This is admittedly long, but I'm trying to summarize a LOT of information, so I'll divide it up a bit to make it more convenient to skim. Hell, maybe nobody will read it anyway, but at least I can add it to the list of previous posts I can quote when people bring up education in a thread.

None of this is designed as a case for or against the program, but simply an attempt to offer information.

Sources:

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National Charter School Research Project (University of Washington, 2007)
Evaluating the Performance of Philedelphia's Charter Schools (Rand, 2008)
Achievement and Attainment in Chicago Charter Schools (Rand, 2008)
Supporting Charter School Excellence Through Quality Authorizing (Dep. of Ed., 2007)
Improving Charter School Leadership. NGA Center for Best Practices Issue Brief (NGA, 2008)
What Does it Mean to be Well Educated? (Alfie Kohn, 2003)
California's Charter Schools: Measuring Their Performance (EdSource Annual Report, 2007)
Inside Charter Schools: A Systematic Look at Our Nation's Charter Schools. Project Update (University of Washington, 2007)
Special Education Services in Charter Schools: Surveying Perceptions of Charter School Administrators and Special Education Directors (Colorado Dep of Education, 2007)

About My Sources:

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Reliable information about charter schools can be difficult to find, because the concept began its run as a political tool almost as soon as it came to fruition. Therefore, it never had a chance to develop in the professional world before entering into the public sphere. A large amount of research about the system is funded by organizations that are either trying to prove or disprove its value. Furthermore, the majority of data used by these organizations is generally from 2000 or earlier. To attempt impartiality, I'm limiting myself to sources and organizations I am familiar with and know to be reliable. The only exception here is a Department of Education NCLB summary of the authorizing process and structures currently being used by the different programs.

Current Structures:

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Charter school discussion often focuses on the schools themselves, but the true significant difference is often in the authorizing program. These programs, usually the authorizing body overseeing a collection of schools and unifying them with a mission statement, vary greatly. Some examples...

According to the Department of Education, only 50% of California's charter schools are Title 1 (disabilities services) schools, an appallingly low figure. On the other hand, 97% of the schools authorized by the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute are Title 1 compliant. Further, the New York authorizer has proven far more willing to close charter schools that underperform or do not meet criteria than the California organization has.

The effects of a lack of Title 1 services can be seen in the fact that the California charter program contains less than 6% special education students (special education service students make up about 13% of the total student population of the US), while a whopping 19% of students seen under the Volunteers of America of Minnesota schools charter program were SPED.

Charter school programs often serve the purpose of seeking out, rather than awaiting applications from, well-designed schools. This allows them to locate schools which allign with their philosophies and mission statements. An example hallmarks list, courtesy of the Minnesota charter program:

1. Small schools
2. A focus on marginalized students (thus the large SPED make-up)
3. A focus on service learning (community service)
4. A commitment to diversity

This illustrates one of the charter program strengths: in a larger community, where multiple charter programs exist, a parent may have multiple programs with different goal sets to choose from.

So how does a school become a charter school? Depends. In Indianapolis, little more than a letter of intent and a prospectus is required. In New York, the process begins the same but includes a concept paper, panel interview and an additional, final application featuring five-year operating budgets.

Trends:

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Charter school leaders differ greatly from their public school counterparts. They are less likely to have a masters degree, are less likely to have classroom experience, and are more likely to have had experience as a counselor or curriculum specialist. Leadership positions in charter schools frequently experience high turnover rates, with members more likely to leave for better paying positions or careers, although this is less extreme after the two-year startup period.

Teachers in charter schools are less likely to be certified, and have less classroom experience than teachers in public schools (although they still average above the crucial five year mark). They have a much higher turnover rate than public schools. As we will see later, it is unclear, perhaps even unlikely, that any of these trends is a major hinderance. Charter schools are far more likely at inception to dismiss poorly performing teachers, although this tendency drops very quickly and is no more prevalent than public institutions by the program's fourth year.

Charter schools are more likely than public schools to feature interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, and block scheduling (side note: my school does all of these things). They are also more likely to offer extracurricular educational opportunities. However, they are less likely to employ Gifted and Talented programs and, as in our examples earlier, vary greatly in their adherance to Title 1 and SPED programs.

Contrary to some claims, student make-up in charter programs is neither homogenous nor havens for high achieving students. In fact, in some districts they tend to be more diverse than their public counterparts.

