Reopening Our Schools

It’s a question a quarter-century in the making, and one that is taking a more prominent position in the nation’s discourse on the future of American education.

This essay pairing features two vocal supporters of charter schools, both of whom strongly believe that the promise of education — especially for at-risk and underserved students — is enhanced by the expansion of public school options. Still, their advocacy for charter schools differs in tone and perspective.

Innovation spurred by charter schools has improved student outcomes, created more personalized and customized learning environments for students, and driven innovation in traditional schools that would have otherwise not occurred, say Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform.

Allen offers an unapologetic defense and embrace of profit-making in public education. She asks: “Is it more noble to earn a profit from fees on a successful school or to squander funds that fail to educate most of its students?” Allen wants to reclaim the concept of “profit” and focus on the benefit and impact — no, profit — that children, parents, and society receive when students are educated by high-performing charter schools, regardless of the entity that manages them.

Meanwhile, Rees points to the responsibility of charters to own outcomes. “Accountability is part of our promise, and the ultimate accountability of every school is to parents,” Rees says. Regardless of whether a market exists for a particular charter school, the school must deliver academic results — or close, if it cannot — in order to properly prepare every child to live out the American dream.

Do you believe charter schools are making good on the promise of education? On what set of values and approaches are they staking their future?

Second, educators aren’t receiving the training they need to be most effective in the classroom. Schools of education may be great on pedagogy, but they’re subpar at giving new teachers the practical experience they need to engage students with diverse social, emotional, and learning needs. Until we overhaul the way teachers prepare for the classroom and are rewarded for success, it will be difficult to dramatically improve school systems.

Third, we are not yet clear on how to offer a customized or personalized education for students. District schools are designed to teach a type of student, but not every student fits the type. We need much more customization. A variety of factors including: the way we use technology, seat-time policies, school hours, and assessments, will affect our ability to offer students an education that inspires them.

Charter schools are delivering solutions to each of these challenges.

First, charter schools give families who don’t have the means to exercise private choice an opportunity to send their child to a great school. Studies consistently show that inner-city charter schools can produce outstanding outcomes for minority students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. They’re boosting graduation rates and narrowing achievement gaps.

Second, charter schools tap a variety of sources to bring more people into the education profession, with an emphasis on quickly developing classroom experience. Charter schools provide opportunities for teachers and other educators to develop their own successful practices and apply them on a wider scale, and they have the flexibility to boost pay for the best teachers.

Finally, charter schools are bringing fresh ideas to the question of how education can be more personalized. In addition to the work of schools like Summit, which is a leader in technology-enabled personalized education, charter schools offer greater diversity in school focus. This allows parents and students to find the right fit for them, whether it’s STEM, arts, career prep, classical education, or ethnic studies — from Alaskan Native culture to Chinese immersion. And because charter schools can self-correct faster than lumbering district bureaucracies, they more nimbly respond to student needs.

In each of these areas, the best charter schools are delivering on their promise by challenging the status quo. They’re offering something that parents can’t get elsewhere — whether it’s higher quality academics, curriculum diversity, stronger and more personalized instruction, or any number of other features.

Making these options available requires flexibility that most educational bureaucracies, teachers’ unions, and many policymakers are hesitant to allow. That’s why it is vital that charter schools speak directly to the needs and wants of families, and help families become advocates for their own children’s education. A successful charter school is one that has advocacy in its DNA. Parents and students should be encouraged to tell their stories and defend their schools, because they can do so more compellingly than anyone else.

Another hallmark of a successful charter school is that it has authentic relationships with the communities it is serving. By getting to know people at the local Head Start center, the local Urban League chapter, other schools and community groups, and all the elected officials who represent their communities, charter schools plant roots and make it harder for opponents to undermine their work. While the national politics around charter schools seem polarized, local politics are much more nuanced and relationship-driven.

Those of us who advocate for charter schools must promote policies that preserve and extend autonomy and fair funding for charter schools, so they can be the innovators communities need. We should also look for opportunities to grow in areas that are most in need of and conducive to change. Launching a school in Birmingham, Alabama, is less expensive than launching one in Manhattan, but the majority of philanthropy is currently focused on markets that are difficult to penetrate or that are hitting headwinds. We should be more responsive to the opportunities available in places that get fewer national headlines, but have just as much need for public school choice.

Finally, the charter school community must stand firm on quality, including: helping poor-performing schools improve, turning them over to other school leaders, or closing them. If we don’t, we are no different from the traditional system. Accountability is part of our promise, and the ultimate accountability of every school is to parents. They decide whether or not to send their children to a charter school. And where charter schools are available, families can make the same decision about attending district schools.

Charter schools push the entire public education system to be more responsive to families and more creative in preparing students for the future. As change agents, we will always face resistance. To remain effective and keep delivering on our promise, we must use every tool at our disposal to combine innovation with the highest quality, while being effective advocates for our students and ourselves.

Before charter schools:

• Core Knowledge was in a smattering of public schools, and schools had a steady uphill battle to secure any grounding for this content-rich, equitable approach to learning. Just a few years into the charter movement, Core Knowledge had captured 10 percent of the charter market share.
• Montessori schools, classical academies, and direct instruction also blew up from the advent of charter schools according to the Center for Education Reform’s earliest surveys.
• Experiential learning and Outward Bound began to take hold in hundreds of diverse communities nationwide.
• The application of technology through whole-school online, blended, or flipped classrooms has its roots in charters, as does personalized learning.
• The first no-excuses schools, which proved that poverty is no proxy for failure, were a charter phenomenon.

Charter schools opened in troubled communities and introduced new ways of organizing schools, hiring and supporting teachers (without union requirements), and new approaches using private capital to build new schools. They enrolled students who were more than 50 percent minority, at risk, and disadvantaged. They were more integrated and more successful. They still are.

And yet the unions and general education establishment fight charters (or try to take them over), malign them, and distort their record. Even worse, they’ve created a narrative around profitability that drives even thoughtful people, journalists, and advocates to attempt to constrain entrepreneurial activities that drive chartering forward.

Charters have been the petri dish for data usage and reporting to guide instruction. Many of those new tools were then scaled, causing traditional systems to have to make massive changes in how they deliver education — changes that many teachers, leaders, and schools have adopted and embraced. Schools across the education sectors have now copied nearly every profitable measure implemented in charters, from performance pay to education technology-based innovations to blended learning.

It’s all proven — quite profitably — that there’s no one model or governance structure in education that ensures a student can gain everything they need to be well-educated. It’s the choices that charters provide to those who see the problem close up every day — parents, grandparents, and teachers once confined only to schools run by unresponsive government and nonprofit entities — that will guide their success.

This issue of profitability is a bit of a non sequitur, however. Is it more noble to earn a profit from fees on a successful school or to squander funds that fail to educate most of its students? A system that continually fails most of its students on numerous data points, squandering $15,000 per student, profits the adults. Is a successful charter school network managed by a tax-paying company, which invests and reaps rewards, less worthy than a network that does not pay taxes?

On the contrary, not only did those organizations significantly contribute to the creation of the laws and policies that paved the way for thousands more to start, but they have invested billions of dollars into creating charter schools to drive impact and benefit — no, PROFIT — millions of kids, teachers, parents, and the general public.

As Aristotle proffered, it’s the natural extension of our human talents and virtues that we create wealth and extend its benefits to others. That’s something we all should emulate.