I'm not prone to paranoia but lately I see an awful lot of folks bent on stopping the charter movement dead in its tracks and I also see them making much headway. I don't think it exaggerates to say that a war is being waged against charter schools. As with many wars, however, both sides have something to answer for. Those who want this decade-old education reform strategy to have a longer opportunity to show what it can accomplish need to recognize that their own failings aren't making its defense any easier.
Attacks are coming from many directions. State officials lead some of them (e.g. Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Michigan). Local school systems spearhead others (e.g. California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts). Teacher unions, having failed in legislative chambers to arrest the charter movement, are turning to the courtroom (in Ohio, Pennsylvania). Governors who claim to be pro-charter (e.g. Georgia's Barnes, Texas's Perry) are going along with newly restrictive legislation. Blue-ribbon panels convened to solve charter problems end up compounding them.
The specifics take many forms and sometimes those behind them are actually trying to help. For instance, Ohio auditor Jim Petro thought he was improving the Buckeye State's charter program with his scathing report on the Ohio Department of Education's sloppy stewardship of that program. But Ohio's teacher unions had blood in their eyes when they brought ever-widening lawsuits against the program itself. The Georgia legislature (and Governor Barnes) strengthened that state's limp charter law in certain respects but sorely weakened it in others. Indiana's state superintendent may simply have received bad legal advice when she decided not to give her state's new charters any money during their first semester. And Texas and New Jersey claimed to be correcting "abuses" when they imposed reams of red tape on their states' relatively freewheeling charter programs.
But one only needs to be a little bit paranoid to see big trouble brewing for charters, whether the troublemakers mean them well or ill.
What accounts for this changing climate? Three problems seem fundamental.
First, much as it also resists standards-based accountability, our deeply conservative public education system is fighting back against this disruptive innovation, one that shifts power, changes control of resources, introduces new forms of accountability, upsets longstanding practices, and brings new uncertainties. This does not have as much to do with charters in particular as with change in general.
Second, the "charter movement" is leaderless and rudderless, less an army than a motley array of individualistic schools, self-absorbed educators and parents, over-eager entrepreneurs, detached analysts and theorists, and advocacy groups that focus intently on their immediate issues but aren't good at helping the broader public understand what charter schools are and why they're a good idea, especially for poor kids. It's not unlike Afghanistan: plenty of warlords, rival parties and local chieftains but nothing akin to an effective national government.
Third, as presently constituted, the charter machinery simply isn't working very well in many places. Thus the widespread impulse to tinker and fiddle with it. The biggest issues aren't, as many suppose, weak academic achievement by the schools themselves. (In fact, careful research is finding in a growing number of states that charters add greater academic value to disadvantaged youngsters than conventional public schools do.) Rather, the core malfunctions are (a) too many feckless, inept authorizers (aka sponsors) that casually issue charters to groups unprepared to run successful schools, are sloppy about results-based accountability, too eager to revert to regulation as the antidote for charter ills, and clueless about what to require before renewing a school's contract; (b) a small but visible group of greedy charter operators more interested in making a few bucks at state expense than running good schools for needy kids; and (c) ill-conceived state laws that starve charters of needed resources while not freeing them from enough of the red tape that binds conventional schools.
The charter phenomenon in America is now a decade old and in many ways it's made remarkable strides: huge growth in schools, surging demand for them, widespread customer (and educator) satisfaction, much organizational innovation, signs of rebirth in local control and civil society, some swell specimens of successful schools, a number of interesting people and groups entering the field, and promising signs that charter-led competition is prompting overdue change in the traditional system. The essential concept-freedom in return for results-has seeped into the larger education debate and mainstream organizations (such as the Education Commission of the States) can now visualize entire school systems run on the charter model. We can actually see schools shutting down because they do a lousy job. We also find charter-like schools in England, Canada and Singapore and hear talk of them even in Japan. At the fast-changing intersection of charters and technology we see some tantalizing creations-e.g. "virtual charter schools"-that are so different from 1950's-style public education that nobody yet knows quite how to deal with them.
At another level, however, the charter movement is losing its edge. Problems such as those noted above are growing more prominent than the promise of the charter idea itself. Political leaders who were much taken with that early promise have ridden off into the sunset. Their successors tend to view charters as somebody's else's idea, to be more aware of malfunctions than successes, and to be skillfully manipulated by establishment interests that are now wide awake to the fact that charters aren't willingly going away and can be kept in check only by strong-arming politicians.
Last week's commission report in Michigan illustrated many of these dynamics. (You can find it at http://www.charterschools.msu.edu/cschools_rpt.html.) Because Michigan lawmakers were stalemated over a bunch of charter issues (especially lifting the "cap" on how many of these "public school academies" are permitted), the legislature called for a special panel "to conduct a complete and objective review of all aspects of public school academies in Michigan." Chaired by Michigan State University president Peter McPherson, the commission also included the state superintendent of schools (who has already distanced himself from its recommendations), several experts, a couple of charter people and the head of the Michigan Education Association. Like most such carefully balanced groups, it was destined to make compromises, and that's what it did, recommending a modest easing of the cap but also more red tape for charter schools and their sponsors (all in the name of "stronger accountability," of course). On the sticky but vital issue of finances, the commission simply punted.
If its recommendations are followed, Michigan will have more charter schools but they'll have less freedom to run themselves and will look a lot more like conventional public schools. The charter advocates on the panel acknowledge this but say it was the best deal they could strike.
With other states headed in the same direction, it's time to pause and ask: if the essence of the charter idea is slowly drained from the reality of charter schools, why bother creating more of them? Charter schools become a faux reform, a label affixed to an institution that has scant opportunity to do anything differently. This is as much a sham as claiming to be engaged in standards-based reform but doing so with crummy standards, shoddy tests and no real consequences.
As T.S. Eliot famously wrote in "The Hollow Men" we may begin to say of the charter phenomenon, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
