Archived Information
A Study of Charter Schools: First Year Report - May 1997
Chapter IV
Summary
This chapter has presented preliminary data about the founding of charter schools and barriers they encounter. Our primary purpose was to describe the range of charter implementation circumstances and issues that have emerged in this early stage of charter implementation. A sense of the great diversity of charter schools emerges from this examination. Some charter schools offer advanced uses of technology at a distance; others emphasize small, nurturing environments with close student-teacher contacts. Some schools mirror different aspects of school reforms of the 1990s; others follow a more conventional education program. Some charter schools create structured learning environments for their students; others deliberately design less structured learning environments. A sizable proportion of charter schools aim to serve special populations, though most charter schools reflect the demographic characteristics of students in their geographic area. The variety across charter schools in education programs and missions is also apparent in their array of different approaches to management, governance, finance, parent involvement, and personnel policies.
In particular, this chapter has shown that many charter schools are founded to realize an educational vision, and that most newly created charter schools have this reason as a prime motivation. At the same time, the first year's exploratory research provided examples indicating great differences among charter schools in their curriculum and instructional approaches aimed at realizing their vision. Future research will ask:
- What types of educational programs and practices do charter schools offer, and how distinctive are these approaches compared to those of other public schools?
- Under what conditions do charter schools' educational programs and practices improve (or worsen) student outcomes?
- How do charter school operations and organizational arrangements--including personnel policies, parent participation, and governance--affect their educational programs and practices?
- Do some charter schools provide models of educational programs and strategies that could be adopted by other public schools?
The preliminary data also indicate that gaining autonomy was an important concern for pre-existing public schools. This issue is complicated for newly created and pre-existing schools alike. The fieldwork suggested that local issues were foremost in charter schools' concerns about autonomy. But until more in-depth research is done, it is hard to assess the relative importance of autonomy from district, state, and collective bargaining agreements. Moreover, for charter schools, issues of autonomy are linked to accountability--an area we could not sufficiently explore in the first year. Clearly, state legislation affects both autonomy and accountability. Preliminary Study findings suggest that subsequent research should focus on the following questions:
- In what areas do charter schools exercise autonomy (including curriculum and instruction, personnel, budgetary, governance, assessment, and student attendance, discipline, and selection) from what agencies, and how does charter school autonomy compare to that of other public schools?
- What factors affect charter school autonomy, and what factors (including state legislation) explain the variation among charter schools in their degree of autonomy?
- How are charter schools held accountable, what explains the variation in accountability, and how does their accountability compare with that of other public schools?
- What are the links between autonomy and accountability in both a legal (state law, regulation, and court decisions) and an empirical sense (e.g., practices and agreements between charter sponsoring agencies and charter schools)?
The evidence in this chapter also identifies resource limitations, political resistance, and regulatory problems to be principal concerns for charter schools. Of these issues, resource limitations are the most pervasive. Of course, each school faces particular resource difficulties arising from its context, and newly created charter schools generally face facility issues that some pre-existing schools do not confront. These variations notwithstanding, most charter schools have to solve more or less severe resource problems. Some charter schools may develop innovative approaches to obtaining and using resources that might serve as models for other public schools. Similar considerations apply to the barriers of political resistance (which, though less pervasive than resource limitations, pose serious challenges for pre-existing charter schools) and regulatory problems that a minority of charter schools encounter. These issues suggest that our research agenda should address the following questions:
- What resource limitations, political resistance, and regulatory problems do different types of charter schools face, and what coping mechanisms have they developed?
- What resources are charter schools able to marshal?
- How do charter schools allocate their resources? What percentage of resource limitations result from costs associated with facility, start up equipment, planning, or other areas?
- How do the state context and charter school laws affect both the difficulties that charter schools experience and the coping mechanisms they develop?
In 1997 we will revisit charter schools (as well as update our phone survey information) in order to collect more intensive data that should allow us more to examine these questions and, more broadly, to identify factors that affect charter implementation. The Study also will begin its longitudinal assessment of student achievement, and initiate the difficult task of collecting information on the effects--positive or negative--of charter schools on local and state public school systems.
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[What Obstacles and Implementation Problems Do Charter Schools Encounter?] 
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[Notes]