Website—Organizing and Policy Work: TESTIMONY: U.S. SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE HEARING ON CHARTER SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL CHOICE

Policy Work

TESTIMONY: U.S. SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE HEARING ON CHARTER SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL CHOICE

Preface

My research into the overall effects of charter laws and charter schools on school districts in various parts of the nation was motivated by one simple but unacceptable situation: After five years of charter school laws in the United States, researchers had produced no empirical dataindicating what impact charters were having on public school districts and how school districts were responding to charter schools. Opponents of charter schools regularly pointed to cases of charter school failures to argue that this reform was causing great harm to public education. Advocates highlighted extraordinary cases of school districts which had seized on charters as a strategy for improving all of their schools. While the political arena had quickly become littered with the few cases of charter disasters or school district resurrection, no one had data revealing the typical effects of the charter school initiative on public school districts.

My report provides findings from a study titled "How Are School Districts Responding to Charter Laws and Charter Schools?" This research aimed to identify: (1) the impact of charter schools on school districts; (2) the ways school districts had responded; and (3) whether districts had experienced systemic change as a result of charter laws and the opening of charter schools. The study was conducted in 1997, six years into the nation's experiment with charter schools. This research was funded by The Saint Paul Foundation and was hosted by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent research unit of the University of California at Berkeley.

Research Questions and Approach

This study focused entirely on ways charter schools and the development of charter legislation may have affected neighboring school districts and addressed the following questions:

o Are charter schools having an impact on public school districts? If so, what kinds of impacts are occurring in school districts and at what level of intensity are these impacts being experienced? How are these impacts affecting the climates and cultures of nearby schools, and school districts? How are they affecting the communities in which charters are situated?

o What have districts done differently from what they would have had charter schools not entered the picture? What has changed in their delivery of educational services?

o What factors spur traditional public schools and school districts to respond to charter laws and charter schools in ways that bring about improved educational opportunities for students who are not attending charter schools? If the effect of charter laws is to cause innovation, through what mechanisms does this occur?

To answer these questions, the study examined the ways school districts have experienced and responded to the development of charter laws and charter schools. The study focused on 25 school districts in eight states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin) and the District of Columbia. States were selected that had at least two years experience with charter schools. An attempt was made to include states with restrictive laws which generally allow only school districts to serve as the charter's sponsor (California, Georgia, Wisconsin) as well as non-restrictive laws which provide for more than one chartering authority (Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia). The study deliberately included a random mix of urban, rural, and suburban districts in which charter schools were situated.

Over 200 interviews were conducted for this study, primarily with district superintendents and central office administrators, principals and teachers in traditional public schools, and charter school administrators, founders, and advocates. People with national and statewide perspectives, including representatives of unions and school employee associations, public officials, directors of charter school resource centers, journalists, and public policy analysts, were also interviewed. Face-to-face interviews were held with over 75% of the informants in this study; the remaining interviews occurred during telephone conversations and through correspondence by letter and e-mail. A range of documents from school districts, individual charter and traditional public schools, local communities, and state departments of education were collected and analyzed as well as an extensive collection of newspaper articles focused on charter schools.

This study focused on the interaction between school districts and charter schools and examined the impact of charters on school districts, the responses of school districts to charter laws and charter schools, and the overall effects or repercussions of charter school laws on school districts. The primary unit of analysis was the school district because it is the district that almost always has the power to determine whether or not changes occur in its schools. The purpose of the study was to advance understanding of how districts have been affected by and responded to this initiative. This study did not choose the charter school as the unit of analysis and did not examine the impact of school districts on charters and the responses of charters to school district action. These topics, however worthy of examination, were outside the purview of this narrowly focused research effort.

A number of issues emerged during this project that bear on the study's findings. First, it was not unusual for different informants to provide different explanations for how specific changes or educational innovations came to be. Educational change is multi-factorial and emerges out of a rich social, cultural, and political context. No attempt was made to prove causation in this study; thus, specific innovations are linked to charters in this report only when district officials or school personnel from traditional public schools explicitly acknowledged the linkage. Furthermore, the various impacts of charter schools on school districts during these early years of this reform initiative often elicited strong reactions and polarized debates. Throughout this report, quotations from interviews serve to exemplify key perspectives raised by several informants. The quotations were selected because they articulate an important and common viewpoint in a succinct and powerful manner.

