Debunking 3 Charter School Myths
During the 2014-15 school year, more than 2.8 million students attended over 6,700 charter schools in 41 states and the District of Columbia. In cities across the country, charter schools make up a significant portion of the school system.
To date, much of the prominent research on charter schools has been devoted to trying to determine if charter schools outperform traditional public schools. Charter schools exist in a political context, so backers have had to prove that their schools can do as well or better than traditional public schools on the measures states use to hold schools accountable.
But academic superiority (measured by test scores) isn't the only goal of charter schools. Charter schools are also designed to give parents more options in the type of education that their child receives. They have the ability to specialize, and because students only attend charter schools by their free choice, schools have the opportunity to create unique learning communities organized around particular principles.
[READ: The Carter Moment]
Unfortunately, the horserace narrative about charter schools totally obscures the diversity within the charter school sector. It also perpetuates, or at least fails to debunk, several myths that many people have about charter schools.
Last week, Jenn Hatfield and I released a study that looked at the diversity of the charter school market in 17 different cities. We went to the website of every charter school in those locales and coded their pedagogical or curricular specialization. Our results debunk several enduring myths:
All charter schools look the same. Even asking the question "do charter schools outperform public schools?" subtly implies that both charter schools and public schools are uniform institutions. They aren't. Among charters, we identified 13 different specializations, and those who enjoy hair splitting could have probably identified even more. From international schools (of which there were 64 in the cities we studied enrolling over 26,000 students) to schools oriented around public policy (of which there were 33 enrolling almost 15,000 students), charter schools varied meaningfully across several different dimensions.
[READ: The Great Charter School Debate]
All charter schools are "no excuses" schools. "No Excuses" schools, like the successful KIPP schools, are characterized by a strong commitment to discipline. In our sample, "no excuses" schools enrolled the most students (39,899) and were tied for the largest number of schools (101). But when you consider that in the 17 cities that we studied, there were 471,000 total students enrolled in charter schools, you realize that "no excuses" schools actually make up a relatively small portion of the overall market. There were the same number of "progressive" schools (Montessori schools or schools with very student-centered pedagogy), and over 30,000 students enrolled in STEM, hybrid and progressive schools.
[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Congress]
All charter schools have some kind of innovative pedagogical or curriculum approach. The flipside myth of "all charter schools look the same" is the belief that every charter school is trying some new, different, outside the box thing. That is not the case either. In total, we found that 49.8 percent of the charter schools in our sample had some kind of specialization. That means that over 50 percent of charter schools simply tried to provide a quality general education. Looking at enrollment, the number breaks even more in the direction of "general" schools, with 55.5 percent of all students enrolled in general schools.
Given the size and prevalence of charter schooling in America, our discourse would be improved if we stopped treating it as a monolithic institution. Pace Gertrude Stein, a charter school is not a charter school is not a charter school.
Michael McShane is a research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He began his career as an inner-city high school teacher in Montgomery, Alabama.
