The debate over school choice and charter schools has grown ever more contentious since Betsy DeVos assumed office last year. Many of the charter schools in DeVos’s home state of Michigan are alleged to be plagued by corruption, and her proposals surrounding school vouchers and school choice have provoked outrage among American voters.
Despite the shadow that DeVos’s rhetoric has cast over charter schools across the nation, evidence suggests that the quality of charter schools varies significantly between cities and states. While charter schools in many states tend to perform at lower levels than traditional public schools, urban charter schools in Massachusetts—and in Boston especially—tend to outperform district schools.
The stark differences between charter schools in Boston and elsewhere may be due in large part to the more rigorous authorization process to which Massachusetts holds charter schools. For-profit charter schools are illegal in Massachusetts, unlike in DeVos’s home state of Michigan, where such schools have become the norm.
Yet the fact that non-charter public schools in Massachusetts are themselves stronger than those in other states raises questions as to whether a strong foundation is necessary in order to build strong charter schools. The strength of Massachusetts’s district schools—and the focus on education that remains embedded in the state’s history and culture—may be closely tied to the high achievement of its charter schools. If this is the case—and a strong public school system is a necessary prerequisite for successful charter schools—then low-performing states are taking the wrong approach in their efforts to improve their educational systems.
Context and Controversy: A Brief Overview
The controversy surrounding charter schools—publicly funded, tuition-free schools that are privately managed and are typically staffed by non-unionized teachers—has gained momentum since the first charter school opened in Minnesota back in 1992. Supporters hail charter schools as centers for innovation and point to the exemplary test scores that many charter schools have achieved. Teachers’ unions typically oppose charter schools, believing that they siphon funding from traditional public schools, are hostile environments for English language learners and special needs students, and are sometimes plagued by corruption.
Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni affirmed this latter view, telling the HPR that charter schools are “not deeply democratic or even remotely democratic.” According to Madeloni, public schools should serve as spaces where “all students are welcome,” yet charter schools tend to undermine this sense of “profound openness.” Issues surrounding funding also lie at the forefront of Madeloni’s concerns. Charter schools are funded on a per-pupil basis—meaning that when a student leaves a traditional district school to attend a charter, the charter receives a sum of money equivalent to the average spending per pupil in that district. The district, in turn, loses that amount of funding, even though many of the fixed costs of education remain the same in the short term.
In spite of these concerns, the success achieved by charter schools in Boston and other areas of Massachusetts is difficult to ignore, and demand for charter schools in the state vastly exceeds the number of seats available—38,000 children remain on charter school waitlists.
In the fall of 2016, a state ballot question proposed raising the cap on charter schools—thereby opening more seats—though Massachusetts voters struck down the measure. Madeloni and the Massachusetts Teachers Association assumed a leadership role in the campaign against the measure.
Troubled Charter Schools and the Rise of Betsy DeVos
The appointment of Betsy DeVos has alarmed both critics and supporters of charter schools. In addition to being a fierce advocate for charter schools, DeVos supports granting families government-funded vouchers to private and parochial schools, essentially allocating public funds to religious institutions.
Charter schools in DeVos’s home state of Michigan, meanwhile, have been the subject of scrutiny for their utter lack of transparency. According to an article published in the New York Times Magazine, DeVos’s home state has “ceded nearly all control” to groups such as universities, community colleges, and existing public-school districts—granting them the power to approve the charters of would-be schools and act as sole oversight bodies.” For-profit companies, run approximately 80 percent of Michigan charter schools, as compared to just 16 percent of all charter schools across states.
In Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, charter schools have received a similarly negative reputation due to corruption or poor performance, with students tending to score at lower levels than those at traditional public schools.
Massachusetts Charter Schools and the Miracle in Boston
Charter schools in Massachusetts, meanwhile, have achieved strikingly impressive results, particularly in Boston. Stanford researchers report that “the average growth rate of Boston charter students in math and reading is the largest CREDO [the Stanford research coalition] has seen in any city or state thus far.” In a report entitled “Let the Numbers Have Their Say,” Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, concludes that in the course of one school year, “the oversubscribed charter schools in the Boston area are closing one half of the Black-White achievement gap in math and roughly one fifth of the Black-White achievement gap in English.”
It appears that Massachusetts’ charter laws are responsible, at least in large part, for the superior performance of the state’s charter schools. Indeed, Massachusetts prohibits for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs), and its process for authorizing charter schools is particularly rigorous. According to Alison Bagg, director of charter schools and school redesign at the Massachusetts Department of Education, Massachusetts is one of the few states in which the Department of Education serves as the sole authorizer of charter schools. “You have some states that have hundreds and hundreds of charters schools, all authorized by these districts or non-profits,” Bagg explained to the HPR. In Massachusetts, by contrast, “it has been historically very difficult to get a charter,” and the state has been recognized by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers as “one of the leaders in charter school authorizing nationwide.”
The charter renewal process is also quite rigorous, according to Bagg. The state monitors charter schools closely and has the ability to close charter schools that have achieved poor results—a practice that is not universal across states.
