Identity crisis: can charter schools survive accountability?

Charter schooling and test-based accountability both have their roots in concerns that public schools are not sufficiently accountable. But

as both innovations take hold, a tension is emerging. Some charter schools believe they should answer only to parents and their mission and should be exempt from many of the accountability requirements that are imposed on traditional public schools.

In this forum, Michael Petrilli argues that charter schools, if they are effective, should not fear accountability, while Theodore Sizer worries that bringing charter schools under the NCLB framework will stifle their ability to innovate and develop radically different, and more promising, school models.

Charters as Role Models

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The charter school movement turns 14 this year, and its behavior, some might say, is "developmentally appropriate." Unruly and temperamental, impassioned and energetic, growing in fits and starts and fiercely independent, even friends and supporters aren't quite sure what to do with it. And now comes the apex of adolescence: the identity crisis.

Like most Americans who have ancestors from multiple countries or even continents, charters were born of disparate theories, education initiatives, and social philosophies. That diversity has been one of the greatest strengths of the big family that is the charter movement. But now public policies--certainly No Child Left Behind (NCLB), but also the state standards movement that preceded it--are forcing conversations long delayed. The most fundamental question is, What's the point of charter schools anyway?

In the early 1990s, at the inception of charters, the bargain was set. These schools would be given greater autonomy and flexibility than traditional public schools, and in return they would be held accountable for getting better results in student learning. And, just as critically, they would be schools of choice for everyone involved--students, parents, and teachers. Two sides of the charter triangle--autonomy and choice--have remained quite clear and without controversy, at least within the charter movement itself. Parents should have plenty of choices; and the more autonomy and flexibility, the better. And it is clear that the charter model has succeeded in attracting applicants (see Figure 1).

But regarding the third side--accountability for results--the conversation was purposefully ambiguous. What results? Measured how? Compared with what? Rather than forcing a standard answer to these questions, policy makers and charter sponsors allowed schools to develop contracts that were customized to their specific contours.

Schools had the freedom to make the case to their state or local overseers for their contracts and accountability plans to reflect their unique pedagogical approaches. If the school was of the progressive stripe, for example, attracting parents and teachers who abhorred standardized testing, then portfolios of student work might serve as the indicator of success. If the school served an at-risk population, such as high-school dropouts, expectations might be adjusted accordingly. In effect, it was accountability sans standards.

As the 1990s progressed, however, and the state standards movement gained strength, the ambiguity around accountability--for charters but also for other public schools--started to recede. Elected representatives decided that it was appropriate to expect all public school students to know and be able to do certain things. Furthermore, they determined that statewide assessments were reasonable tools to measure whether this learning had in fact happened. And, by the end of the decade, some states were ready to hold schools to account for education success or failure.

Finally, by 2002, through the No Child Left Behind act, the public's elected representatives took decisive action to close the achievement gaps plaguing our nation--and to hold all public schools, including charter schools, accountable for making progress toward that end. Some simple but powerful principles were codified in the law: every child can learn--and to expect anything less is a form of bigotry, which should stop.

Autonomy versus Accountability

So here we are, 14 years after the birth of charters, looking into the mirror at an identity crisis. Some in the charter school movement, viewing autonomy as its most important animating principle, responsible for so much of the innovation and energy in the 3,300 charter schools across the country, argue that the testing regimen at the heart of the standards movement and NCLB will leave charters hidebound, soulless, bureaucratized.

Is that a reasonable concern? Let's return to the fundamental question: What's the point of charter schools anyway?

If the only point is for schools to be innovative, experimental, and risk-taking, like the alternative schools of the 1960s, then exemption from statewide testing and accountability systems, and adoption of unique goals and objectives for each school, might make sense. But what if the point of charter schools is to dramatically raise student achievement and close the achievement gaps so that all young people have a chance to participate in our democracy and economy? What if the point is to innovate, experiment, take risks, and bring in new energy and ideas in order to perform at levels higher than otherwise possible?

In practice, this debate over the point of charter schools has itself reached a critical juncture. NCLB, supported by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress, makes it clear that all public schools--including charter schools--must be held accountable for raising student achievement and closing achievement gaps. In particular, schools are expected to make their state-set achievement goals ("Adequate Yearly Progress" under the law) to ensure that all children learn to read and do math.

At What Cost Proficiency?

How much of a threat to charter autonomy are this law and the related state accountability systems? Is proficiency in math and reading too heavy a burden to carry? I would argue that excellent charter schools, no matter how traditional or progressive, can handily meet the achievement expectations of state accountability systems while maintaining their distinct character. The requirements of NCLB are merely a starting point. Schools can build on statewide testing with their own "authentic" assessments of student learning, such as portfolios or demonstrations. And while ensuring that their students are literate and numerate, they can go on to provide a full, well-rounded education, defined as they see fit.