Second, this research observed policy effects at a fairly early stage in the dynamics which charter laws and charter schools may generate. The fieldwork for this study was conducted during 1997 and the first few months of 1998 and the findings reflect the status of district responses at this particular time. While the eight states studied and the District of Columbia have distinct charter school laws, during the time period of this study changes occurred regularly which affected the research findings. Since the period studied, additional states have been considering and approving charter legislation. States with laws have been changing them in various ways. Charter impacts and district responses vary not only geographically but also over time. This study examined one particular cross-section of time in a frequently shifting and evolving process.

Third, the states and school districts in this study frequently offered a variety of programs involving public school choice (intra-district and inter-district enrollment, post-secondary options, magnet schools, vouchers, and others). In districts with a rich menu of public school-choice options, informants were asked to distinguish which shifts or innovations were triggered or influenced primarily by charters. Nevertheless, it was often difficult to untangle the differing options and attribute specific changes in public education solely to charter schools, the focus of this study.

Fourth, this study focused on only 25 school districts. While the investigator hoped a random selection of 25 school districts would prove representative of the range of effects emerging out of this initiative, the size of the sample meant that, in any single state, only a few districts affected by charters were studied. Hence this report is limited in its scope. Interviews with individuals with statewide perspectives were included in an attempt to broaden the study's frame of reference and distinguish between dynamics that were typical and those that were highly unusual. While media and policy-oriented discourses about charter schools frequently seize on extreme examples or exceptional cases of individual charter schools "destroying" or "single-handedly reviving" public education, such a focus was not the intent of this study. The aim of this research project was to determine what typically had been experienced by districts following the appearance of charter laws and the opening of charter schools.

Background on Charter Schools

From 1991 through 1997, 29 states and the District of Columbia approved legislation that allows for the formation of charter schools. Charter laws vary from state to state and charter schools vary widely even within states. Essentially charters are schools formed by parents, teachers, and/or community members who collaboratively determine the school's structure, mission, and curricular focus. Depending on the state law, they are granted a charter by local school districts, state or county boards of education, public universities, or other official bodies deemed appropriate as charter sponsors. Charter laws essentially allow entities other than the school district to start and operate a public school. This usually occurs with approval of the local school board but half the states with charter laws also allow some other public body to sponsor charters.

Charter schools are provided with public financing, are usually freed from many state and district laws and regulations, and are governed by the terms and conditions set forth in their charter. In exchange for freedom from many formal regulations, the charter generally commits the school to specific student outcomes and various other objectives. The school is granted a charter for a specific term--often five years--and may apply for renewal, at which point the chartering body assesses the school's success in meeting its objectives.

Advocates have argued that charter schools will improve public education in the United States in a variety of ways: (1) by providing quality educational programs and improved academic achievement for the students in the charter school; (2) by offering families the opportunity to exercise educational choice within public education; (3) by generating innovative pedagogical methods which district schools may then adopt; (4) by providing district school boards with an opportunity to create new and different schools: (5) by creating incentives for district boards to improve their schools and school districts.

My research is aimed at investigating point #5: Are districts improving their schools and school districts due to incentives created by charter laws and charter schools?

Since 1993, a variety of research efforts have been directed towards charter laws and charter schools. Almost all of these studies have focused on the charter school: investigating school characteristics, student populations, student achievement, and organizational dynamics. Perhaps because the initiative has been in a start-up phase, only a few researchers have examined emerging relationships between charter schools and other public schools or the dynamics created within school districts once charters have been proposed or developed in the area.

Highlights of the Research Findings

(A) Charter Impact

Finding #1: The impact of charters on school districts was manifested in five primary ways: (a) the loss of students and often an accompanying loss of financing; (b) the loss of a particular kind of student to niche-focused charter schools; (c) the departure of significant numbers of disgruntled parents; (d) shifts in staff morale; (e) the redistribution of some central office administrators' time and increased challenges predicting student enrollment and planning grade-level placement.

