Charter Schools:
Do They Measure Up?
By Kim Pleticha
Parent:Wise Magazine, September 2009
When it came time for Martin Lujan to choose a high school for his oldest son, one thing was clear: he wanted a school in which discipline and academics were a priority.
Mr. Lujan eschewed the local district high school after seeing too many students engaged in “public affection” and dressing inappropriately; the school’s lackluster Academically Acceptable rating from the Texas Educational Agency didn’t impress him, either. So he turned to Harmony Science Academy, a college preparatory charter school in Northeast Austin.
“There is zero tolerance for that kind of behavior at [Harmony],” he says. “They tell the kids they come here to learn, not to see your boyfriend or girlfriend.”
Mr. Lujan got lucky.
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Harmony Science Academy and its sister campuses were the only charter schools in the Austin area to receive an Exemplary rating, which is the state’s highest educational designation, from the Texas Education Agency in 2008 (2009 statistics had not been released at press time).
Had Mr. Lujan chosen another charter school, he may not have been so pleased: Most of the other charter schools in the area, and in Texas in general, aren’t doing much better than their traditional public school counterparts when it comes to academic achievement.
Indeed, a recent study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University finds that charter schools are, in many cases, significantly trailing traditional public schools in terms of achievement. Worse, charter schools seem to be failing at-risk kids the most, according to the study.
“Texas has generally been on the leading edge when it comes to its educational practices [and] with charter school accountability,” says Ken Surratt, the Assistant Director of CREDO and a lead researcher on the study. “So I think Texas is aware of [the problem], but it is a struggle putting in all of the programs needed to improve education.”
So where does that leave kids?
Charter School History
Education in Texas, and throughout the country, has changed dramatically in the past three decades. Before 1987, kids in Texas did not have to pass a test to graduate from high school. In fact, before that time there was no centralized curriculum in the state: school districts were free to come up with their own curricula and implement it in whatever way they desired. The problem with this method of doing things was that there was no way to gauge whether a student who went to school in the Rio Grande Valley received as good of an education as someone who went to school in Austin.
In the 1980s, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) implemented a basic skills test to ensure that all kids in Texas were competent in certain educational measures before leaving high school. By the 1990s, the basic skills test had intensified into the more rigorous Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test. After the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 —which requires state public schools to demonstrate academic achievement in order to receive government funding— Texas implemented the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, which all high school students must now pass in order to receive a diploma.
This high-stakes testing is, in many ways, what caused the birth and growth of charter schools in Texas.
“The need for charter schools has evolved because…some [traditional public] schools have failed to meet the need of certain student groups,” says TEA Spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman. “Most traditional schools use the ‘teacher as lecturer’ technique and some students just can’t learn in that environment. So that’s where charter schools have come into play.”
The Texas legislature granted charter schools the right to exist in 1995. The law, which has never been amended, allows any nonprofit organization, government entity, or institution of higher learning the right to apply for a charter and open its own schools. Current law allows for 215 charters in Texas, each of which functions much like a school district: a charter is the governing body that in turn opens and operates its own charter schools. Charter schools are completely separate from local school districts, but they receive funding from the state for each pupil they enroll.
Right now, Texas charter schools enroll only two percent of public school children in the state. But that small number belies their impact. Charter schools have been at the center of the debate over school choice, school funding, and academic achievement. Case in point: teachers unions, which originally supported the charter school law, fought against a legislative amendment this Spring that would have granted more charters (the bill ended-up dying in committee before receiving a full vote in the Legislature).
This disappointed the Texas Charter Schools Association, which supported the bill and its goal of adding12 new charters to Texas law. The group strongly believes that competition between charter schools and traditional public schools will eventually increase achievement at all schools.
“[Charter schools] are not threatening the traditional public schools,” says David Dunn, the organization’s executive director. “I think parents have the right to have some choice within the public school system.”
Measuring Achievement
But how do parents evaluate those choices and make a good decision for their children—especially when charter schools in Texas don’t seem to be delivering on their original promise of increasing achievement?