Schools of all kinds of educational persuasions can meet and are meeting the standards demanded by states and NCLB. The Office of Innovation and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education went looking for examples of some of the best charter schools in the nation, as measured by state assessments, and found a wide variety of institutions getting the job done. The resulting booklet, Innovations in Education: Successful Charter Schools, highlights some by-the-book miracle workers like KIPP Houston and Boston's Roxbury Prep. But it also includes entries like the School of Arts and Sciences in Tallahassee, Florida, which features interdisciplinary learning, portfolios, and multi-age classrooms, and does without grades, report cards, or kids sitting in rows. What the schools all have in common is that they made adequate yearly progress under NCLB and otherwise demonstrated impressive student-achievement gains.

Granted, the achievement-level design of the NCLB accountability system creates some challenges for new schools like charters. Many charter schools purposefully recruit students who historically have been left behind by the traditional public schools; many of them are at-risk students. Especially for charter high schools, with students entering three, four, or five years behind, this presents a unique challenge. Some in the charter movement might prefer a value-added approach to accountability, one that looks at the gains made in student learning each year. In fact, there is a version of this system built into NCLB's so-called safe harbor provision, which finds a school's progress adequate if it increases by at least 10 percent, the number of students who are proficient, even if the school does not meet its achievement target. Whatever the system, though, it is important that we expect all students to achieve proficiency. Can educators--in charters and in other types of schools--say that their students are well prepared for life and further learning if they can't read or do math at grade level?

While the accountability demands of NCLB could lead some charters--those exploring the furthest frontiers of education practice--to modify their programs, a much greater impact will be felt by charters that are low performing by any measure. And this may be the law's greatest gift to the charter movement. It is already clear that many charter schools will be labeled "in need of improvement" under state accountability systems and NCLB. (According to the Government Accountability Office, as early as 2002-03, 25 charters in California, 28 in Michigan, and 38 in Pennsylvania needed improvement because they did not have enough students in certain subgroups reaching proficiency in reading or math.) While some of these schools are likely making great progress with students who started out far behind, others are unquestionably underperforming. As they face the steadily increasing improvement measures triggered by NCLB, many charters will surely be closed by their authorizers. And that will be a victory for the charter movement in the long run.

Why a victory? Because without the pressure of state accountability and NCLB, precious few authorizers have been willing to pull the trigger on underperforming charters. In a culture that can't get enough of Donald Trump and his "Apprentice," we have been terribly gun-shy about telling charters those two important words: "You're fired!"

This lack of political courage has consequences--not only for the kids in the failing schools, but also for the charter movement itself. The year 2004 was difficult for charters, with the well-placed, well-spun American Federation of Teachers "study" taking center stage in a bruising battle between charter critics and supporters. The report--and the New York Times, which "broke" the story on its front page last August--was roundly criticized by researchers for its inadequate methods. (See "Gray Lady Wheezing," Education Next, Winter 2005.) While the official release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data demonstrated that the sky had not fallen--after controlling for race, as many had pointed out, any differences between charters and traditional public schools washed out--the news was no reason to celebrate either. Again, if the point of charter schools is to raise achievement and close achievement gaps, there's plenty of evidence that some charters are not pulling their weight. These are the schools most likely to face the ultimate consequence of closure under NCLB. That will make the whole charter movement stronger.

So in which direction is our 14-year-old heading? Which identity will it assume? It can throw tantrums, declare its disgust with the "system" that is NCLB-style accountability, and become a teen rebel. Or it can work through its growing pains, coming to grips with the responsibilities of a mature education movement while also maintaining and celebrating its uniqueness and independence. I am hopeful that the charter movement will find its way, never giving up the innovation and energy that make it special, but also shouldering the load of helping to close the nation's achievement gaps. And when it does so, it will be declared not only a success in its own right, but a role model for the entire public education system.

Michael J. Petrilli is associate assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement, which houses the federal charter-school grant programs.

BY MICHAEL J. PETRILLI

Heavy Demand (Figure 1)

Across the 40 states (and Washington, D.C.) with charter schools,
students on waiting lists are nearly 9 percent of total charter
enrollment. In nine states the number on waiting lists exceeds 20
percent.

Note: No data were available for Maryland.
SOURCE: Center for Education Reform

Don't The Us Down

Of the many arguments for charter schools, one is crucial: that charters should be deliberately, thoughtfully, boldly different from existing mainline public middle and high schools.

