Charter Schools Are Big News

Nationwide enrollment in charter schools was about 3.1 million students during the 2016-17 school year, as compared to 50.4 million students who attended U.S. public schools that same year. In 2017, 86,446 North Carolina students were enrolled in charter schools, while 1,432,507 students were enrolled in traditional public schools, or TPS. Charter schools receive public funding to provide students with a free K-12 education, and in exchange for accepting various oversight and reporting requirements, are allowed to operate with more freedom to (one hopes) both innovate and improve student outcomes. Typically, the funding comes as a per-student allocation that matches the amount spent by a local education agency for each public-school pupil.

Following Hurricane Katrina, regulators converted the public schools in New Orleans to charters at a rapid rate, commencing by firing all of the teachers in the system; by 2017, 80 of the New Orleans school district’s 85 public schools were charter schools (and over 90% of students were enrolled at charters). That city offers an extreme case, of course, and, judging from students’ test scores, the schools were in dismal shape before the storm flooded their buildings. When the storm hit in 2005, the charter-school movement in the US was still in its infancy. New Orleans was held up by charter advocates as a bold, promising experiment.

Charter schools are certainly a hot topic in North Carolina in 2018.  Since 2011, when the NC General Assembly approved a law to remove the statewide cap of 100 charter schools that can operate in the state, 73 new charters have opened their doors, and 20 more charters have been granted for schools that will open within two years.

Charter schools are managed by multiple types of organizations and enterprises. Some charter managers are mom-and-pop organizations, while others are large companies of professional educators, administrators, and business people. In 2017, 27 charter schools in NC were run by for-profit management organizations, presumably making these schools at least slightly less similar to TPS than the charter schools that run solely on public funds.

Statewide, charter spending amounted to over $513 million in 2016-17. As with so many issues related to K-12 education, it’s hard to say whether that money has been, on the whole, well spent. Helen Ladd, professor emerita of public policy and economics at Duke University, faults charter schools for both a lack of accountability and for missing opportunities for “economies of scale” that are more easily realized in a traditional public-school system.

Many people are opposed to charter schools for the simple reason that they receive public funds that would otherwise go to traditional public schools, which in some areas are chronically underfunded.  In Durham County, the growth of charter schools has cost the Durham Public School system dearly in recent years, as the Raleigh News & Observer reports. In 2017, the 13 charter schools in Durham County received education funds from state, county, and federal sources for a total of $21.8 million. The money is allocated per student, based on students’ residence in the county, so most of that total is money that DPS lost.

Opponents of charters and advocates for TPS—they are often, but not always, the same people—complain that charters are not subject to the same oversight (and red tape) as TPS while competing for the same funds; that they have found ways to pump up test scores by excluding the students most in need of high-quality instruction and additional interventions—in some cases, through expulsions; and that they are frequently driven solely by a profit incentive.

Who’s right? We’ll consider some ideas in a series of blogs on this topic. Get started with Performance of Charter Schools in Wake County.