The original intent of charter schools, to increase the professional autonomy of teachers so they could explore innovative ways to educate children and youth, has given way to other agendas that have grafted onto the movement.
Increasingly, charter school policies have been influenced by market ideology that treats the movement as a vehicle for privatizing public schools.
Research reveals that, in practice, charter school “innovations” too often occur more on the management side than on the educational side of schooling.
And despite anecdotal reports of local successes, overall, charter school students perform no better than non-charter public school students.
To improve the education of all students, policy-makers should focus not on the governance structures of schools, but on the improvement of curriculum and instruction in classrooms.
The idea for charter schools emerged in the late 1980s as a way to enhance professional autonomy of teachers that would empower them to identify ways to educate students that were more effective than what the existing bureaucracy would allow.
Since that time, charter schools have enjoyed support from a wide range of interests, including teacher unions, minority rights advocates, and advocates of deregulation and free market reforms.
Over time, the agendas of these different interest groups have influenced charter school policy and practice.
Today, the rhetoric supporting charter schools usually emphasizes an offer of autonomy in return for accountability for educators and increased choice for parents.
Because the main idea behind charter schools is that exemption from cumbersome state regulations will free local educators to generate more effective ways to educate students, one might expect that local reports of charter school success would identify the regulations that previously had impeded school performance.
Armed with this information, policy-makers could abolish those regulations so that all public schools would benefit.
Moreover, if cumbersome regulations are really the principal obstacle to school improvement, as the case for charter schools implies, then why not simply waive these cumbersome regulations for all public schools?
Not only would such a policy free all public schools to pursue innovative solutions to their educational problems, but also the time, energy and money spent on preparing tedious charter petitions, then negotiating the petition process could be invested directly in local school improvement.
Neither of these things are likely to happen because, despite the appealing rhetoric about autonomy and choice, another agenda has quietly come to reshape charter school policies: namely, to impose market-based reforms on the public school system in order to prepare it eventually for privatization.
Although the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Georgia Charter School Act currently require all charter schools to be public, that is, funded by public money, both laws allow the public money to be paid to private for-profit companies to run charter schools.
This legislation has opened the door wider for privatization of public schools.
Research into charter school practice has found that “innovations” that charter schools typically implement have more to do with management and advertising than with curriculum and instruction.
Classroom practices in charter schools are little different than classroom practices in non-charter public schools.
The promise that the deregulated governance structures of charter schools would precipitate the introduction of new and more effective classroom practices remains unfulfilled.
When charter schools and other market-based reforms for public education were first proposed, there was no evidence that they would actually improve education.
Now that these reforms have been attempted, the evidence is still not in their favor.
Overall, the available evidence indicates that, nationally, charter schools do not outperform non-charter public schools in terms of improved academic achievement of students.
And international research has found that countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United States that have implemented market-based school reforms, such as school choice and charter schools, have higher levels of educational inequality in terms of academic achievement of students.
Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Japan that have strong publicly supported school systems and few, if any, market-based educational experiments, enjoy high levels of both access to education and academic achievement.
If our goal is to improve education for all students, the bulk of the evidence suggests that market-based education reforms, including charter schools, are not going to help us achieve it.
The best policy for improving public schools is to invest directly in reforms that have been proven to work.
Those reforms should focus not on the business side of schools, but on implementing classroom practices that have been demonstrated to improve curriculum, instruction and assessment—and ultimately student learning.
William G. Wraga is a professor in the University of Georgia College of Education’s Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy.
