True or false: A charter school is a public school
If you don't know the answer, you're not alone. "I think there's a lack of understanding of what a charter school is," says Eugene Piccolo, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools. "I think a lot of people don't even understand that charter schools are public schools."
What is a charter school?
Charter schools are public schools that are generally independent from school districts (the exception is a charter school that has one or more school districts as its sponsor) and have both the freedom to design their own curriculums and fewer regulations to follow than do school districts. Parents, teachers, community members, or a combination can start a charter school, but each must be approved for operation by the Minnesota Department of Education. Each charter school has a nonprofit or educational (school district or college) sponsor, which is, in theory, responsible for overseeing the school's management and academic achievement, along with an elected board of directors. Minnesota is the birthplace of the charter school movement-the statute creating charter schools was enacted in 1991 and the first charter school, City Academy, opened its doors in St. Paul a year later.
Although it attracts a fair amount of attention, the charter school movement is a relatively small one: nationwide, there are just 3,400 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia. While numbers are growing, there were 104 charter schools in Minnesota with just over 17,500 students during the 2004-2005 school year, representing just 1.5 percent of all enrolled K-12 students.
Are Minnesota charter schools succeeding?
While there are some real success stories among those schools, there have also been a handful of very visible charter school failures. Even the experts are divided about how the schools are doing on the whole. "[They're doing] very well," the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change says on its Web site. But State Representative Jim Davnie (DFL-Minneapolis), who's a teacher and also sits on the Minnesota House Education Committee, charges, "Charter schools have never fulfilled their original promise to act as a laboratory for bold new initiatives, to be an independent research and development arm of public schools. School districts were supposed to be able to pick up the successful ideas and drop them in. We've never seen that laboratory."
There have been serious and documented charges of financial and managerial mismanagement. Most recently, St. Paul's Col. Charles Young Military Academy closed abruptly in October 2004, as did Minneapolis' Chiron Charter School in February 2005. Closings like these concern Judy Schaubach, president of Education Minnesota, the union representing 70,000 teachers. "I worry about the kids who are stranded mid-year," she says. In other financial woes, in May of this year, St. Paul's Minnesota Business Academy asked the city to settle a loan for pennies on the dollar after twice deferring its repayment. Additionally, up to one-third of charter schools were late in submitting financial audit and board minute information in 1999 and 2000, according to a study by Minnesota House Minority Leader Matt Entenza.
Both Piccolo and charter school advocate Jon Schroeder of Education/Evolving, a Minneapolis-based think tank, say that administrative and managerial challenges hinder charter schools.
"A charter school is a very entrepreneurial enterprise by its very nature," says Piccolo, adding that charter schools don't have the ready-made support systems of accounting, personnel, etc., in place as school districts do.
Schroeder says that because charter schools are a new concept, some are bound to fail. When asked to compare the success of charter schools in other metro areas, such as Chicago, with problems in some Minnesota ones, he suggests that the two aren't comparable. "We in Minnesota have a wide, diverse, and broad range of schools," Schroeder says. "Our schools are more organic, they're locally developed and organized-not created by national groups in a sort of "chain store" approach."
State Senator Wes Skoglund (DFL-Minneapolis), a teacher who serves on the Minnesota Senate's K-12 Education Finance Committee, thinks that while there are some good charter schools in Minnesota, there are also a number of not-so-good ones. "I've seen some kids prosper at charter schools, but there have also been some mismanaged ones," Skoglund says, adding, "Charter schools have had more than their share of misused funds. Some operators have gotten into the charter school business that shouldn't have. It's seldom you see that in [district] public schools unless there's embezzlement," he says.
Piccolo bristles at talk about financial mismanagement. "I think there needs to be greater financial oversight of all public schools-public school districts as well as charter schools," he says. "All the public schools have is the public trust; when that's violated, it undermines the core of public education."
Schaubach has a number of concerns about charter schools. One is that teachers may not be licensed to teach a particular subject. "Parents need to ask questions about staff qualifications," she says, adding, "There can also be huge [teacher] turnover at these schools." And she shares Davnie's feelings about charter schools as a vehicle for change. "[Education Minnesota] was cautious about charter schools but thought that they might be useful as a laboratory for the research and development of innovative approaches," she says. "That has not been the experience, and it's been disappointing to everybody."
Piccolo and Schroeder say that the challenges charter schools face have to do with a lack of training of the sponsors, who are charged with academic and managerial oversight. Education/Evolving is planning to remedy this, Schroeder says, by helping to implement "a rigorous process that includes training for the sponsors as well as some intensive work with individuals." The project, called the Minnesota Sponsor Assistance Network, links sponsors and other key individuals with training and experts for technical assistance in order to improve their ability to oversee the schools. Charter school boosters like Piccolo and Schroeder say that improving the sponsors will improve the schools' stability.
Who are the kids?
Both boosters and critics agree that many of the kids in charter schools face educational challenges. They are more likely to come from low-income families (54 percent) and to have English language challenges (16 percent). Although 13-year-old Andrea Nicholson of St. Paul doesn't fall into either of these categories, she does have a learning disability, says her mother, Cindy Ray, who started looking for just the right middle school when Andrea was in 5th grade.
"We looked at a lot of schools," Ray says. They wanted a school close to home, one that would be equipped to handle Andrea's reading disability, yet have high academic standards. Ray admits that when she heard about Twin Cities Academy, "I had to educate myself about charter schools." Ray did her homework well, and was impressed with what she learned: the school was fiscally stable, had low teacher turnover and the same principal since it was founded in 1999.
"Andrea does all of her work right in the classroom, she's not pulled out for special classes," Ray says. "I am delighted with the school's core curriculum and the school in general. Andrea likes it very well, too. It is a smaller school, a highly structured school. It's a very good match for Andrea's learning style."
Andrea is thriving at Twin Cities Academy. She has gained an impressive 2.5 grade levels in reading in the past 1.5 years. And she isn't an isolated case: the school, which has been awarded five stars each for reading and math, including citations for outstanding performance compared to schools of similar size (Twin Cities Academy has 185 students) and outstanding performance compared to schools with similar numbers of economically disadvantaged students. The school's sponsor is the St. Paul school district, which may play a part in the its success-Twin Cities Academy has access to experienced educators and managers.
On the horizon
There are 33 new charter schools approved to open this fall; Morgan Brown, director of School Choice and Innovation at the Minnesota Department of Education thinks there will actually be 20-25 that open on schedule, with the remainder waiting another year.
We'd need a crystal ball to see how many of these schools will be as successful as Twin Cities Academy or fail like Chiron Charter School. One thing's for certain, though: the state legislation that created the first charter school 14 years ago in St. Paul has changed the face of American education, for better or worse. And that's something that all sides can agree on.