Caleb Hurst-Hiller, a founding faculty member and now Head of School at the Community Charter School of Cambridge, also commented on the “remarkable amount of oversight” and “real accountability” that characterizes Massachusetts’ processes for authorizing and monitoring charter schools. For example, even though CCSC has achieved consistently strong Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System scores and Advanced Placement participation, the school—like all other Massachusetts’ charter schools—must receive approval to renew its license every five years and is subject to “mid-cycle check-ins.”
Erica Brown, chief of policy and practice at Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, meanwhile, believes that the particular success of Boston charter schools can also be attributed in part to the collaborative spirit of Boston Charter Alliance, which encourages best-practice sharing between the 15 charter schools in Boston. A former charter school leader and alliance member herself, Brown told the HPR that the organization offered an “incredibly … hardworking group of people who are relentlessly committed to quality and relentlessly committed to kids,” and one that made it “almost difficult to fail,” given the support network for seeking new methods and troubleshooting challenges.
Charter Schools and District Schools: A Correlation
Massachusetts’ educational success is certainly not limited to its charter schools. Massachusetts public schools across the board rank the highest in the nation, and at the international level, Massachusetts students achieve the fourth highest reading scores in the world—outpaced only by students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Ironically, while traditional public schools and charter schools are increasingly regarded as entities at odds with one another, there appears to be some relationship between strong overall educational systems and strong charter schools. In New Jersey, the state with the second highest-performing educational system, charter schools also tend to outperform district schools. Meanwhile, the low performance of public schools in states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Texas—states that also have significant percentages of low-performing charter schools—seems to substantiate this relationship from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Nevada, for example, is the state with the lowest-ranking educational system in the country, and its charter schools have produced troubling results: according to a Las Vegas Sun article citing a Stanford study, “Nevada’s charter school students lose between six and seven months of learning each year compared with their traditional public school counterparts.”
The possible correlation between district school performance and charter school performance is by no means fool-proof. Louisiana, for example, is among the country’s lowest-performing states when it comes to education, yet charter schools have achieved promising results.
On the whole, however, some correlation exists between charter school performance and district school performance. Charter schools appear weaker than district schools not only in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, but also in Ohio and Pennsylvania, while they have achieved mixed results in California.
Other Connections
The potential correlation between district school performance and charter school performance may be due in part to the differing quality of various state departments of education, which preside over district schools but are also often responsible for authorizing charters. A state’s commitment to supporting teachers also seems to factor heavily into the equation.
Analysts often attribute Massachusetts’ success to the passage of an Education Reform Act in 1993. Among other measures, the act set a minimum level of funding for each district in the state and gave way to increased state spending on education by 8 percent per year. The bill also created a set of educational standards and established a statewide standardized test, known as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, while legislating that the lowest performing schools would be temporarily supervised by state officials.
The Education Reform Act may constitute both a root cause of Massachusetts’ educational success and a symptom of the state’s longstanding emphasis on education. It is perhaps no coincidence that the state with the best public schools was also home to the original Common School Movement back in the 19th century, and the underlying strength of the Department of Education may be responsible for the success of both the district schools and the charter schools.
“What has happened in Massachusetts is that it’s the Department of Education who’s holding districts accountable and charter schools accountable,” said Brown, adding, “charter schools take the same test as district schools, and the commissioner of education and the board of education tell a district that their scores are unacceptable in the same way that they would tell a charter school that their scores are unacceptable… It’s not just coincidence that there’s a good charter school sector and a strong performing traditional district sector.”
Brown further noted, “If you had a great authorizer and you had a great Department of Education in any state, then there’s nothing that says that both sectors can’t be great—and should both be great, as we push one another.”
In addition, Bagg and Hurst-Hiller suggested that the talent pool among educators and school leaders in Boston and Massachusetts has contributed to success. “The results of the school are a credit to the faculty who have done the incredibly difficult work that is teaching effectively and throwing themselves into this work,” said Hurst-Hiller.
Massachusetts may also promote greater respect for the teaching profession than many other states, achieving higher salaries and lower attrition rates. By contrast, the same states with low-performing educational systems and even lower-performing charter schools also tend to have particularly negative reputations among teachers. Arizona, for example, has been labeled the “worst state to be a teacher” by USA Today. According to the Huffington Post, “When you adjust for cost of living, Arizona elementary teachers are the lowest paid in the nation,” while “[h]igh school teachers come in 48th.” Nearly three quarters of Arizona school districts are understaffed due to problems recruiting and retaining teachers. And among teachers that were hired in 2013, 42 percent quit within three years or fewer.
Not surprisingly, the treatment of teachers seems to make a significant difference when it comes to the quality of public education in a given state. The “talent pool” that a state builds among educators may in turn lay the groundwork for a generation of strong charter school leaders.
Building the Foundation
Due perhaps in large part to strong existing traditions at the state level and to a long-term commitment to building and retaining teachers, charter schools seem to have received the greatest acclaim in states—Massachusetts especially—where the district schools already perform at high levels. By contrast, in many of the states that need education reform the most—Nevada, for example—charter schools have not been achieving the desired results.
Charter schools are an attractive option for struggling school districts, appearing to offer beacons of efficiency and innovation in otherwise languishing educational systems. But if the trajectories of the highest-performing and lowest-performing states tell us anything, perhaps a strong foundation is more important than we realize.
Image Credit: Flickr/Alex Starr