by Jacques Arsenault

Charter schools have been a hot topic in the news recently, with charter debates raging in several states, charter schools being praised by President Obama (who signed the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act at a SEED Public Charter School this week), and by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But if these schools have made an impact on the education landscape, what is the end goal, collectively, of the charter school movement? Josh Cook writes in his recent Edurati post “What is a Charter School“:

When states began passing laws allowing public schools to be chartered they did so with the understanding that these schools would be in more direct, local control of their day-to-day and year-to-year operations, but the trade off would be that these schools would have to show superior results when compared to the local public school they would be competing with. In this sense, a school charter is two things: 1) a granting of rights to the charter’s managing body and 2) a performance contract between this managing body and the sponsoring institution. To put it succinctly, a charter school must outperform the public school to remain in existence. To quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Charter schools can serve a number of functions:

• Innovation – given the flexibility that charters are given, they have the ability to experiment with new content, pedagogy, or technology.
• Variety and focus – perhaps a focus on arts, or leadership, or kinetic learning, or serving adjudicated youth, some charter schools are created to serve the particular needs of a specific group of students.
• Different management structure – because most charters do not have to work with unions, they are able to build in different management and performance structures for teachers, as well as for students.
• Longer school days/years: many charter schools, particularly some of the nationally-known models like KIPP have longer school days, weeks, and years than the districts in their regions.
• Community focus: some of the earliest charter schools were those created by community leaders in a local neighborhood setting. These are still a source of charters, though their performance results don’t necessarily match the results of KIPP, SEED and other national CMOs or charter networks.

Charter schools can incorporate one or more of the above functions, though rarely all of them. And many charters have demonstrated compelling, inspiring results for students that often would have been written off.

But what is the lesson to be learned from charter schools? Are they the means or the end for ensuring an excellent education for all children? In other words, if we have learned new pedagogical and/or management insights:

• Should we be continuing to add new “firms” to the competitive landscapes (by raising charter caps)?
• Should we be trying to take advantage of innovation, and incorporate some of these lessons in our traditional public schools?

In other words, is the ultimate end goal to have traditional public schools in low-income replaced by a menu of charter and other options, or is there still an intrinsic value of strengthening school districts ?

And what of the approach to new charter schools:

• Should we encourage new entrepreneurs to continue creating new schools and new schooling models?
• Or should we instead encourage expansion of the franchises (YES Prep, Imagine, etc.) that have shown good results?

As we see political showdowns around charter schools, and few if any states have reached a saturation point in terms of charter school supply, it is crucial to ask questions about the overall goal of “the charter movement” — or more accurately “the many charter movements” in order to begin answer some of the questions above.

Your thoughts?