Results:

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In each individual case study observed, as well as in each of the national studies, results were extremely consistent: student achievement gains are statistically indistinguishable between charter and public schools. This sentence is, in my mind, the most significant of this entire evaluation. It goes against proponent arguments that they offer an improved version of education, and against opponent views that the education offered is less complete.

There are smaller trends within this, however, worth noting. Firstly, student gains do accelerate during the first year of charter school attendance. These gains then evaporate during the next two years, making the actual source of the gains difficult to ascertain. Second, while I stress that results are NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT, they do tend consistently to tease slightly higher than public schools during high school grades and slightly below public schools in elementary and middle grades.

Public schools that have a charter school or charter program open in their neighborhoods do not appear to perform better or worse as a result of the competition; instead, success levels tend to remain static. There is currently extremely little data regarding the impact of competition on entire districts.

The good news: charter school students are more likely to graduate...about 6% more likely overall (as much as 8% in places like Chicago). The reason for this trend is uncertain. Charter school approaches to discipline and instructional design do not differ significantly from public schools. Furthermore, students who attend charter schools for 3 years or less are actually much more likely to graduate, whereas students who attend charter schools for 5 years or more are no more likely to graduate than public school students. Charter school students also perform slightly better on ACT tests.

One highly fluctuating variable with charter schools is the cost per student. Many charter school proponents note that they operate below the public school $9,000 per student average. However, the Department of Education and the RAND organization both note that charter schools do not factor all programs into their measurements. For example, the Chicago program did not include free and reduced lunch programs (provided by federal funding) or other social and Title 1 programs into their per student average, while public schools do. In charter schools where the make-up of the student body matched the public school average, and where these moneys were included in factoring per student spending, the result was not significantly different.

Thanks. That was very well presented. I read every word of it. Do you think you could give LW lessons in precise posts?

Results:
In each individual case study observed, as well as in each of the national studies, results were extremely consistent: student achievement gains are statistically indistinguishable between charter and public schools. This sentence is, in my mind, the most significant of this entire evaluation. It goes against proponent arguments that they offer an improved version of education, and against opponent views that the education offered is less complete.

As a parent the big gain I would see in having charter schools and a voucher system is that I could get my son into the school that best suits his needs. The gains need not be grade related. The gains may include: philosophical alignment with mine, my son's happiness quotient at school, coursese offered.

The current education system shuts parents and kids out of the debate of what's best for the kids. Government is there at the interest of taxpayers, teachers represent them selves, the schools and principals are primarily an extension on government, but there is no party to represent parents and their children. School vouchers and charter schools lets the parent and older students have some say in their educational direction.

I think it might be important to note the varying types of charter schools. The problem with lumping them into one giant bucket is that charter schools exist for different purposes. Some of them exist solely as a place where they babysit troubled kids whom the public schools don't want, so it's kind of hard to just compare the "charter school" bucket to public schools and use the average results as evidence that public schools perform as well as charter schools.

Interesting. I'm interested to know how success varies across state boundaries. Are there states with more successful charter schools than failures? From what I understand bad schools have a tendency to fail anyway. Something that's beneficial to a healthy education system. In the aggregate I don't doubt anything you present. But I would be interested in knowing whether there are charter programs in certain states that significantly outperform their public school counterparts.

Aside from the Alfie Kohn book and the last two, which I got from journals I subscribe to, all the sources for this report are available publicly. I'm speaking from recall here, so please don't treat this as an absolute, but I'm fairly confident that they were exclusive to studies regarding separate entity school programs...not magnet-type charters, which is the "dumping ground" you refer to.

Again, speaking from recall, but I can at least say that I am 100% certain that the two biggest single-city studies I looked at were for separate entity programs.



This is a fantastic question, and one with interesting results. Obviously, if you grab any collection of 100 schools, some of them will be doing better than some of the others. This is true in this case as well...ignoring the California program, which does well but features many schools which admit no or few special education students, there are a number of successful charter schools. Some of them should be of particular interest. But the trick is this:

A. In my mind, if the program is not significantly successful at the macro level, it simply cannot be not among the best solutions to the problem. Instead, with this system you seem to have pockets of success, which is true for the public system as well.

B. Very little of the research that is done focuses on why some are more successful than others. This, to me, would be of exceptional value. A charter school, in theory, has far more freedom than public schools to engage research and theory to develop new systems. Are they being developed? Or is there some other variable at work? Amazingly, there is almost no independent research on this matter. Instead, a lot of the research focuses on trends that don't seem to correlate with where the successes occur (one of these non correlating events, by the way, is teacher pay...).

