Can West Virginia learn from states with charter schools?
Walk into a Colorado charter school and you might see a student painting a picture while a few classmates explore a concept using the Socratic method.
By Davin White
The Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Walk into a Colorado charter school and you might see a student painting a picture while a few classmates explore a concept using the Socratic method.
Mark Hyatt, executive director of the Charter School Institute of Colorado, described a Montessori charter school as very "child-centric," where students learn at their own pace. Teachers also integrate activities like hiking or mountain biking into the lessons.
Hyatt describes a charter school as a place with its own niche that offers something different from a traditional public school.
As West Virginia lawmakers prepare to consider several education issues, including charter schools, advocates on both sides of the issue are making their points.
Research shows that students at some U.S. charter schools outperform traditional public schoolchildren, but other charters fail their students. Still, some advocates say West Virginia has 20 years worth of research allowing state lawmakers to craft a law that lets them monitor and sustain high-performing charter schools.
Hyatt heads up the oldest charter-authorizing agency of its kind in the country, according to Randy DeHoff, a member of the Colorado Board of Education. DeHoff advised West Virginia lawmakers, education officials and others who researched the issue earlier this year.
The charter advocate can be "the entrepreneur, the risk taker that benefits disfranchised students" but also ends up helping traditional kindergarten through 12th-grade students as well, Hyatt said.
"What we're slowly doing is changing the industry [of] K-12 education," Hyatt said. "We're competing with our local districts only to make them better.
"All I'm trying to do is provide options and change for good in our state."
A charter school's purpose is, not surprisingly, contained in its charter, says Howard O'Cull, who led the West Virginia group investigating charter schools this year. The US<co> Charter Schools website describes the charter as a "performance contract detailing the school's mission, program, goals, students served, methods of assessment, and ways to measure success."
West Virginia is one of 10 states without a charter school law.
How some charters work
Charter schools receive public funding, but usually have more independence than traditional public schools.
Often, parents or nonprofit agencies who want a charter school petition a sponsor -- usually a state or local school board, a state university or an independent agency like the Charter School Institute in Colorado, DeHoff said.
The organizers list in the charter which state rules they're asking to be waived, said O'Cull.
Charters usually must be renewed every three to five years, according to US Charter Schools.
"The basic concept of charter schools is that they exercise increased autonomy in return for this accountability," according to the group's website. "They are accountable for both academic results and fiscal practices to several groups: the sponsor that grants them, the parents who choose them, and the public that funds them."
In Colorado, each charter school must have a board of directors, which might consist of parents, a principal, teachers, former educators or local business owners, Hyatt said.
"You've got to have full disclosure on the board," he said. One charter school in Colorado Springs has been in trouble for nepotism on their board, he said.
"You have to have some sort of oversight and you can't have conflicts of interest," he said.
In Colorado, authorizers and each school's board of directors also must assure that schools follow special education laws and Title I laws and provide a safe learning environment.
Colorado's Charter School Institute, which Hyatt runs and DeHoff used to run, operates like its own school district, but has an independent board and is not really a part of the state Department of Education, DeHoff said.
In Colorado, either the local school district or the institute needs to approve a new charter, but not both, he said.
Local school districts are required to offer their vacant facilities to a charter school if asked. However, if the institute approves a charter, the school may have more independence, DeHoff said.
Charter schools often receive and control money for transportation, food and other services -- which a county school board would control for public schools.
Most charter schools in Colorado don't provide buses for students, he said. Facility costs also can eat up a big chunk of a school's budget -- often between 15 and 20 percent, DeHoff said.
Each Colorado charter school usually receives 95 percent of the dollars allotted for the school, while up to 5 percent goes to the authorizing agency for administrative costs.
Academic research
Last year, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University released a study that found charter schools to have very different effects in different states.
Charter school students in five places -- Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and the cities of Chicago and Denver -- learned significantly more than they might have in traditional public school, according to the report.
But students in six states -- Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas -- saw less growth than their peers in public schools, according to the study. And California, Georgia, North Carolina and the District of Columbia had mixed results.
CREDO researchers created "virtual twins" for charter school students in an effort to gauge whether those students fared better than they would have at a traditional public school.
"They probably got an answer that's reasonably close to the right answer," said Sean Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford.
Caroline Hoxby, an economics professor at Stanford, criticized her colleagues at CREDO for the study. She then led her own study of almost all charter schools in New York City, and found that students who attended charter schools for several years were more likely to close achievement gaps in math and English, to earn a diploma by age 20 and score higher on exams than public school students.
Reardon credited Hoxby and her fellow researchers for relying on random lotteries when they compared charter students with public school students.
Because all the New York City students in the study had an equal chance to attend a charter school, researchers had the opportunity to obtain highly credible "estimates of the effect of attending a charter school rather than a traditional public school," Reardon wrote.
However, he argued that the study had some statistical flaws, and the results appeared to overstate the benefits of attending a charter school.
More recently, Mathematica Policy Research, a nonprofit research firm based in Princeton, N.J., conducted a study of charter schools for middle school students.