Finding #2: Of the 25 case-study districts in the research study, almost half (12 or 48%) experienced either strong (five or 20%) or moderate (seven or 28%) impact from charter schools and slightly more than half (13 or 52%) experienced either no impact (nine or 36%) or mild impact (four or 16%). Within a single state, the type and level of impact varied widely from school district to school district and often districts studied within a single state exhibited dramatically different types and levels of impact.

Finding #3: The impact of charter laws and charter schools on large urban districts was less than on rural, suburban, and small urban districts.

(B) District Response

Finding #4: Typically, school districts had not responded with swift, dramatic improvements, as of the time of this study. The majority of districts had gone about business-as-usual and responded to charters slowly and in small ways. Almost one quarter of the districts studied (24%) had responded energetically to the advent of charters and significantly altered their educational programs.

Finding #5: Several districts classified as having low or moderate responsiveness, had made a significant effort to improve public relations and had begun to aggressively market their schools to the public.

Finding #6: Several moderate- and high-response districts had made changes in their educational offerings as a result of charters. These changes included opening schools organized around a specific philosophy or theme, creating "add-on" programs such as an after-school program or all-day kindergarten, and offering more diverse activities or curricular resources.

Finding #7: Certain innovations and changes in school districts and traditional public schools hypothesized by the study's investigator had rarely occurred: Few superintendents, principals, and teachers in district schools were thinking of charter schools as educational laboratories or attempting to transfer pedagogical innovations from charters to the district schools; districts were still building large school facilities and were rarely creating smaller schools; the large urban districts studied rarely had responded in meaningful ways to charter laws and charter schools.

Finding #8: An analysis of the 25 case studies in this report suggests district response to charters evolves over time and that there may be distinct stages in the development of charter schools, which offer specific opportunities for district response.

Finding #9: The climates and cultures of nearby traditional public schools, school districts, and communities almost always had changed following the appearance of charter schools in their midst, but not in a single, predictable manner.

Finding #10: The districts in this study which had experienced high levels of impact usually exhibited responses to charters, though not necessarily at a high level; districts which had experienced low levels of impact generally exhibited low levels of response or no response at all.

Finding #11: A variety of factors other than the nature and degree of impact seemed to contribute to school district response to charters, including the overall ecology of school choice in the district, student performance, a critical mass of charters in the area, community awareness of charters, and district leadership. Districts which exhibited a high level of responsiveness to charters usually had reform-minded leaders who seized on charters as a strategic tool to step up reforms in their districts.

Finding #12: Informants disagreed about whether creating a competitive environment for districts leads to school improvement. Some believed it does. Others saw competition as harmful and believed educators prefer collaboration and are motivated by the needs of students or personal pride in their work rather than competition over enrollment, awards, or reputation.

Finding #13: This research suggests charter schools may have contributed to statewide reform efforts that have no formal connection to charters.

Finding #14: Advocates and opponents of charter legislation and many of the state policymakers interviewed for this study often inaccurately characterized the overall effects which charter schools have had on school districts.

Policy Recommendations

One aim of this research study was to develop recommendations for policymakers to consider as they confront legislative proposals regarding charter laws and charter schools. Several recommendations emerge from an analysis of the data which might be useful to this Senate Committee:

o Recommendation #1: Policymakers crafting charter school laws should clarify the legislation's aims regarding the overall effect on school districts. If spurring overall district reform is the intent behind charter laws, policymakers should consider both these laws' impact on school districts and the districts' response. Policies aimed at achieving a critical mass of charters in a particular area and efforts which garner significant media attention for charters may result in heightened impact on districts; policies created to allow more than one entity to sponsor charters may result in increased response from districts.

o Recommendation #2: The leadership of professional associations of superintendents and school board members should step up efforts to educate their members about charters, respond to their concerns, and allow them to discuss charters with peers who are successfully utilizing charter laws as part of an overall reform strategy. Because this study suggests that superintendents and school board members play pivotal roles in determining the district's response to charters, these interest groups must receive considerable education and opportunity to debate charter laws.

o Recommendation #3: Policymakers should seriously consider ways to ensure that urban educators, charter school advocates, union activists, and other leaders of reform efforts engage in collaborative efforts to develop an urban strategy for charter schools which encourages charters to contribute energetically to overall systemic improvement and spurs district responsiveness to charters.

o Recommendation #4: Policymakers should ensure that evaluations of the state's charter policy include a detailed assessment of impact, response, and overall effects on districts.