Exactly. That's why I asked.

Are charter schools a single network? Or do they all function independently? It would seem to me that they'd look to adapt educational approaches that better schools have tried.

In Rochester, charter schools have pretty much been a failure every time they have been tried. They have stiff competition from excellent private schools and some of the best public schools in the nation (in suburbs). The inner city kids don't typically utilize them. And they all seem to fail within a couple of years and have abysmal performance.

It just seems to me that while competing with public schools, it would be in their interest to model schools similarly after successful schools.

I'm not terribly concerned about schools not have access to special needs kids in the aggregate. And that is mainly because it provides an opportunity to create schools specifically catered to special needs kids.

Along those lines, I am interested to know your opinion about specialized schools for the developmentally disabled and handicapped. Do you think it should be done? Or do you think they should be integrated with normal students? If so, how do you do this without hindering the performance of the rest of the class by catering to a small number of developmentall challenged children?

Do you think schools specifically designed to cater to the developmentally challenged would lead to a reduced overall cost within the educational system as well? It would seem to me that from a cost perspective that specialization within the K-12 system would be a good thing.

The sources above, those that have information about instructional practices, show no substantial difference between charters and public schools. However, I did read a report this morning to see what more I could find.

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Differences between Charter and Traditional Public School Teachers’ Instructional Practices and Curricular Alignment to the Mathematics Standards and State Assessment in Indiana

Accord to that, charter school math teachers in Indiana tend to teach fewer concepts, but teach them more in depth. Now, the amount of information covered in a public education has roughly doubled since 1980, so I would say this is a positive. The charters may feel the same pressure, in the long run, that public schools feel in regards to posting good standardized test scores as opposed to having the best teaching methods, though.



I think you walk a very thin line when you begin looking at rolling back inclusion policies, especially when there are strategies out there that are highly effective at making the process a positive. For example, assigning higher level students to peer tudor their classmates is one of the most effective methods of improving learning among BOTH groups, and coteaching (having a regular ed and a sped teacher work together in a class made up of 25-35% sped students) can be incredibly successful as well, and can reduce the number of sped teachers required in a building or district by as much as a fourth.



I can't really speak to this, truthfully.

Good stuff. Very informative.

I can only see this working to a certain extent. I don't think a kid taking AP Calc is going to get any benefit at all teaching a mentally incapacitated individual how to do his addition and multiplication tables. At some point the challenged kids should be left behind.



I don't see how this can possibly be. I really don't. Maybe it's just because I'm in NYS. I saw my parents Regents exams that they took in the late seventies. And they were quite a bit more difficult than the exams that I scored very high A's on on just about everything. Since I graduated about ten years ago, the state exams have become even MORE watered down. Particularly in math and science. I just cannot possibly fathom that the kids today are learning 4/5 of what I had to learn. The Chemistry Regents for instance has been reduced in content, covers less information, has an expanded reference table, easier questions on the Regents exam (less math, less multi-step problems) AND it has a curve. This year if you scored an 82% on that exam, it was curved to a ONE HUNDRED! ON A STATE EXAM!

I have spoken to my biology professor in the fall quarter, as well as my hydrogen technology professor who teaches general chemistry as well. Both have had to change their cirriculum and make their cirriculum easier because inoming freshman do not have the background that students used to enter with. This has been particularly true in the Chemistry department. Classes have been so scaled back that many fourth year classes have become technical electives because the cirriculum has been pushed back so much.

To go farther, back when my grandfather became an engineer, if you were going to get accepted into a good engineering school, you had to know differential and integral calculus. Your first math class was differential equations. When I entered you needed pre-calc. The math standards have become so shotty that many schools have even backed off of THAT standard. Even my college will let you take a "dumb calc" pathway if you didn't have pre-calc in high school.

I just really have a hard time swallowing that. And I see you toss it out a lot.

This is in danger of getting us totally off task, but:

The complexity of AP courses being unwound as restrictions regarding who can take them are softened notwithstanding, less than 5% of students in AP courses in New York State have IEPs...which is reasonable, since an IEP holder may have a deficiency in a very specific area that doesn't substantially effect other learning. 5% is an exceptionally low number.



I'm explaining it poorly. You think I'm talking about the quantity of presented information, which has increased by roughly 15% since 1979. During that time, the average amount of instructional time in a single school year also increased by about 15%...I would say this is an unfortunate trend, for the record, but it's nothing to do with our current topic.

