UCLA Charter School Study
Amy Stuart Wells is the Principal Investigator of the UCLA Charter School Study. Research Associates are Ligia Artiles, Sibyll Carnochan, Camille Wilson Cooper, Cynthia Grubik, Jennifer Jellison Holme, Alejandra Lopez, Janelle Scott, Julie Slayton, and Ash Vasudeva
Executive Summary
This report provides an overview of finding from one of the first intensive studies of charter school reform in California, the second state to pass charter school legislation and the state with both the second largest number of charter schools and the most students enrolled in these schools. Charter school reform allows groups of parents, educators, and entrepreneurs to create more independent schools, free from many state and local regulations.
The purpose of this two-and-a-half year study was to examine many of the most prominent claims of charter school advocates against the day-to-day experiences of educators, parents, and students in charter schools as well as in nearby public schools.
We conducted case studies of 17 charter schools in 10 school districts across the state. We sampled for diversity at both the district and school level in order to capture the range of experiences within this reform movement.
While charter reform as a public policy tool prescribes no particular school-level practice or singular reform strategy, it is appealing to educators and policy makers due to claims about how charter reform will spur much-needed change throughout the public system.
Claims about Charter School Reform
Claims about charter school reform include:
• Accountability: Charter schools, more than other public schools, are more accountable for student outcomes; given the threat of having its charter revoked, a charter school will work harder to meet its stated performance goals.
• Autonomy and Empowerment: In exchange for greater accountability, charter schools are granted autonomy from the bureaucratic, rule-based public system; empowered by this flexibility, charter school educators will better serve students and families.
• Efficiency: Charter schools are more efficient. Freed from bureaucratic demands, charter schools will be able to do more with fewer resources.
• Choice: Charter schools provide more choices to more families, particularly those who traditionally have had the fewest choices in the public educational system.
• Competition: Charter school reform, by creating a competitive market, will force change in the entire public system.
• Models of Innovation: Charter schools are more innovative; creating new models of schooling and serving as laboratories from which other public schools can learn.
The findings that emerged from our investigation of 10 school districts and 17 charter schools across the state shed light on how charter schools’ experiences compare to the stated claims of reform advocates. The following are the study’s 15 major findings:
Finding #1--Charter schools in California are, in most instances, not yet being held accountable for enhanced academic achievement of their students. They are more likely to be held fiscally accountable.
Finding #2--School boards are ambivalent about their responsibilities to monitor charter schools; many are reluctant to become involved.
Finding #3--Charter schools have multiple constituencies to whom they see themselves as accountable.
Finding #4--Charter schools vary widely in the amount of operating autonomy they need or want and in the demands they make on districts.
Finding #5--The amount of public funding that charter schools receive for operating expenses ranges widely from one district to the next and even within the same district.
Finding #6--Private resources are usually necessary for the survival of charter schools.
Finding #7--Charter schools vary widely in their ability to generate private sources of revenue.
Finding #8--Charter schools often depend heavily on strong, well-connected leaders.
Finding #9--Charter schools exercise considerable control over the type of students they serve. Thus, in some cases charter schools have more choice than do parents.
Finding #10--The requirement that charter schools reflect the racial/ethnic makeup of their districts has not been enforced. Other demographic differences between charter schools and nearby public schools exist and vary by local context.
Finding #11--Teachers in charter schools value their freedom, relatively small classes, and esprit de corps or collegiality; but heavy workloads are an issue.
Finding #12--Although not obliged to do so, most charter schools continue to employ teachers with regular state credentials.
Finding #13--Teachers in conversion charter schools continue to belong to teachers unions, but those in start-up schools do not.
Finding #14 --There are no mechanisms in place for charter schools and regular public schools to learn from each other.
Finding #15--Public school educators’ believe that charter schools have an unfair advantage inhibiting competition.
Looking across all of the 15 findings from this study, it is clear that in the majority of cases, the experiences of charter schools do not support the advocates’ claims. Claims about greater autonomy leading to greater satisfaction and decision-making capacity are supported, in part, by the data. Most charter schools do tend to have greater autonomy from district and state directives – although the degree varies greatly across schools and districts. However, the simple notion that autonomy in and of itself is a good thing is not supported by the data. Rather we have learned that in many cases charter schools have relied heavily on the support and services available to them through their local districts or other entities.
Similarly, charter school teachers do express a sense of empowerment, derived from their freedom to create smaller, more intimate school communities and their enhanced professional identities. Still, they face difficult working conditions in some cases and wonder how long they can keep up with the pace of work at their schools.
While the above-mentioned issues do, in part, support claims made about charter reform, the bulk of our data controverts advocates’ claims. For example, the evidence shows charter schools are not more accountable for improving student outcomes than are other public schools in California. This has happened for several reasons; namely, there has been no consistent statewide assessment system in California since the charter school law was passed, charter school founders engage in this reform to accomplish a wide range of goals, charter proposals themselves are often vague regarding specific outcomes, and school district officials often lack information about charter schools’ performance and are ambivalent about their responsibilities over charter schools. Unsure how to measure and hold schools accountable for performance, districts tend to monitor charter schools’ use of fiscal resources, which is the accountability role they are most likely to play in the regular public system.
