You can see them if you drive through practically any struggling American city. The loading bay is painted in vivid primary colors in a converted warehouse. A storefront in a strip mall, wedged between a Family Dollar and a check-cashing establishment. Occasionally, a brand-new, shiny structure appears to have accidentally fallen from a wealthier zip code. These are charter schools that were marketed to parents, politicians, and donors as the solution to America’s most dysfunctional districts for more than thirty years.
The pitch was fairly straightforward. Release the schools from central office bureaucracy, union contracts, and legacy system inertia. Allow principals to choose who they want to hire, fire, and manage the day in a way that best suits children’s learning. The rest was supposed to be handled by the market. Poor schools would shut down. Positive ones would proliferate. At last, parents in zip codes that had been written off for a generation would have another option for where to send their children.
In any case, that’s the tale that was told. It is more difficult to condense the current narrative into a brochure given the amount of research that has accumulated since the late 1990s. Charter schools have not turned out to be the catastrophe that their most ardent detractors feared. Additionally, they haven’t fulfilled the rescue mission that their boosters advertised. For the most part, they have been a challenging experiment with a challenging grade.
In a 2019 review, the Center on Reinventing Public Education discovered something that most people on both sides of the argument would prefer not to accept. District budgets are typically harmed by studies on charter finances. Test scores seldom exhibit the same harm, according to studies on student outcomes. An estimated $1,500 to $3,500 in fixed costs are left behind in the district they left behind, at least for a year, when a student departs for a charter. Debt, pensions, and partially occupied buildings. The enrollment decreases more quickly than the bills.
However, on average, children in those underperforming districts don’t appear to be suffering as a result. They’re doing a little better in some cities. New York. Boston. Chicago, Denver. When there is a pattern, it appears less like collapse and more like districts gradually learning how to function in a world where they cannot take students for granted. Reasonable people are constantly debating whether that is evidence of competition or simply a tale of underpaid administrators learning the hard way.
However, the charter story’s gaps have grown. An industry with an uncomfortable failure rate is depicted in the Network for Public Education’s closure analysis, which has been updated several times over the years. Schools are open. Schools are closed. Families rush. A trail of district paperwork and partially completed buildings are left behind by certain operators. In August, a new Progressive article described the industry as a “industry in retreat, propped up by unchecked federal funding,” a statement that would have been unimaginable in 2010, when charter expansion was still widely accepted.
Observing this unfold gives the impression that the nation wagered on a specific theory of school reform and received something less substantial than it paid for. Not a disaster. Not a miracle. A few networks stand out. Many mediocre middles. There were some truly awful actors who used children as props. In the meantime, schools like Gibsonton Elementary near Tampa, which has a food pantry and washer-dryer on campus, are not charters at all, even though they appear to be carrying out the costly and time-consuming task of genuinely improving conditions in impoverished neighborhoods. These are community schools that carry out the unglamorous tasks of feeding children and meeting parents where they are.
If you had to write a report card, it would be filled with numerous incomplete tasks.
