There are two basic arguments for charter schools’ existence, note Michael McShane and Jenn Hatfield: First, by taking advantage of flexibility not afforded traditional public schools, they can raise student achievement. Second, they can use that freedom and deregulation to create a more diverse set of schools than might otherwise come into being. There is an increasingly robust body of evidence on charter schools’ academic performance. Far less is known about the second aspect. So how diverse is the nation’s charter sector?
The short answer is: more diverse than you might expect, but less than we might hope. McShane and Hatfield ran the numbers on 1,151 schools, which combine to educate nearly half a million students in seventeen different cities. Based on each school’s description of its own mission or model, they were divided into “general” or “specialized” schools. Within the latter category, schools were further divided in thirteen sub-types, including “no-excuses,” STEM schools, progressive, single-sex, etc. There’s an even split between generalized and specialized schools, with the most common types being no-excuses and progressive.
The pair also found significant variation between cities. They contend that these distinctions are driven by demographics, the age and market share of each city’s charter sector, and (most interestingly) the number and type of authorizers. The higher the percentage of black residents living in a city, they found, the more students are enrolled in no-excuses schools. More poor residents tend to correlate with more specialized schools. McShane and Hatfield posit a “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Charter Schools” to explain their findings. “Academic achievement is often the primary concern for low-income communities; thus more no-excuses and STEM schools in poorer communities,” they write. “But in wealthier communities, families have the luxury of looking for specialized options such as international and foreign language schools.” Authorizers also “might be inclined to support established models” over programs that are more innovative but harder to implement (hence more KIPP). Or market diversity could simply be a function of maturity: The older a city’s charter sector—and the greater the number of authorizers—the more diverse the menu of options. “There is no ideal mix of schools for a given community,” McShane and Hatfield conclude, “or at least there is no ideal mix that can be determined by people outside of the community.” It’s not unreasonable, they observe, to make the diversity of charter offerings a “second-order concern behind school quality.” Yet as the authors note (nicely citing Fordham’s What Parents Want report), not every parent is a test score hawk. “If we require all schools to perform well across one set of metrics before we think about allowing for diversity,” McShane and Hatfield conclude, “we will most likely limit the amount of diversity that we will see.”
SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane and Jenn Hatfield, “Measuring diversity in charter school offerings,” American Enterprise Institute (July 2015).