When it comes to statistics, Texas charter schools do seem to be lagging. Overall, in 2008 charter schools had half as many Exemplary and Recognized ratings, and nearly four times the level of Academically Unacceptable ratings, as their traditional public school counterparts (see sidebar). Having said that, charter schools outperformed traditional public schools in the Academically Acceptable ranking.
But statistics don’t tell the entire story.
In Texas, charter schools tend to draw heavily from at-risk populations — students from low socio-economic, minority, or otherwise disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds. In many cases, these students transfer to the charter schools to escape public schools that failed to educate them, says Ms. Marchman of the TEA.
“Many charters recruit kids who could not or did not perform [well] at a public school and these charters are stepping up,” she says. “So although there are some charter schools that struggle, you have to keep in mind that they have a high concentration of at-risk kids that they are educating, so you are not getting the same apples-to-apples comparisons.”
The Austin Can! Academy is a prime example of this. Located in East Austin, the school has languished at the bottom of TEA’s achievement rankings for years. On paper, it would seem that it is a key illustration of a school the TEA should close for not making Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act. But the school exists for a very specific reason: to educate kids who have dropped out, or are in danger of dropping out, of traditional public schools. This translates to a seriously at-risk high school population: one that includes kids who have dropped out of school three-to-five times, have a 60-70% pregnancy rate, a 60-70% mobility rate, and an overall reading level of 3rd or 4th grade, says school principal Dr. Joe Gonzales.
“I don’t make any excuses [for the low test scores],” he says, but adds that the Austin Can! Academy is doing well with the population it has. “It has been proven that you can make great gains with kids who are up against great obstacles.”
Critics, however, assert that schools like the Austin Can! Academy simply aren’t making those gains fast enough. The recent CREDO report, for example, shows that African American and Latino children enrolled in Texas charter schools do “significantly worse” in both reading and math compared with their counterparts in traditional public schools.
But again, the devil is in the details: the report also finds that poor children do significantly better in Texas charter schools, and that the longer any child remains in a charter school the better he or she does: students enrolled in a charter school for three or four years do significantly better in reading and math than those in traditional public schools, according to the report.
So how long should the TEA give low-performing charter schools to raise achievement? It’s a tough question, says Ms. Marchman, made all the more difficult by the laws governing charter school management. Right now, any school —charter or traditional— that obtains an academically unacceptable rating for two years in a row receives mandatory sanctions from the TEA, such as campus intervention or reconstitution. After five years of academically unacceptable ratings, TEA can shut down the school, as it recently did with Pearce Middle School.
But this doesn’t always happen with charter schools, chiefly because the TEA’s hands are tied if the school is underperforming for other reasons. If a charter school doesn’t have the money to adequately educate its students, for instance, or if its data reporting is faulty, the TEA must wade through the legal system to close the school. This, say critics, must be changed.
“What I feel is not happening in the charter school movement,” says Mr. Surratt of CREDO. “is that while there are mechanisms for closing underperforming charter schools, it’s not happening at the rate it should.”
“No Excuses”
David Dunn of the Texas Charter Schools Association agrees with that assessment.
“Charter schools that are not achieving and are not serving students should absolutely be shut down,” he says. “But we need to be very careful how we’re measuring success.”
Mr. Dunn, a former chief lobbyist for the National School Boards Association and chief of staff for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the Bush Administration, is fiercely dedicated to improving the quality of charter schools in Texas. As such, it may seem odd that he doesn’t advocate a standardized approach to measuring success. But he is careful to point out that, while academic achievement is paramount, charter schools that serve predominantly at-risk populations whom traditional public schools have failed should have an alternate means of gauging accomplishment.
“Measuring growth for a school like American Youthworks—where many of the kids have dropped out or are in gangs—it presents a different challenge,” he says.
True, say the folks at the Knowledge is Power Program, but that doesn’t mean you make excuses for poor achievement. KIPP, as the organization is known, operates 82 charter schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia, including three in Austin (with a fourth planned for 2010). All of the KIPP schools in Austin —and all but four in the state— have achieved TEA’s second-highest “Recognized” ranking. This, while educating primarily at-risk kids: 80% of the students who attend KIPP schools nationwide are from low income families, and 90% are either African American or Latino, according to KIPP statistics. When students enter KIPP schools in the 5th grade, the average student reading score is in the 31st percentile, while the math score is in the 41st percentile; by the time students are in 8th grade, however, those scores have nearly doubled.
