NEWS RELEASE
For more information,
call Mike
McLaughlin at the
N.C. Center at (919) 832-2839
The
“Charter school supporters
are advocating that the legislature increase the number of charter schools
allowed from the current cap of 100, but the Center’s research indicates that
such a move would be premature,” says Mike McLaughlin, editor of North
Carolina Insight. “Too many of the
schools are mediocre to poor academic performers, too many are in fiscal
disarray, and too many are segregated by race.
That’s not what the legislature hoped for when it began the charter
school experiment.”
Based
on its findings, the Center recommends: (1) that the state retain its current
cap of 100 charter schools until it has five full years of data that can prove
the worth of the charter experiment; (2) that the State Board of Education not
grant any more charters that target a narrow racial or ethnic population; (3)
that the N.C. General Assembly implement financial reforms to require that
charter schools spend one year planning and getting their financial affairs in
order before opening to students; and (4) that the 2005 General Assembly –
armed with adequate data about charter school performance – consider whether to
raise the cap on charter schools and, if so, by how much.
In
January 2002, the State Board of Education recommended that the General
Assembly raise the cap on charter schools to 110 in 2003, provided a range of
conditions is met. And, bills are
pending before the legislature to raise the cap to 135 schools or eliminate the
cap altogether.
Charter schools are
nonprofit corporations run by volunteer boards of directors that have
significant autonomy in determining how the schools are operated, yet they are
hybrids in that they rely primarily on state funds. As nonprofits, they receive freedom from many
government regulations and are free to raise money from foundations,
corporations, and individuals. Their
governing boards are not subject to local boards of education, and they are
free to pursue the best teachers, who may be attracted by small class size,
small schools, and the opportunity to have a greater say in operations. Yet charter schools are public schools in
that anyone is eligible to attend, the schools do not charge tuition, and they
are guaranteed a certain level of state and local funds. The idea behind charter schools is that
freedom from various rules and regulations will create room for innovation and
transmit fresh ideas and enthusiasm to public schools.
North Carolina began its
charter school movement in 1996 with the passage of enabling legislation that
has since been ranked as 12th best nationally among the 38 states
that allow charter schools by the Center for Education Reform. That Center in
The
Charters
have yet to prove themselves on the other three goals: (4) improving student learning,
(5) increasing learning opportunities for
all students, with a special emphasis on at-risk or gifted students, and (6)
providing innovative teaching that can be adapted to the traditional public
schools. While some students excel in
charters, charter schools as a whole are not performing as well as the public
schools. So far, charters also have not
proven they are better at serving at-risk students. And, the state’s own Charter School Evaluation
Report found little evidence of new forms of instruction that had not been
tried in the traditional public schools.
The
Center identified three key weaknesses that prevent it from endorsing expansion
of the charter school movement in
The
Center based its study on a review of existing state and national data, site
visits to charter schools across
Charter schools have made
large gains on state writing test scores, though they are still below the state
average as a group. For the 2000-2001
academic year, 53.6 percent of charter school fourth
graders passed the writing test, up from 36.2 percent the previous year. For seventh graders, the passing rate
increased from 55.2 percent to 62.8 percent.
For tenth graders, the passing rate increased from 23.4 percent to 36.8
percent. The state averages for all public schools on the 2000-2001 writing
test were 68.8 percent passing for fourth graders, 73.3 percent passing for
seventh graders, and 53.9 percent passing for tenth graders.
Some schools have delivered
on the charter school promise, and some clearly have not.
In a separate effort from
the Center’s study, the legislature required the N.C. Department of Public
Instruction (DPI) to evaluate charter schools.
Performed under contract, the state-sponsored charter school evaluation
report found in a three-year study that charters do not perform as well as
their traditional public school counterparts on end-of-grade tests, even when
students with similar academic and demographic backgrounds are compared. An additional analysis by the Office of
Charter Schools within DPI found that when the first year of operations was
excluded, charter school students actually showed more academic growth than did
their peers in the traditional public schools.
Nonetheless, at the end of the three-year period, the charter students
remained behind students in comparable public schools.
Charter advocates said this
was because the ABC accountability program is not appropriate for charter
schools, which seek to innovate yet are tied by the
test to the state curriculum. Charter
school advocates also countered that (a) DPI’s study
was limited to a small number of schools, (b) the study included the first year
of charter operations, a year that often finds charters mired in start-up
difficulties, and (c) many charter schools serve students at high risk of
academic failure. Serving a
disproportionate number of high-risk students makes it difficult to achieve
high end-of-grade scores, advocates say.
The
state’s charter school evaluation report also found that charters are doing a
worse job than the traditional public schools in educating African-American
youth, despite their attractiveness to minorities. This has resulted in an increase in the
achievement gap between black and white students enrolled in charter
schools. “In other public schools, the
achievement gap has been approximately the same size each year, and it has been
smaller than the gap in charter schools,” the report indicated. However, DPI’s
Office of Charter Schools found that excluding the first year, African-American
youth show greater academic growth in charters than in traditional schools.
Aside
from academic performance, the Center found a lack of racial balance in many
charter schools. Charter schools often
incorporate ethnic themes such as those employed by
Of
the 97 charter schools operating in 2000-2001, 30 had student populations more
than 80 percent non-white – the vast majority of which are African-American
students, despite a state law requiring charter schools to reasonably reflect
the racial make-up of the general population of their local school districts. Seven charter schools had no white
students. In addition, the evaluation
found eight charter schools to have a lower percentage of non-white students
than any traditional public school in the same local district.
Concerns About Fiscal Management in Charter Schools
The
State Board of Education has revoked 14 charters since the first charter
schools opened in 1997. In most of these
revocations, fiscal difficulties were cited as reason for the closings. Nine additional schools failed to open or
voluntarily relinquished their charters.
Charter advocates say one reason for the fiscal problems is that unlike
traditional public schools, charter schools do not receive public funds for
capital construction. This can amount to
about $1,000 per student per year for building new classroom facilities in the
public schools.
The
N.C. Charter School Act requires that at least 75 percent of teachers in grades
K-5, at least 50 percent in grades 6-8, and at least 50 percent in grades 9-12 hold
teaching certificates. In a November
2001 meeting with the State Board of Education, DPI officials stated that
approximately 20 percent of the charter schools appear not to have enough
certified teachers to meet the minimum legislative requirement. Charter schools counter that much of this
apparent gap is due to confusion or delays in reporting and processing of
teacher qualifications, rather than an actual deficiency in number of certified
teachers.
Jan Crotts,
executive director of the North Carolina Association of School Administrators,
says the loss of students from public schools to charter schools can cause
fiscal problems in small, rural school districts. “For a large and growing district like
On the whole, the Center
found too many question marks regarding charter school performance to recommend
expansion at the present time. “If
charter schools were to get a report card from the state, they would still have
a check beside ‘needs to improve’ in several key categories,” says
McLaughlin. “That’s not a solid
foundation on which to argue for an increase in the number of charter schools.”
The
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For more information on the
Center’s study of charter schools in