Study Doubts Charter School Success Claims

Charter schools, the publicly funded but independently operated institutions that have become increasingly popular nationwide, often fall short of the sweeping reforms their advocates promise, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.

The report, made public Thursday, comes as California prepares for a major expansion of charter schools under a new law taking effect in January.

According to the two-year study of 17 charter schools across the state, most are not being held accountable for improving academic performance. The study also found that, contrary to state requirements, some schools have not taken steps to make their student population reflect the ethnic and racial makeup of their surrounding school districts.

Perhaps most troubling for those who believe charter schools will foster educational innovation--yielding benefits for the whole public system--the study found that charter schools and conventional public schools have no forum for swapping ideas or learning from each other.

The study, one of the most in-depth to date on an educational movement that has grown to more than 1,000 schools across the country in the past decade, gave kudos to those charter schools that have inspired parents and teachers and compiled a record of accomplishment. It found, for example, that charter schools have fostered an esprit de corps in their faculty that other schools might envy and that most are employing teachers with state credentials.

“We’re not trying to say charter schools have failed,” said Amy Stuart Wells, the lead investigator and a UCLA associate education professor. “We’re saying there’s a rhetoric around this movement that doesn’t match the reality.”

Charter school proponents immediately denounced the report as slipshod and biased.

“There is abundant evidence that shows the positive benefits of charter schools nationwide,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, based in Washington, D.C.

Allen said that most of the nearly 50 studies nationwide that have been done on charter schools have turned up evidence of success. The UCLA study, Allen said, “is clearly baseless.”

California was the second state to embrace the charter movement, following Minnesota’s lead in 1991, and has approved more than 150 such schools in the past five years. The schools operate free from most state regulations even though they receive public funds. They are required to apply for renewed authorization every five years.

The number of charter schools is a small fraction of the 8,000 public schools statewide. But their ranks are expected to grow significantly under a law enacted last spring that allows up to 250 charter schools in this school year and hundreds more in following years.

Gary K. Hart, whom Gov.-elect Gray Davis this week named education secretary for his incoming administration, said charter schools will remain a key element of the state’s school reform policy. Indeed, support for charters crosses party lines. During the gubernatorial campaign, Democrat Davis and Republican Dan Lungren repeatedly pledged support for charter schools.

“What you’re talking about here is an opportunity for experimentation and innovation,” said Hart, who wrote the state’s first charter school law in 1992. “Any time you do that, you’re going to have some that fall short and are failures. But by and large, [they have been] reasonably successful.”

But UCLA researchers turned up some disquieting revelations about the charter schools they studied from the spring of 1996 to spring of 1998 in 10 California school districts. The researchers observed schools firsthand and conducted more than 460 interviews of parents, teachers, educators and others with knowledge of the schools. (The districts and schools were kept anonymous, Wells said, following university policy.)

Atop the list of concerns was academic performance. The study noted that those who run charter schools make a bargain with the state: In exchange for greater freedom from perceived bureaucracy, the schools will be held more accountable for results.

But the study found that many charters fail to set specific academic goals measurable by test scores or other objective criteria. “Goals and outcomes are often vaguely written and ill-defined,” the report concluded. One charter, for example, affirmed that its goal was “enabling pupils to become self-motivated, competent and lifelong learners.”

Difficulty in measuring progress has been compounded by the lack of a consistent statewide student achievement test in recent years and the simple fact that charter schools--by nature independent and idiosyncratic--vary widely in their approach and mission. Some tailor their lessons to certain racial or ethnic groups. Some are “back-to-basics.” Others focus on “hands-on” learning.

In addition, the report found that many school boards are ambivalent about their role as monitors of charter schools--even though they are the primary agency responsible for issuing and renewing charters. One school board member told UCLA investigators: “We still have not done a good evaluation of these schools to know whether they’re more effective than they were before they were charters. I don’t think, frankly, that they are.”

Another issue the report raised was the level of public funding for charter schools and their management efficiency. Advocates often say that charter schools, unhindered by bureaucracy, can do more with less. But in practice, the researchers found that charter schools are forced to scramble for funds--both public and private.

Some charter leaders say they don’t always receive the money they’re entitled to under the public school system, whether because of lack of expertise on their part or by design of a school system suspicious of charters. One told the UCLA researchers: “Basically, we have to rely on their [public school officials’] good graces in terms of anything they want to give us.”

The report also found that the demographic profile of charter schools is frequently out of sync with the racial and ethnic mix of surrounding districts--a frequent concern of charter school critics. In 10 of 17 schools studied, at least one racial or ethnic group was under- or over-represented by 15% or more compared to the local district. The data, the report suggested, fly in the face of a state requirement that the schools take steps to achieve a racial and ethnic balance that conforms to the local population.

In another key finding, the report concluded that charter schools are typically not serving as laboratories for the public schools--in part because they lack the time and resources to collaborate with regular public schools. “To be brutally frank, they have not had an impact,” one school administrator from a regular school told the researchers.

But Irene Sumida, an administrator of Fenton Avenue Charter School in Los Angeles, which was not part of the study, said her school has shown others how to cut expenses by trimming paperwork from a government program for subsidized lunches. Sumida criticized the UCLA report for approaching charter schools “from a very negative perspective.”