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The evidence of the ineffectiveness of the traditional design of K-12 education, especially that of middle and high schools, serving both rich and poor, is overwhelming. The trail goes back for decades, from John Goodlad's massive inquiry, summarized in A Place Called School (1984), and Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen's The Shopping Mall High School (1985), to a string of studies starting in the late 1950s by James S. Coleman and scores of others. Journalists' accounts ring similar bells: Frederick Wiseman's searing 1960s documentary film "High School," Charles Silberman's 1970 Crisis in the Classroom, Samuel Freedman's 1990 Small Victories, Mark Edmundson's 2002 Teacher, to name just a few. They all tell a remarkably common story. I know of no research that argues that the secondary-school design with which we are all so familiar is effective, by any measure.

Age-graded institutions where "delivery" is the dominating education metaphor are the norm. So are schools where teachers have 120 or more students to get to know (with this 120 shuffled at the end of each semester); where serious learning is broken up into snippets of 50-minute "subject matter periods" arranged in no intellectually coherent order; where assessment keeps knowledge tightly packaged in separate intellectual domains; where short-term memory work is rated as deserving the highest value at the expense of original, long-term analytic work; and where the intellectual engine of the curriculum comes at most students and teachers as a list of subjects and skills, usually far too long for the careful savoring and devoted practice that leads to deep understanding and worthy habits. As the research shows, these so very familiar conditions poorly serve children, their teachers, and, ultimately, the culture.

The waste is prodigious, and the frequently observed (and unsurprising) cynicism of all too many adolescents about serious intellectual work is deeply disheartening. The title of Denise Pope's painstakingly documented recent book is as blunt as it is illuminating: "Doing School": How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. That title is less hyperbolic than many of us wish to believe.

A Vive la Difference Standard

If one takes this tidal wave of research and reportage seriously, one cannot responsibly push aside fresh school designs that challenge the premises apparent in the schools that we have inherited. Indeed, we must encourage new designs, risky as that may appear. Accordingly, any policy that drives charters into old molds--making them, in effect, "look and act familiar" as worthy expressions of the existing "system," producing students who do well primarily on tests organized in ways that reflect this system--undermines the sound intent of the charter idea. (See Figure 1.) Mindlessly administered, NCLB could have the effect of driving charter schools into discredited routines, in effect, killing them.

Charters (and cousins such as district-sponsored pilot schools) should be different, should march to promisingly better tunes. Policymakers should insist on that. If these schools are different, however, how to evaluate them? As one of the founders, with my wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, and as its acting co-principal, again with Nancy, during the school's fourth year, I have personal experience with the admirable Massachusetts system of performance review. The heart of it is rigorous in-school inspection of student work; of faithfulness of the school to the terms of its charter; of the mood, morale, and intensity of the school, its faculty, students, and families. Test scores are part of it, but hardly its center. Inspectors randomly examine student portfolios of work, "shadow" students and teachers, witness classes, talk confidentially with staff, students, and parents and guardians. They get a fair sense of the place as a whole. Full-scale inspections come every five years, supplemented with annual focused visits. On the basis also of rigorous inspection, the school is a member of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the regional independent accrediting organization. Parker's students take the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), as well as the Stanford 9 (now 10), and SATs. There are data arising from such indexes; but these are not the only or the most compelling data. There is far more to it. As there should be.

Parker's design is not traditional. Students enter at "seventh grade," but move upward over three "divisions" on the basis not of their age but of their publicly exhibited performance. There is one focused course of study (history, language--English and Spanish--and the arts; mathematics, science, and technology; and health); everyone is enrolled in it; an appropriate path for each student is developed (every child has a "personal learning plan"); most teachers have responsibility for no more than 50 students (this on a per-pupil budget that is the same or less than in nearby public secondary schools). The basic pedagogy is provocation, question asking, "do it over and over until you get it right," "apply what you think you know in this new, even unexpected situation." In these and other ways Parker is deliberately different (and, incidentally, closer to the way the world beyond school actually works), and we are blessed to be in a state that honors, values, and, in its practice, protects that difference. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is "results oriented," but it demonstrates that there are many fashions of "results," many ways of achieving them, and several ways of measuring them.

The reality is that there is no such thing as an admirable manner of "doing school": our children and our communities are too richly varied for that. Policy that stiffens the grip of any one narrowly defined "system" is sure to result in seriously mixed results. There are many good roads to a fine education, and varied travelers along those roads.

NCLB Is Bad--but Good!

I have twice been the principal of a charter school: during 1997-98 at Parker and 1972-81 at Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts; the latter, arguably, the earliest such school in America still in operation. Its charter (allowing it to own property--farms--from which revenue could be raised to pay the costs of the school) was granted by the Massachusetts Revolutionary Legislature in 1778 and signed by its chairman, John Hancock. That document (modified by modern realities) remains in force to this day. In the cases of both Phillips and Parker, separated by more than two hundred years, each school received broad but specified authority from the state, with diplomas granted on the basis of public "exhibitions" and with the expectation--the trust--that the details of the program and its assessment would be creatures of the schools' immediate community, subject, as deemed necessary, to the inspection by the state or, in the case of Phillips, the local superintendent of (public) schools.

