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Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities: Review of Existing Data - November 1998

Accountability

A 1996 report by the American Federation of Teachers noted with concern that only 17 of 25 states with charter school legislation required that charter schools use the same tests as other public schools to document student learning and called for all states to require that charter schools participate in state accountability systems. According to the report, the absence of comparison data in some states is "highly problematic" because charter schools promise greater accountability for results in exchange for increased autonomy. In contrast, charter school directors in Colorado expressed concern to researchers that state standards and assessments could result in curriculum uniformity and limit charter schools' flexibility to innovate (McLaughlin, Henderson, & Ullah, 1996).

A study of California charter schools by SRI International (Powell et al., 1997) provided data related to the accountability issue that has interesting implications for these concerns. California is one of the states the AFT identified as requiring that charter schools use the same tests as other public schools. The SRI study, focusing on accountability in general, not specifically on special education populations, found that district and county sponsors were diligent about financial accountability but that charter school accountability for academic outcomes was less rigorous. In response to surveys, 91 percent of schools reported that they sent financial data to their sponsors, and the California charter law requires annual financial audits of all charter schools. Eighty-five percent of charter schools reported sending student achievement data to their sponsors, but only 4 percent of schools and 8 percent of sponsoring agencies reported that the sponsor had ever "requested specific actions or imposed sanctions" in response to those data. In fact, the percent of sponsoring agencies requesting actions or imposing sanctions was higher for noncharter schools (17 percent). The SRI report highlights this finding because the specific intent of California's charter school law was to substitute performance-based accountability for rule-based accountability.
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