Charters leverage rivalry
Posted on Saturday, February 23, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Charter schools accelerate students ’ academic performance while creating a competitive environment that strengthens the traditional schools around them, a researcher said Friday.
Stanford University economics professor Caroline Hoxby explained the findings of three studies on charter schools in a presentation sponsored by the state Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville.
“They aren’t a silver bullet, but I do think charter schools are an important part of school reform in the United States,” Hoxby said.
Charter schools are public schools that are exempt from some of the laws and rules that govern traditional public schools. In return for the flexibility, the schools are held to stricter standards for student achievement. Seven new charter schools are scheduled to open this fall in Arkansas, bringing the total in the state to 17.
The schools are gaining momentum across the United States, Hoxby said. There were no charter schools in 1992. Today, there are more than 4, 000 charter schools in the United States.
While studying the effect of charter schools, Hoxby tracked the academic progress of 13, 000 New York City charter-school students admitted to the schools through a selection lottery. The students studied performed an average of 0. 07 levels higher on standardized reading tests and 0. 43 levels higher on standardized math tests than students who applied to charter schools, but weren’t selected in the lottery.
Charter schools adapt the traditional school model through methods such as targeting curriculum, lengthening the school day and modifying class sizes. The schools that showed the most significant gains in the study implemented longer school days, many as long as 10 hours, trading the extended day for larger class sizes.
“They use their autonomy to pursue different policies,” Hoxby said. “But nothing that they do differently is something that a regular public school could not do.”
Charter schools raise the bar of competition for public schools around them, causing a subsequent increase in student test scores, Hoxby said the study found.
In the first year that a competitive charter school opened within the district, neighboring traditional public schools lost up to 5 percent of their enrollment, forcing them to make changes in instruction and policy, Hoxby said.
As a result of the increased competition, the traditional schools nearly doubled their yearly gains in math and reading comprehension after the charter schools open, the study found.
Administrators at traditional schools see charter schools as a motivating factor to eliminate ineffective teachers from their staffs and to implement instructional techniques that may not have been favored without the concern of decreasing enrollment, Hoxby said.
“It gives them the leverage to do things like that,” she said. “It also gives them the leverage to make some pretty basic changes in curriculum they may not have made before.”
Dan Marzoni, president of the Arkansas Education Association, said the statewide teacher’s union supported charter schools when they were billed as laboratories designed to find creative solutions that could later be implemented in traditional public schools.
“The way things have evolved with charter schools, that promise has never been fulfilled,” he said.
Instead, charter schools have become small learning communities that skim high-performing students with committed parents from traditional public schools, Marzoni said.
“Basically, what you have now is people trying to create private schools with public money,” he said.
Most charter schools in Arkansas only outperform their surrounding conventional counterparts by one or two percentage points, he said. Schools that show higher margins of success do so because they provide higher per-pupil funding, Marzoni said.
“If state schools were as wellfunded, we would be in much better shape,” he said.
House Bill 1504, which passed in the 2007 legislative session, removed distribution restrictions for the state’s charter schools. Prior to the law, the state allowed only six charter schools in each of Arkansas’ four U. S. congressional districts. Under the law, the state can distribute the approved 24 schools according to regions with concentrations of high-risk students.
Hoxby said charter schools in New York were more likely to attract black and Hispanic students and less likely to enroll affluent, white children.
Marzoni said the trend didn’t apply in Arkansas. Most of the state’s charter schools are concentrated in the Northwest Arkansas and Little Rock metropolitan areas, neglecting at-risk students in poor, rural areas, he said, and Northwest Arkansas charter schools were criticized last year for their low enrollment of Hispanic students.
“For us to go back to supporting them, they would have to go back to their original intent,” he said.
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