Further more, there is no evidence that charter schools can "do more with less." Rather, much of the evidence illustrates that charter schools rely heavily on supplemental private resources and do what they can to extract a greater share of public dollars. In this way, we see charter school reform at the forefront of efforts to privatize public education, as the reform forces these schools to rely on private funds. The wealth of the local community and the presence of well-connected leaders determine, in many instances, whether a charter school can garner the necessary resources.
On other issues, this study’s data speak to some of the claims about charter reform, not by confirming or disconfirming them, but by reframing the terms of the debate. While advocates claim that charter reform will give parents more choice, our study suggests that the issue is considerably more complicated. We found that charter schools are both the chosen and the chooser. Charter schools have more control than most other public schools in California over who is recruited and who can attend. We learned that charter schools make use of various strategies for choosing parents and students – e.g., targeted recruitment and requirements such as parent or student contracts that dictate what families must give to the school.
While this ability to choose their students and families allows charter schools to create a community identity, which can foster a shared vision for change, our findings raise questions about which parents have the range of choices the charter policy assumes. Without transportation, faced with sometimes demanding parent contracts, and with limited access to information about the practices of charter schools, some parents face serious constraints on any choices they might make. Since charter schools are not held accountable for their success in enrolling a student body that reflects the racial/ethnic make-up of their host district, these facts about charter reform in California suggest that the debate over charter schools and choice is often silent on critical policy questions.
In addition, our data also show that regular public schools in districts with charter schools feel little to no pressure from the charter schools to change the way they do business. In other words, our data do not support the notion that charter reform, via competition, will spur changes in the wider system. In fact, the existence of charter schools may mean that these public schools receive students not accepted at or asked to leave the charter schools, or that they lose their most involved parents to the charters. Furthermore, overcrowding in many California schools hampers the concept of competition for students.
At the same time, we saw that the charter schools we observed, in all but one case, were not serving as models of innovation from which educators in other schools could learn. We found that there were no mechanisms in place for charter schools and regular public schools to learn from each other. Also, there was little communication among the schools, especially in situations in which the charter schools were more independent or when they were established to be in direct competition with the public schools. While we do not have enough data from public schools to draw broad conclusions about the "ripple effects" of charter reform, we do have sufficient data to suggest that charter reform to date has not spurred competition between charters and other public schools, nor have charter schools become models of change and reform throughout the system.
Implications
We draw the following set of public implications from our findings:
• If charter schools are to be held accountable, a new system of accountability must be devised. Such a system must be broader and more comprehensive than a single standardized test, recognize the range of academic and non-academic goals of charter school operators, and balance these goals against the public’s need to know how these more independent schools are spending tax dollars.
Furthermore, charter school petitioners should be required to be more specific about their goals and intended outcomes in their charter proposals. This information should be made public so that charter schools are accountable to taxpayers and voters. And finally, the measure of academic achievement of students in charter schools should be longitudinal and not one-shot test scores compared to the public school down the street. The self-selection bias inherent in charter schools or any school of choice needs to be factored into analyses of charter school accountability.
• It is time to rest the fired rhetoric that all bureaucracy is bad and all autonomy from bureaucracy is good.
There are many charter schools in California that could not exist without the ongoing support of their local school districts. In fact, policy makers and educators have a lot to learn from charter school operators about which aspects of autonomy are most important – e.g., the freedom to hire teachers – and which aspects of the bureaucracy are most supportive. Our data suggest there will not be a lot of agreement across charter schools on these particular aspects, but more information on this issue could help frame future debates about how to provide public schools with more autonomy while maintaining supportive bureaucracies.
• To the extent that charter school reform is going to provide students and communities most in need with better educational programs, federal and state funding for charter schools should be targeted to low-income communities that lack corporate sponsorship to start charter schools. Furthermore, information about charter school funding sources should be disseminated broadly so that the long-term implications of privatization of public education through charter school reform can be publicly debated.
• If a central goal of charter school reform is to provide more choice to parents who have had the fewest options, our data suggest that charter schools have too much choice over who attends. In order to assure more parental choice, information about charter schools must be disseminated broadly and the ability of charter schools to maintain stricter discipline codes and mandatory parental involvement contracts must be curtailed.
Furthermore, states and districts would need to provide transportation for students who choose charter schools but lack the means to get to them.
• Political rhetoric about competition as a force to improve education is empty in places where overcrowding is an issue. Furthermore, educators who feel they are being asked to compete on an uneven playing field are less likely to respond to competitive forces in the manner that economic theory would suggest. Thus, any policy that tries to infuse competition into public education should take these two issues into account.
• If charter schools and regular public schools are going to learn from each other, districts or states will need to help facilitate this interaction. Bringing educators from the different sectors together to share information would be a first step. Also, framing charter school reform as a collaborative, as opposed to competitive, reform movement would help.
• Further research is needed on charter schools, especially research on equity, access, resources, accountability, impact on the public system, and classroom practices.
For all the excitement and satisfaction that this reform has brought to communities able to sustain viable charter schools, the charter school reform movement, at least in California, has failed to live up to many of the claims put forth by its proponents. Furthermore, the debate over charter schools and choice is often silent on critical policy questions related to equity and access for students. We argue that it is time to reassess this "magic bullet" of school reform and to raise harder questions about equity.
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