KIPP achieves this using a unique approach to education: a 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. school day; a heavy homework load; school on Saturdays two times a month; and three weeks of Summer school each year. This, combined with dedicated teachers, a strong expectation that each child will go to college, and a commitment to building ethically and morally robust students, round out the organization’s philosophy — one that has worked amazingly well everywhere it has been implemented.
“We get there through high expectations,” says Steve Mancini, KIPP’s national spokesman. “We think what the KIPP experience shows is that with great teachers, a longer school day and a focus on college, low income students will not only learn they will thrive.”
Harmony Academy, where Mr. Lujan enrolled his son, has learned the same thing. The Harmony schools, at which 60% of the student populations are “high risk”, has managed to earn an Exemplary rating at every campus. Their formula is strikingly similar to KIPP’s: high expectations, committed teachers, strong discipline, and a focus on college from the earliest grades.
“This is not rocket science [and] it’s not magic,” says Mustafa Guvercin, Harmony school’s cluster superintendent in Austin. “We focus, and we work with the kids, and we don’t leave anyone behind.”
Defining Success
The hard fact is, however, that some students are being left behind. And many of them end-up in low-performing charter schools because those are often the only schools willing to take a chance on such kids.
So how do you measure the success of those academically low-performing campuses? Dr. Gonzales, of the Austin Can! Academy, suggests it might be better to look at graduation rates rather than strict academic achievement.
“In life you have options [and] here is the option we have: we know through hard research and longitudinal studies that 70% of jail and prison populations are made up of high school drop outs. And we know that in any urban area in the country, no matter the size, anywhere between 35% and 50% of kids are dropping out of school,” Dr. Gonzales says. “So the question is: do you want kids in jail where it costs $22 an hour to feed and clothe an inmate or in our school where it costs $7 an hour?”
Dr. Gonzales says the choices facing society are limited when it comes to educating seriously at-risk kids, and that charter schools are some of the only places left willing to assume the challenge. “[We] take a chance on these kids—a second or third or fourth time—[and] we are graduating record numbers: 60-70% of our eligible seniors,” he says. “That’s a lot better than not graduating any and having them go on the streets.”
The Bottom Line
Martin Lujan’s son easily could have fallen into the latter statistic. Pablo, now 18, needed strong discipline to remain in school and stay focused, his father says. The small classes and personalized instruction at Harmony Science Academy worked well for him — far better, his father believes, than the local district high school could have done. Pablo graduated from Harmony last Spring but he has not yet decided whether to attend college. Still, his father was so impressed with the program that he has enrolled his two younger children in Harmony’s sister campuses. He admits the school isn’t for everyone, but because it’s a charter school, people are free to choose to attend— or not.
“In [Papblo’s] class, lots of kids left because they didn’t like the discipline,” Mr. Lujan says. “But everybody needs to do what’s best for them.”
That, perhaps, is the bottom line. While charter schools may not be outperforming traditional public schools, they are providing an educational alternative for parents and children. They are generally smaller, more personalized, offer unique learning environments, and tend to encourage, or even require, parental involvement—and for many parents, those qualities outweigh TEA achievement rankings.
And while the CREDO report casts doubt on short-term charter school achievement, a recent RAND study finds that charter school students do have a higher probability of graduating and attending college. It is this report to which charter schools in Texas, and throughout the country, point when discussing charter school achievement. While academic rankings are important, graduation and college attendance rates —especially amongst at-risk students— should be given equal weight when judging charter school performance, they say. And this is what they’ll tell the legislature in 2011 when they once again request that the Texas charter school law be expanded.
“Over time, charter school students are outperforming students in traditional public schools,” says Mr. Dunn of the Texas Charter Schools Association, “so I think it’s important not to lose sight of that.”