They compared the performance of students in 15 states who were admitted to charter schools through random lotteries with students who applied to the same schools but were not admitted.
On average, the charter middle schools were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement in reading and math or student behavior. But individual charter schools diverged widely as to how they impacted stuAlso, the researchers found that charter schools were "more effective for lower-income and lower-achieving students and less effective for higher-income and higher-achieving students."
Also, the researchers found that charter schools were "more effective for lower-income and lower-achieving students and less effective for higher-income and higher-achieving students."
Charter schools in large urban areas helped students learn more math, while schools outside the large urban areas weren't helped, according to the release.
Also, the study indicated that the charter schools positively affected parent and student attitudes. They seemed to be more satisfied with school.
Reardon said the "big takeaway message" from the three studies is that on average, charters aren't doing any better or worse than traditional public schools.
But that hides a huge variation, he said. Some charters are doing much better than traditional public schools, while other charters are doing much worse.
"Like most things, the devil's in the details," he said.
Quality
Hyatt sees himself and other charter school supporters as "disruptive innovators" who shape instruction to fit individual children.
"Some kids learn better doing things differently," he said.
Supporters of traditional public schools do not always look upon him fondly. He contends that today, education sometimes seems more about the adults and less about the children.
Colorado has some online charter schools and some geared toward specific students. Ridgeview, 30 miles east of Denver, is a school where male teenagers in the judicial system are tightly regimented, made to march in formation and wear the same shorts. Another charter school is just for unwed teen mothers, Hyatt said.
Reardon has heard complaints that bad charter schools are too often left open. In the CREDO report, Stanford researchers noted the apparent reluctance of some authorizers to close underperforming charters, which "reflects poorly on charter schools as a whole."
"More importantly, it hurts students," they noted in the report.
But in Colorado, Hyatt said he's shuttered underperforming charters. "To me, if a charter school is not doing its job, it should be shut down," he said.
"We just closed one of ours that wasn't benefiting children," he said -- the Colorado Distance & Electronic Learning Academy. Some students thrived in the school's environment, he said, but most did not.
Hyatt is looking at another underperforming charter school, and hopes they get their act together.
"It's sad," he said. "It breaks my heart to see 30 people without jobs."
DeHoff said a key to successful charter schools is allowing different groups to sponsor them. Allowing only local school boards to authorize charter schools, he said, would be like "asking McDonald's to approve Burger King coming into their area."
For small or medium-sized public school districts, approving and overseeing a charter school or two can be a real distraction for the county school board, he said.
Todd Ziebarth, vice president for state advocacy with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said allowing the State University of New York to authorize new charters is a major strength in New York's charter school law.
The SUNY Charter Schools Institute has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for its "innovation and excellence" in reviewing charter school applications, conducting ongoing oversight and evaluation of existing charters and closing underperforming schools, according to the institute's website.
Ziebarth encourages West Virginia lawmakers to look at states like New York and build upon their good laws.
In Ohio, he said, charter school laws faltered because too many authorizers were allowed and many didn't hold schools accountable. DeHoff described Ohio charter schools as a "pretty uncontrolled environment." Both said that Ohio lawmakers are working to correct the problems.
Many school leaders believe the greatest key to a successful charter may be the freedom to develop "great teams" in their schools, according to Ziebarth.
To do so, they need leeway to hire and fire, compensate and evaluate teachers in a way that fits their school model, he said.
DeHoff agrees that for charter schools to be successful, they need enough autonomy to let struggling teachers go. In Colorado, at-will employees with one-year contracts who aren't working out can be removed by midyear and a new teacher brought in, he said.
He said he couldn't understand the "vehemence of the union opposition" in West Virginia to charter schools until he saw the state's school personnel laws, which he said are far more lengthy, detailed and protective of employees than Colorado's laws.
Then, he figured the unions just want to maintain those laws and not let "the camel ... peek under the tent."
West Virginia's bill
As he understands it, Ziebarth is skeptical of West Virginia's latest charter school proposal.
This spring, the recommendations from O'Cull and other members of the 21st Century Jobs Cabinet task force went to state lawmakers. In May, lawmakers could not agree on education reforms meant to improve West Virginia's chances to secure up to $75 million in federal education dollars.
The Obama administration dubbed the competition Race to the Top, and supported charter-friendly plans.
O'Cull said Senate lawmakers and a working group of five senators and five delegates have made some key changes to the task force proposal.
Under its current design, only the local and state boards of education would authorize charters.
Lawmakers are working under a framework where charters are very similar to West Virginia's innovation zones, where a school's staff can request waivers of state code to explore creative new teaching strategies. Personnel laws, however, are unthreatened.
"I'm wondering what could it really do differently in terms of staffing, programming and budgeting to be innovative and close the achievement gap?" Ziebarth asked. "I'm not really sure what would be different about these schools other than their name."
At the least, he supports a pilot program that would allow about 15 real charter schools in West Virginia on a limited basis.
Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, said he won't support any bill that doesn't cap the number of charter schools created. He also will not support any bill that would take money away from existing public schools.
"Taking money from some for the advancement of others is not educating all children," he said.