What I am saying: thanks largely to Hirsch's rediculous Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and the fact that, while most people will agree too much is being covered, everybody disagrees about what might be cut, the number of concepts covered in a public education has indeed doubled in that time period. To pack twice as many concepts, skills, and facts into an only slightly larger timeframe, one inevitably is forced to limit the time and depth allowed to each individual piece of the puzzle. Arts, music, and physical education courses have also been pulled back over the years to accomodate this trend, which (among other things) of course helped lead to renewed complaints by parents that their kids don't get enough exercise in school, and that that's why they're getting fat. One of the major frustrations among teachers regarding NCLB testing is that the assessments are generally written and designed along the same thinking that led to Hirsch's book, testing a huge array of semi-related concepts, which only further erodes any hope of teachers covering ideas with any depth.

McP@W - Does the charter system give the parent and child a greater say in their education? Or are they like public schools where you are at the mercy of the principal and teacher unions?

You'll have to elaborate the question for me. Both public schools and charter programs allow transfers to different schools in the district. Neither allows for any significant parental sway in WHAT is being taught, for reasons I think (?) are probably ascertainable from the information in my first post.

Teachers unions I don't really have any interest in discussing, good or bad. They don't have my respect or concern, I guess. They are essentially a nonentity to me. I have never belonged to one, I have never felt any pressure or experienced any mandate from one, have never talked to another teacher who had, and the one fight the Omaha extension of the NEA ever took up in the time I've been teaching they lost their asses off on, so I've seen no influence whatsoever. I sometimes forget it even exists.

As long as teacher's stick to cirriculum I've never had an issue iwth what's taught. But it seems to me that much of the education process is designed around the teacher rather than the student.

Example, my son is in grade 10. This past summer I had him take a grade 10 course in summer school. The school would not allow him to take a grade 11 course this year without a protracted fight. Even then the school was very passive aggressive about it. His first schedule was classes straight from 8:45 - 2:15 with no lunch. His longest break would be 5 minutes. We actually gave up trying to get him a grade 11 class, got him a textiles class in the middle of his schedule. I told him he never had to go to textiles and just use it as his lunch period. I'm not popular with that teacher bu what the hell.

I know my son could go to a different high school, and his commute would go from 5 minutes by bus (15 minutes by bike) to at least 45 minutes by bus. Not much of an option.

It just seems to me that quite often that the student is seen as the interloper in the design of the education process. Charter schools seem to be an improvement on it but are tehy still hamstrung by the same relationships in designing the education process?

I'm not really inclined to comment on a singular case in a specific school, about which I've only heard one side, but...



This is not the case at all. If anything, teachers generally feel like they are the interloper, between the students/parents and legalities they have little or no say in. I will absolutely acknowledge that I have worked with people who I would consider unsatisfactory teachers (the worst one I have ever witnessed, by the way, just left last year after being asked not to return and subsequently getting a job at an Arizona charter school), but I can honestly say I have personally never once seen any decision regarding how to serve a student boil down to what was best, convenient, or acceptable to the teacher. Even when the wrong choice was made, it was always made with the right intentions...I do think that the legalities, often setup to best serve the student and parent, occasionally prevent us from doing exactly that.

That, also, is a singular experience, but it's all I've got for you on that one.

EDIT: I take that back. I had some experiences in working with my stepson's middle school that didn't impress me at all, but that also is just personal experience.

Charter schools seem to be an improvement on it but are tehy still hamstrung by the same relationships in designing the education process?
As long as teacher's stick to cirriculum I've never had an issue iwth what's taught. But it seems to me that much of the education process is designed around the teacher rather than the student.

Example, my son is in grade 10. This past summer I had him take a grade 10 course in summer school. The school would not allow him to take a grade 11 course this year without a protracted fight. Even then the school was very passive aggressive about it. His first schedule was classes straight from 8:45 - 2:15 with no lunch. His longest break would be 5 minutes. We actually gave up trying to get him a grade 11 class, got him a textiles class in the middle of his schedule. I told him he never had to go to textiles and just use it as his lunch period. I'm not popular with that teacher bu what the hell.

I know my son could go to a different high school, and his commute would go from 5 minutes by bus (15 minutes by bike) to at least 45 minutes by bus. Not much of an option.



They're still bound by the same legalities, which is probably a part of why there isn't more of a departure from the norm in how they operate and function.