Charter Schools: The Future for Public Education?

America's schools are failing. The United States has a lower high-school graduation rate than all but two of the world's developed countries, and this reported figure does not include the countless apathetic students known as "in-school dropouts," (OECD, 2005). The evolution of the economy has made workers' knowledge the most important asset in the domestic job market. Business leaders have learned to recognize that no labor input is more valuable than human capital; there exists an enormous divide between the output of an uneducated worker and an educated one. Magnifying this problem is the fact that the quality of education delivered by schools has not declined in recent years; the reason for the education system's incompetence lies solely in its structure"the typical American public school has become obsolete. To satisfy this increasingly high demand for knowledgeable and educated workers capable of a high rate of return, an alternative approach to education is needed. There is an urgency in public education that cannot be addressed by making small changes to the schools as they exist presently"new schools must be built on new and drastically different foundations. Charter schools are an excellent option to fill the void left by inadequate public schools.

Charter schools are, by definition, still public schools. They are funded publicly in the same manner as traditional schools, which receive the bulk of their money " about 91 percent ," from state and local governments and have the remaining amount supplied by the federal government. Some states do provide a smaller percentage of aid to charter schools, but it is always given (NEA, 2006). What allows charter schools to defy convention is the freedom they are given to allot this funding. Charter schools have the luxury of combining appealing aspects of both public and private schools, becoming a fusion of successful past practices in education that can be built upon with newer techniques (Manno, Finn, & Vanourek, 2000). There is no time-honored structure to which they must adhere; charter schools are given free reign to experiment with various teaching methods to best cater to individual students' needs. Once given the permission to open its doors " the approved charter" the schools can take any educational approach they see fit. It is not uncommon for a charter school to hold classes only one or two days a week, have entire courses conducted over the internet through computer networks, or allow students to conduct most of their work independently, with teachers serving solely as supervisors even at the elementary school level. The view of the learning process is fundamentally different than what is used in public and most private schools. State laws do differ in the amount of autonomy charter schools are given, and some are intended to stunt the growth of charter schools while they are still in their early phase: Legislation in Illinois, for example, limits the number of charter schools allowed in the entire state to sixty and allows only thirty within the city of Chicago (WestEd, 2006).

Governments, however, do not give away their scarce monetary resources purely so these schools can play around with new concepts and ideas"they demand results. The charter schools are responsible for considerably improving the students they are designed to serve; they are required to demonstrate their merit, which is usually measured by comparing the test scores of charter schools to scores of other schools within the district (NEA, 2006). The schools are receiving greater freedom in exchange for taking on more responsibility. This accountability creates a very strong incentive for charter schools to educate their students that is missing from traditional public education. If students at an ordinary public middle school, for example, consistently receive below-average scores on a statewide mathematics assessment, a few teachers may be fired and some changes in the administration may occur, but the school will not abruptly be shut down. In a way, the pressure on charter schools to succeed is indicative of frustration over the underperformance of the education system as a whole; the government concludes that the poor performance of the students at charter schools is not attributed to a few incompetent individuals working for the school, but to the structure on which the facility is based. This degree of liability has never been placed on traditional public schools and it is a main reason why charter schools, as they exist currently, can satisfy the increasingly high demand for educated and knowledgeable workers better than the conventional public schools.

The unregulated nature of many charter school operations has prompted critics to say that the atmosphere fosters corruption. Evidence for this view has frequently come from an incident at the Chiron School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After the school closed down in early 2005, Chiron was found to have deliberately over-counted the number of its enrolled students to receive more funding from the state; in all, $340,000 was fraudulently obtained by the school during its brief operation (Brandt, 2006). The emergence of this scandal was particularly devastating to the charter-school movement because Minnesota was the first state in the country to pass charter school legislation, doing so in 1991 (Nathan, 1999). In the aftermath of the scandal, opponents of charter schools cited the episode as a clear example of the flawed structure present in all charter schools. The criticisms made were very serious ones. If the charter schools were based on an inherently weak design, then no amount of re-organizing on the surface would be able to fix the problems that were invariably created--the charter schools would fail just like public schools.

