Advocate for Sensible Charter Policy

The best argument for quality charters that I know of comes from from one of my student’s parents.  While talking with her the other day at an after school event, she told me about how her eldest daughter attended their zoned neighborhood school and had a horrible experience involving hazing, gangs and poor admins.  After that experience, she swore she’d send her remaining children to the best school she could find in Memphis, which happened to be a charter school down the road.  This one comment summed up her thoughts; “the only reason I stay in Memphis is because of the school I send my kids to.”

I wish this sentiment could be shared by parents across the city about their children’s schools.  However, in my experience this is rarely the case.  More often than not, parents face two choices; send their student to the struggling neighborhood school or move. And for many, this second option really isn’t realistic.

Enter charter schools, a publicly funded alternative to the traditional neighborhood school that allows for greater flexibility of discipline systems, curriculum and employment practice.  We are blessed to have many quality options here in Memphis.  However, charters in Tennessee have recently come under attack, notably by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn in the Washington Post this past week.  They argue, among other things, that the growth measures created by the TVAAS system in Tennessee act to perpetuate the mass expansion poor charters.  They also point out that many have neutral or negative growth (more than show positive effects).  They also note that TVAAS’ focus on growth over proficiency masks the true inequality in our education system.  Their solution is to do away completely with value added measures and charter schools all together.

This would be a serious mistake.  While there are certainly many charters in Tennessee with room for improvement, there are also many charters doing incredible work for students across the state.  And these schools truly do give parents a third option for where to send their kids.  However, data doesn’t lie, and we do have many charters in Tennessee that are not achieving the success we would want to see for a publicly funded alternative school.  Instead of a blanket ban on charters as advocated by Horn and Wilburn, a better solution, as it so often does, lays in a more nuanced solution focusing on identifying quality schools and shutting down those that don’t demonstrate success over time.

Such a proposal is needed more now than ever.  As of May 2011 the cap on charters in Tennessee was lifted.  To ensure the state is not flooded with charters that promise transformational outcomes but wind up with gains similar or worse to traditional public schools, I propose three different policies that would introduce quality and accountability into the system:

Ensure a rigorous, research based application process to ensure only quality charters are opened - not everyone should be allowed to open up a new charter school whenever and wherever they please.  We should have standards for good quality charters and these standards should be used when new considering charter applications. We should prioritize bringing charter authorizers with a track record of success to our state.  Some authorizers have a track record of successful charter school governance and some do not, and we need to draw on this information to be discerning when opening new charters in Tennessee.

Give charters 3 years to demonstrate student growth or face closure - evidence suggests that charters that are successful in their first year continue to be successful.  Likewise, those that struggle in their first year typically continue to struggle as time goes on.  Given that information, we should draw a hard line in the sand in Tennessee; you show that you can grow our kids or you are shut down.  And you have three years to do it.  I work with educators who teach in charters across the city, and we know which ones are good and which ones deserve to be shut down.  However, many of them continue to be approved for god knows what reason.  We need such a hard deadline and criteria for shutdown to ensure that we do in fact eliminate under performing charters from continuing to function.  It’s tough to shut down an under performing charter once it works its way into the planning process for the district and gains the backing of financial advocates.  But if we truly place kids at the center, we will see this as a necessity rather than a nuisance as so many do.

Study and learn from effective charters to apply their successes to our traditional public schools – one of the chief criticisms of charter schools is that they have more freedom to operate than traditional public schools.  Yet we know very little in Tennessee about what our most effective charters do to achieve their results (as Horn and Wilburn note).  We should be studying these charter schools to learn more about what makes them so successful and see if we can apply these lessons to our traditional public schools.  Are there programs we can replicate?  Are there professional structures that exist in these schools that don’t exist elsewhere?  If we can’t do this (as we so often don’t) charters will still serve a purpose in helping some students escape poor performing schools.  But we lose a valuable source of innovation if we fail to take the lessons successful charters demonstrate and apply them to traditional public schools.

Just like the mother of my student, all parents want a quality school for their kids, and they should have more than one realistic option. Charter schools do provide the option of choice.  However, not all charters are good and it’s time we stop pretending. Parents and educators everywhere should make a push for a sensible charter policy in Memphis and Tennessee that ensure that our school choice options set the tone for quality public alternatives in this state and across the country.