We must rethink rhetoric behind charter schools

In the past five months, three major reports have been released showing charter schools performed more poorly than public schools on the same tests. The most recent of them, issued this month by the Education Department, presented a re-analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress comparing outcomes for charter and public school students on these national exams. It echoed the NAEP findings released in August by the American Federation of Teachers. Yet another report, released reluctantly by the Education Department this fall, looked at state exam data in five states and came to the same conclusion.

What are we to make of this? Proponents of charter schools say we don't have enough data and that the schools have not existed long enough to be judged. Opponents say three strikes and you're out.

My own view is that there are important public policy lessons to be learned from a reform movement that was promoted as the answer to a failing public school system, and that cannot, 14 years later, keep pace with that system. As a researcher who has studied charter school reform in six states, I believe we should not interpret the recent reports as an indictment of individual charter schools. Rather, they should alert policymakers to the hazards of building an educational reform movement on top of untested rhetoric about market forces and public schools.

I have seen some excellent charter schools, with well-trained educators and solid curricula. They tend to be in more middle-class communities, where private resources augment the low level of public funding charter schools receive. I have also seen charter schools run by people who collect the public funding while providing minimal services for low-income students who have few other options. And I have seen a lot of charter schools that fall somewhere in between — not stellar, not awful, but no better than the public schools nearby.

With such variation at the grass-roots level, it's not fair to say all charter schools are failures. Yet clearly we have enough evidence to suggest the free-market ideals that fueled this reform movement are at best misguided and at worst harmful to the most disadvantaged students. It was this rhetoric that persuaded lawmakers in 42 states to pass laws establishing some 3,000 charter schools, which have enrolled nearly 700,000 children. It is this set of principles that lawmakers must reconsider.