What really caused the corruption, however, was not a design flaw of charter schools, but rather the actions of an individual profit-seeking entrepreneur. Chiron was constantly in legal trouble even before it closed and the over-counting was discovered"it had an administration that was inept at running the school. Chiron missed an important filing deadline for its audit in 2004 and had its Minnesota Public School endorsement taken away in that same year (Brandt, 2006). The scandal at Chiron was not a problem typical of a charter school; it was a problem typical of any organization run by incompetent management or a few corrupt individuals.

The idea of a free market is central to charter schools' philosophy, and is one of the motivating factors that encourage greater choice in public education. At heart of the free-market theory is that, when faced with competing successful charter schools that have access to the same funds and resources, public schools will be forced to replicate the results or lose their students. Critics of charter schools are quick to note, however, that an increased choice in education is likely to further racially segregate children and teenagers, especially in urban areas (Levin, 2001). Systematic segregation in urban areas is still a problem for public schools, and critics emphasize that this will only be made worse by charter schools. If the free-market mechanism is working, it is working against the interests of poor students, critics argue (Wells, 2004). Charter schools' demographics, however, must be looked at differently than the demographics of conventional public schools. There are some charter schools , notably in Texas" that are created specifically to serve a certain ethnic group of students. These schools are predominantly located in communities with large minority populations, and are touted as providing the equality lacking in the nearby, often less segregated public schools. The composition of these charter schools is, as expected, quite homogeneous, but that does not mean that they are promoting racial inequity. " Chartering also has the capacity to reduce the inequity created by the districting of public education, which gives those with private resources the opportunity to select the schools they want but leaves few choices for those without the resources to move or enroll in private school," says Ted Kolderie, a major figure in the development of charter schools (Kolderie, 2003). These schools offer parents of students in the frequently underfunded, low-quality public schools another option in education. "Especially for minority parents who for a long time have felt cheated by the public school system," charter schools enhance equity by offering new options for underserved populations, (Ascher & Wamba, 2003). Transportation systems linking charter schools to neighborhoods in the area are, admittedly, underdeveloped and insufficient; this contributes to the patterns of racial isolation seen in charter schools that reflect the areas in which they are located. It is clear that charter schools have not solved problems of racial isolation with which public schools still struggle, but they do play an important role in reducing the racial inequity present in public schools.

A charter, of course, is merely a piece of paper giving someone permission to run a school for a specified length of time. The only thing that can be known for sure about a charter school that has yet to open is that it will be different than existing schools, and the best that can be expected of the school is that some of its innovations will turn out to be successful. (Kolderie, 2005). The structures of charter schools vary widely, and none is more unique than the Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota. The school has one 17,000-square-foot room and serves roughly 110 students in grades seven to twelve. The owners of the school are directly involved in the day-to-day academics--in fact, they're the teachers. There is no curriculum, with students required only to spend ninety minutes a day in required math and quiet reading schedule blocks. The math class is conducted primarily with a computer program and a textbook; students work on their own and can discuss problems with each other or an advisor, who sits in the middle of the room. There are also twenty-five minutes after lunch reserved for reading silently. The rest of the school day , which ends at 3 o'clock, is designated for working on independent projects, which each student conducts (Toch, 2003). The school has recently been commended by the U.S. Department of Education for "using innovative methods to help close the achievement gap between low-income, minority, and special need students and their peers." Only seven other schools in the country were given this honor. (U.S. Department of Education, 2006).

The Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center has an ethnic composition similar to the city of Providence, Rhode Island where it is located. Twenty-four percent of the students are white, forty-two percent are Hispanic, and twenty-nine percent are African American. In addition, sixty-eight percent of enrolled students qualified for free or reduced lunch during the 2005-2006 school year (Measuring Rhode Island Schools for Change, 2006). The Met, like the Minnesota New Country School, favors a learning-advisor approach that allows students to work on individual projects of their own choosing. This project is worked on over the four grades the school houses (nine through twelve) and is coupled with an internship program, called Learning Through Internship, which exposes children to the workplace for academic areas they are interested in (Levine, 2001). The Met follows no curriculum and offers no instruction in the standard classroom setting; instead, students' learning projects must touch upon five objectives for learning: quantitative reasoning, communication, empirical reasoning, social reasoning, and personal qualities (What Kids Can Do, 2006). The school has only been in operation since 1996, but the results it has already generated are a testament to the effectiveness its structure. For the 2003-2004 school year: The Met had a graduation rate of 94.6%, compared with 81.3% for the state as a whole and 54% for the city of Providence; the school's attendance rate was 92.1%, while Providence's was 80% for its high schools (Measuring Rhode Island Schools for Change, 2006). The Minnesota New Country School and the Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center are two examples of charter schools located in distinctly different parts of the country. Henderson, Minnesota has a population of 910 and its median household income is $43,125; Providence, Rhode Island is home to 173,618 people and has a median household income of $26,867 (U.S. Census, 2000). The successes of both schools are not encouraging merely because they are charter schools, but because they are charter schools with surprisingly similar structures. These serve as strong examples that charter schools can serve students in vastly different environments, and reaffirm the idea that charter schools are an excellent alternative to failing conventional public education.

Although charter schools exist in all but ten states, there is still limited information on which conclusions can be drawn about the schools' performance. The locations of current charter schools are usually scattered; before 2005, there had not been an urban area that ushered in a substantial number of charter schools--then came Hurricane Katrina. After the devastating storm, Louisiana opted to open over half of the public schools in New Orleans as charter schools, thirty-one in total (Carrns, 2006). Even prior to the storm, there had been efforts to take public control of the underperforming schools in the city. The public school system had historically been one of the poorest performing in the country. Reopening the schools as charters is an ideal way to measure the direct effect that charter schools have on school performance. The large scale on which the schools are now operating in New Orleans will also ensure an appropriate sample size: 22,000 students have re-entered the school system in (NPR, 2006). If the results from district's schools are encouraging, it may spark a push for charter schools in other urban areas across the country. It is too early in the process to get any reliable data on the new schools, but it is clear that this is the largest test that the charter-school movement has ever had to face. The future of charter schools, at least those on the same scale as in New Orleans, will likely be decided by the test scores of 22,000 children over the next two or three years. The rest of the country is watching.

There are certainly limitations to what charter schools can do. After all, a charter does not dictate the structure of a school, it is just a license to create a potentially wonderful one. There is enormous variation among different charter schools and how effective they are; some work and some don't. Even good charter schools are far from perfect. For one, they are truly independent entities; thus, they can only be run as well as its administrators are able to run them. Charter schools are also still restricted to the ethnic makeup of the area they operate in, perpetuating and sometimes worsening the problem of racial isolation; but the schools can, importantly, improve racial equity. In spite of these flaws, the innovative structures of many charter schools have produced outstanding successes, giving hope that this increased choice in public education will do some remarkable things in the near future. The United States is in a very difficult quandary, where the evolution of the economy has made human capital the most important input in the labor market, while the failing education system is not doing its job in preparing workers for entry into this workforce. The system of chartering, though imperfect in its still-early stage, is an exceptional option to fill in for traditional public schools that cannot make the grade.

Works Cited

Ascher, Carol & Wamba, Nathalis Guy. "An Examination of

Charter School Equity." Education and Urban Study 35.4

(2003): 462-474

Brandt, Steve. ï"Charter's Demise Highlights Flaws." Star Tribune. 9 September

2006.

Carrns, Anne. "Charting a New Course." The Wall Street Journal. 24 August 2006.

"Charter Schools" National Education Association. December 2006.