Charter Schools and Minorities
An Examination of the Effectiveness of the Charter School Concept to Date
The nation's public schools are struggling to meet the challenges presented by the No Child Left Behind mandates, and charter schools have been suggested as one approach that holds the promise of providing public schools with the tools they need to succeed. According to one authority, "The Charter School concept has the potential to utterly transform public education" (n.p.). Unfortunately, this potential has not been realized to any appreciable degree in many such charter schools to date (Schmerler, 2002). To this end, this paper will provide a review of the relevant and peer-reviewed literature to determine how well charter schools are actually serving and meeting the needs of urban students of color. A comparison of the performance of the charter schools with the performance of public schools in educating students of color will be followed by an examination of the opportunities and barriers that exist to implementing best practices in a given charter school; a summary of the research will be provided in the conclusion.
Review and Discussion
Background and Overview. In sum, a charter school provides a framework in which a group of teachers, parents, or other stakeholders with comparable interests and views about education to organize and operate a school; the authorizing governmental body that grants charters can be a local school district, by the state, or by the national government (Anderson & Wohlstetter, 1994). Since the original charter school legislation was enacted in 1991, there has been a growing amount of interest generated by the possibilities inherent in this network of more autonomous public schools (Anderson & Wohlstetter, 1994). According to Ferraiolo, Hess, Maranto, and Milliman (2004), as of January 2003, there were approximately 2,700 charter schools operating in 36 states and the District of Columbia, providing services to more than 684,000 students; further, 30 states already had charter schools in operation as of September 1999. A survey completed by the Public Agenda Foundation that same year, though, showed that the majority of Americans had only the vaguest concept of what the term charter school meant (Brouillette, 2002). The charter school movement is based on the fundamental tenets that schools should be accountable to their stakeholders and open to any student wanting to attend; the movement has attracted a number of proponents as well (Boyd & Nathan, 2003). For example, according to Connecticut Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman: "Competition from charter schools is the best way to motivate the ossified bureaucracies governing too many public schools. This grass-roots revolution seeks to reconnect public education with our most basic values: ingenuity, responsibility, and accountability"; likewise, an Arizona official called charter schools "the most important thing happening in public education" (Finn, Mann & Vanourek, 2000, p. 13). These authors define a charter school as "a new species, a hybrid, with important similarities to traditional public schools, some of the prized attributes of private schools -- and crucial differences from both. According to Heise and Ryan (2002), a charter school is some type of combination of public and private schools; they are authorized by state statutes, the schools are publicly funded, tuition-free, nonsectarian schools that operate pursuant to a contract between the school and the chartering agency, which is the local school board, a state agency, or a state-designated agency.
Charter schools can assume a number of incarnations as well; for example, charter schools can be formed by creating new schools, or by converting public or private schools; further, they can be opened and operated by any number of groups, including teachers, parents, and private corporations, although some states require that the charter school creators be a nonprofit group (Heise & Ryan, 2002). Charter schools also enjoy exemption from compliance with various regulations relating to such issues as teacher hiring, curriculum, calendar, and length of school day; in exchange for these exemptions, charter schools are strictly accountable for their performance (Heise & Ryan, 2002).
Because they are public schools, charter schools are by definition required to be open to any student who wants to attend there without regard to race, religion, or academic ability; in addition, charter schools are financed with tax dollars, meaning there is no tuition charged and these schools are also accountable for its results to an authoritative public body such as a state or local school board for their continued existence as well as to those who enroll (and teach) in them (Finn et al., 2000).
Charter schools are also differentiated from standard-issue public schools; the majority of charter schools to...
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