The President reported last evening on the state of the union. Allow me to appraise the state of America's charter-school movement in early 2005.
Now fourteen years old, it strikes me as a typical adolescent, full of promise and with some accomplishments to its credit, but also the source of exasperation and frustration to those who want it to be more and better than it is. It's headstrong, ornery, disorganized, and insistent on its independence and its rights even when not quite ready to exercise them wisely.
Like every teenager I've known, the charter movement deserves a mixed report. But it's only fourteen, for Pete's sake, and nobody should pass final judgment at this stage of its development any more than one would a boy or girl at this age. So much remains to be determined, to be developed, to be tried - and so many more mistakes are waiting to be made en route to maturity.
Six things are especially worth knowing about the charter movement in 2005.
First, the man in the street still knows next to nothing about it, maybe hasn't yet even heard of charter schools and, if he has, is unsure what they are. ("Some sort of private school, maybe?" "A school for kids with problems?") Recent polling, nationally and in California, shows that participants in the charter movement naturally have a fair notion what it is, as do many other educators and policy makers, but this entire approach to schooling is not even on most Americans' radar screen. That obliviousness creates, on the one hand, a terrific opportunity for this movement to make itself known in positive ways; but also an environment in which bad news on TV or hostile comments by public figures can easily foster negative opinions - precisely because the audience has no independent base of knowledge or experience.
Second, despite its faint public profile, the charter movement has grown large enough to threaten various established interests, hence to have developed real enemies. With 3,300 schools enrolling nearly a million kids; with a handful of cities finding upwards of ten, even 20 percent of their K-12 student in these schools; with "virtual" charter schooling spreading fast (80 or so of them today, with 28,000 pupils, says the Center for Education Reform); and with some systems (e.g., Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, sundry Massachusetts towns) finding their budgets shrinking fast due to families exiting for charter schools, the charter challenge to traditional models of schooling has gotten beyond theory and ideology and become a bread-and-butter issue for establishment educators.
Third, in fact, the charter movement today may have more enemies than friends in high places, especially since its first generation of political backers has largely vanished from office. Nobody expects the teacher unions to vanish, nor the school board associations, nor the ed schools, and for the most part they're doing their damnedest to rein in and discredit charter schools, which they see as eating their lunch, threatening their monopoly, and challenging their assumptions. On the pro-charter side, one doesn't see lots of governors or legislative leaders any more. For the most part, the business community is sitting on its hands. And the White House is mute.
Fourth, the charter movement's spotty academic performance record to date, though readily explained by and to its friends, empowers its enemies. So do its occasional financial screw-ups, melt-downs and signs of unbridled greed, not to mention its slipshod self-policing. (Teenagers don't pick up their dirty clothes, either.)
Fifth, like an adolescent, the charter movement needs to mature, which includes, above all, getting beyond some favorite myths from its childhood. Foremost among these:
- That just about anyone can run a good school and should be allowed to try.
- That authorizers (a.k.a. sponsors) and authorizing aren't very important.
- That academic results aren't too important, either, so long as people are eager to attend the school.
- That great schools can make it on a financial shoestring.
- That the charter movement can succeed in decentralized fashion, without coherent leadership, common agendas, and structured organizations.
Sixth, the No Child Left Behind act poses new challenges to charter schools and their movement, including its single-minded emphasis on academic achievement; its impatience with school autonomy and diversity (and tendency to wrap all schools in uniform rules and measures); and the mixed blessing of its threat to "reconstitute" failing district schools as involuntary charter schools.
There's good news, too. The re-energized Charter School Leadership Council introduced itself to the world this week at the National Press Club, along with an important and encouraging synthesis by Bryan Hassel of numerous studies of charter-school performance. (See below for more.) The California Charter School Association held an awesome conference last week in Pasadena. Florida's attorney general recently held that the state must fund charter schools the same as district schools. The massive Gates Foundation is taking charter schools seriously as a reform strategy. And more.
Will the good news trump the bad? I'm not sure. It's a teenager, remember. It's neither predictable nor well-disciplined. For it to mature successfully, I submit, the facts outlined above need to be faced and the challenges addressed.
Why bother? Because this kid matters a lot. He points the way to a brighter and very different future for American public education itself, a "tight-loose" structure in which results count hugely but schools can produce them through the structures and means they see fit, in which "systems of schools" replace "school systems," in which flexibility triumphs over bureaucracy, competition supersedes monopoly, and consumers wield at least as much influence over their children's education as do providers.
The fate of the charter movement is thus enormously important to the future of American K-12 education. But this teenager could end up in jail or out on the streets instead of college. He and those who care about him have some heavy lifting ahead.