Neither the Andover of the 1970s nor the Parker of the 1990s was perfect, but I make no apology for either. Both pursue high standards, expressed in a rich variety of ways. Both have attracted and hold strong faculty, largely because the teachers know that they have both the exhilaration of shaping their place for learning and an obligation to meet external standards, including the satisfaction of their students' parents. Both attract substantial numbers of families seeking admission for their children, and by careful selection--at Andover originally done by the master and now by faculty committees and at Parker by state-controlled (blind) lottery--both are able to admit only a small percentage of those applicants.

So why are NCLB and its "external standards" so troubling to educators like me who work today in and for public schools like Parker?

Because, especially at the secondary school level, the academic patterns to be "tested" may excessively reflect the centralized political, and thus pedagogical, wisdom of their times, with which citizens and teachers in a healthy democracy may very often and very reasonably disagree.

Because--and especially in their assessments--they tend to reflect familiar categories: The sharp and often distorting distinctions among and between "subjects"; age grading; the value placed on quick recall; the dumbing down of the quality and grace of expository prose to make it fit into some sort of rating scheme; the overload of material to be covered, usually the inevitable result of intracommittee ideological logrolling, which leads to a bit of this and a dollop of that; the almost absolute denial of a value placed on individual ingenuity, craggy but provocative thinking, sustained work, and desirable variety; the lack of interest, signaled by the assessment apparatus, of the virtues of fairness, good character, and imagination.

Because they represent--or could soon represent--something never before seen in American education: a centrally directed, narrow categorization of just what a child should know and be able to do and an excessively consistent way of assessing all that. This process, perhaps necessarily wrapped in psychometric mumbo-jumbo far beyond the reach of the common, smart citizen, is, at its egregious worst, Orwellian.

All that said, NCLB is in fact also an inspired and necessary corrective to the sloppy, often thoughtless reality of existing American education. NCLB and the state initiatives that preceded it have served the purpose of putting in front of all citizens the stunning weaknesses of our schooling system, especially as it serves--or fails to serve--its most vulnerable young citizens. The test results, even with their technical flaws, have exposed the appalling neglect that we as a people have long recognized but have never fundamentally addressed. Americans started down this worthy road of exposure during the 1960s, with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, of which NCLB is technically the reauthorization. But we dodged the deep implications of this exposure thereafter, preferring stirring statements to sophisticated reform and necessary finance.

Ends and Means

The end of No Child Left Behind is worthy, profoundly reflecting a democracy's need for an educated citizenry. It is long overdue, but its current means may end up, save at the embarrassing margins, hurting the schools more than helping them, turning them into test-prep places and driving away the imaginative teachers that each of us as a parent wants in contact with our children. Test prep is a parody of serious education. While the scores from good standardized tests tell us something about a student, they hardly tell us everything about that student, much less that student's school. Policy that blithely ignores these

realities is destructive policy.

Which brings me back to charter schools and their relatives in mainstream school systems that are, by bearing witness, pushing their colleagues in better directions. These enterprises deserve vigorous encouragement and support for their quality, variety, and imagination. For their own as well as for the public's benefit, they need a program of serious, sustained, independent assessment, based on the exhibited quality of an agreed-upon scope of work. This evaluation can be achieved with a mixture of inspection and varied forms of standardized testing. It can also be helped by policies that extend parental choice among schools, allowing a market to play a proper part in the process: Family interest represents an important kind of assessment.

Some of us in the charter world (and beyond) already see the merits of these interconnected approaches. May our tribe increase.

Theodore R. Sizer is author of The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (Yale University Press, 2004), and coauthor, with Deborah Meier and Nancy Faust Sizer, of Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools (Beacon Press, 2004).

BY THEODORE R. SIZER

A Short Leash (Figure 1)

Although charter schools have more autonomy than traditional public
schools, they are heavily regulated in most of the 40 states (and D.C.)
where they have been allowed to open.

                                            Percentage of states in
Measuring Charter School Independence       which the answer was "Yes"

Is at least a portion of charter schools     55
bound by school district collective
bargaining agreements?
Does at least a portion of charter school    85
teachers have to be certified?
Does the state require charter schools to    95
submit annual reports?
Are the state's standards and assessments   100
applied to charter schools?
Does the state have any caps on the number   68
of charter schools?

Note: These questions were posed in 2003, before Maryland allowed
charters.
SOURCES: Education Commission of the States, StateNotes: Charter
Schools, April 2003

Note: Table made from bar graph.