is explained by certain characteristics such as an extended school day and school year, flexibility with hiring and firing, strict norms for student behavior, and high expectations for students and staff. For instance, in some charter schools, teachers are expected to be on call for parents like a doctor might be for their patient in an emergency.
This example points to the limits of these models: They often rely heavily on young, highly dedicated teachers who are willing to work very long hours and follow controversial schoolwide procedures such as having students line up and enter classrooms silently. Additionally, the very characteristics that explain the success of these schools frequently contribute to high teacher turnover rates, raising questions about their sustainability and capacity to functionally expand.
Nonetheless, there are some clear lessons to learn from the most successful charters that are grounded in decades of research on effective schooling. A vibrant and collaborative school culture, caring teachers, high expectations for students and consistent schoolwide systems to ensure order and safety are just good practice.
While there are plenty of pros and cons to discuss about the practice of these schools, the real problem is how they are used in the policy arena. Policymakers should not use successful charters as evidence to promote flawed educational reforms. For instance, closing traditional public schools and replacing them with a charter and all new staff will not help us develop better teachers and practices or alleviate the powerful effects of concentrated poverty.
Holding up successful charters as exemplars, without providing supports necessary to improve practice, can unfairly demonize and devalue teachers. This may make it even harder to attract great teachers to work in our neediest communities.
It makes sense to create more good schools for these communities with an understanding of the limitations of successful charter models. Chief among these is a reliance on a limited supply of teachers who are willing and able to meet the intense demands of the work. This should teach us all a lesson about the current limits of school reform as our primary strategy to fight poverty and inequality.
Alfred Chris Torres is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Montclair State University.