While statewide evaluations of charter policies should assess student achievement and evaluate overall school performance in the state's charter schools, resources should be devoted periodically to an assessment of how school districts may be changing in the aftermath of this reform initiative.

o Recommendation #5: Researchers assessing the effects of charters on school districts should recognize that systemic change rarely occurs swiftly and dramatically and avoid imposing inappropriate expectations and unrealistic time frames on the charter/district dynamic. Long-term ethnographic studies of the effects of charter schools on school districts should be initiated. Special attention should be devoted to locations where charter policies are inspiring reform and resulting in improved student achievement in the district schools. Such studies might ask: What kinds of charter laws and what kinds of charter schools spur systemic change? What specific conditions, factors, and dynamics are necessary to allow charters to trigger district-wide improvements?

o Recommendation #6: District superintendents, central administration personnel, principals, and school board members should redesign their planning processes for an era of increased public school choice. New systems, schedules, and processes might improve budgeting and planning for capital improvements, enrollment levels, and personnel shifts and allow districts to anticipate changes brought about by school choice options.

o Recommendation #7: If policymakers create charter laws with the intention of districts transferring pedagogical innovations from the charters to traditional public schools, they should examine carefully ways in which charter laws may polarize constituencies which are intended to work collaboratively. They should analyze the impact charter laws are having on school districts--particularly in the areas of financing, redistribution of administrative time, student placement concerns, and the loss of particular kinds of students to niche-focused charters--and work with districts to plan for these and other changes. Policymakers should be aware of a possible dilemma here: Creating policies which allow for sponsors besides the local district may produce more innovative schools yet may encourage a polarization among educators which precludes mutual exchange.

I aim to continue this line of research over the next few years. The recent history of school reform in this country has shown that initiatives win approval based on anticipated overall effects on nearby school districts, but little research has occurred focused on whether this has occurred. After more than 25 years of magnet schools in the United States, we have very little data examining the overall effects of magnets on other public schools. My intention is to see that this does not happen with charter schools, hence I will continue to engage in empirical research into charter impacts, district responses, and the overall effects of the charter initiative on public education.

FOOTNOTES

Some of the more interesting studies in this category include, Corwin, R. and Flaherty, J. (Eds.). (1995 November). Freedom and Innovation in California's Charter Schools. Los Alamitos, CA: Southwest Regional Laboratory; Wohlstetter, P., Wenning, R. and Briggs, K, (1995 December). "Charter Schools in the United States: The Question of Autonomy," Educational Policy, 9(4), 331-358; Vergari, S. and Mintrom, M. (1996 September). Charter School Laws Across the United States--1996 Edition. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University's Institute for Public Policy and Social Research; American Federation of Teachers. (1996). Charter School Laws: Do They Measure Up? Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers; Wohlstetter, P. and Griffin, N. (1997, September). First Lessons: Charter Schools as Learning Communities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

The federally-funded multi-year charter school study will be investigating effects on districts during its second and third year. See A Study of Charter Schools: First Year Report. (May 1997). Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. See also Nathan,, J. (1996). Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; also Vanourek, G., Manno, B., Finn, C., and Bierlein, L. (1997 July). The Educational Impact of Charter Schools. Washington, D.C.: Hudson Institute. Amy Stuart Wells and colleagues at UCLA have been studying California charter schools in the context of local school districts and will be releasing their findings later in 1998. See also Charters in Our Midst: The Impact of Charter Schools on School Districts. (1997). Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

o Eric Rofes is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education where he is completing his dissertation on charter schools' effects on public education. He has studied charter schools throughout the nation for four years. His writings on education have appeared in The Harvard Educational Review, Rethinking Schools, The High School Journal, Dollars and Sense, and Education Digest. For additional information contact him at 73B Collingwood, San Francisco, California, 94114, or erofes@uclink2.berkeley.edu, or (415) 255-6210.