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A National Study of Charter Schools - July 1998

C. Key Challenges

Exhibits 6-6 and 6-7 show the results of computing the percentage of charter schools that cited at least one of the key barriers in a cluster.^[5] The table shows that resource limitations, including funding and facilities and health and safety regulations, are by far the greatest challenges faced by charter schools; almost three-quarters (73 percent) of all charter schools report facing at least one key resource barrier. Political resistance is the next most problematic group of barriers for charter schools, with more than one-third (37 percent) of all charter schools facing these types of obstacles. At least one type of internal difficulty was reported to be problematic for about 23 percent of charter schools, and union or bargaining unit difficulties were problematic for about 17 percent of all charter schools.

Exhibit 6-6 shows the differences in the percentage of charter schools that cited at least one of the key barriers in a cluster, according to their status as a newly created or pre-existing charter school. Confirming the findings reported above, these data suggest that newly created schools face greater obstacles in all areas except union and bargaining unit difficulties. The difference is most striking in terms of resource limitations, with 80 percent of newly created schools facing resource obstacles, while 61 percent of pre-existing schools faced these problems. When compared to pre-existing schools, newly created schools are also more likely to report facing internal difficulties; 27 percent of newly created charter schools reported facing at least one key internal barrier, while only 17 percent of pre-existing schools faced some kind of internal conflict. Pre-existing schools, some of which were part of a district's collective bargaining unit, were more likely to report facing difficulties with union resistance, bargaining agreements, or teacher certification requirements.

EXHIBIT 6-6

ESTIMATED PERCENTAGE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS
CITING AT LEAST ONE KEY BARRIER WITHIN A FACTOR
FOR NEWLY CREATED AND PRE-EXISTING SCHOOLS

Factor	All sites		Newly created		Pre-existing
Resource limitations	73.0%		80.2%		61.1%
Political resistance	37.0%		38.0%		35.4%
Internal conflict	23.1%		27.0%		16.7%
Union relationships	17.3%		14.8%		21.5%

Exhibit 6-7 also shows the differences in the percentage of charter schools that cited at least one of the key barriers in a cluster, according to their year of opening. Schools that opened during the 1994-95 school year faced greater difficulties both in terms of political resistance and union relationships than schools opening in other school years, suggesting again that many of these schools were affected by an affiliation with the district and its collective bargaining laws. Schools that opened during the 1995-96 school year were more likely to be newly created schools and therefore were more likely to face resource limitations.

EXHIBIT 6-7

ESTIMATED PERCENTAGE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS
CITING AT LEAST ONE KEY BARRIER WITHIN A FACTOR
BY YEAR OF SCHOOL OPENING

Factor	All sites		1994-95 or earlier	1995-96		1996-97
Resource limitations	73.0%		68.4%	75.4%		73.8%
Political resistance	37.0%		43.9%	36.2%		33.1%
Internal conflict	23.1%		20.4%	16.7%		31.0%
Union relationships	17.3%		27.6%	20.3%		7.6%

D. Summary

Most charter schools face challenges during their development, start-up and implementation. Schools opening in later years have somewhat different patterns of difficulties from schools started earlier and newly created schools and pre-existing schools have different patterns as well.

Most implementation difficulties faced by charter schools can be grouped into four clusters: resource limitation, political resistance, internal conflicts, and union relationships. Resource limitations--especially funding and facilities difficulties--are the greatest barriers that charter schools report facing. Lack of start-up funding was cited as a difficult or very difficult barrier by 58 percent of all charter schools. Inadequate operating funds, cited by 41 percent of charter schools, was the second most commonly reported difficulty for charter schools. These difficulties ranked as first and second, respectively, for charter schools opened in every year and for newly created and pre-existing schools.

Newly created schools face different implementation problems than do pre-existing schools. In addition to start-up and operational funding, inadequate facilities and lack of planning time pose the greatest difficulties for newly created schools. Nearly two-thirds of newly created charter schools reported lack of start-up funding as the most difficult obstacle faced by the school while 43 percent of pre-existing schools did so. Inadequate facilities and lack of planning time also posed more serious difficulties for newly created schools than for pre-existing schools.

State or local board opposition and district and state level resistance and regulations were cited as difficulties by 15 to 25 percent of all respondents. Internal conflict posed difficulties for nearly 20 percent of respondents. Schools opening in the early years of the charter movement faced greater implementation difficulties with state or local boards, district regulations, and with state department of education resistance and regulations than schools opening in later years.

2 These differences were found using a chi-square statistic, which tests whether the year of school opening and the barriers are independent of each other.

3 Of the 237 newly created schools in the sample, about 54 percent (127 schools) report that they lease their facilities from a commercial source; 19 percent (45 schools) are in a facility provided by the district either for free or at a nominal cost; 11 percent (26 schools) lease their facility from the district at or near the market rate; and 30 percent (71 schools) have acquired their facility under other arrangements including leasing from nonprofit agencies and having the site provided by an agency that sponsored the school (e.g., the Urban League).

4 Factor analysis is a statistical procedure used here to reveal underlying groups of barriers or "factors" that can be richer and more meaningful than individual barriers used alone. The responses to the barriers questions were "rotated" three-dimensionally to clarify the relationships between the individual barriers; we used the most common type of rotation, referred to as a "varimax" rotation. This rotation results in a factor "score", which is a quantitative measure of the relationship among the barriers. The numbers shown in Exhibit 6-6 are the correlations of each of the individual barriers with the four factor scores. The numbers in the table have no intrinsic substantive meaning, but a number close to 1 (or -1) is a "high correlation" between the respondents' answers on each of the barriers question and the factor score. This correlation shows which barriers most strongly define the underlying factor; a higher correlation (a number closer to 1 or -1) means that the barrier more strongly defines the factor.

5 We utilized several decision rules to determine whether a barrier falling on a cluster was a "key" barrier. We examined the correlation of each individual item with the factor cluster and examined the reliability of the factor scale using Cronbach's alpha. We considered the sensitivity of the factor relative to the number of cases that were lost by including individual barriers as part of the cluster. We also considered the percentage gain in schools reporting that a cluster of barriers was problematic on a barrier-by-barrier basis by considering barriers which correlated most strongly with the factor first. On the basis of these analyses, we finally counted a barrier as a "key" barrier when its correlation with a given cluster was greater than .50. Only these key barriers were counted in the computation of the percentage of charter schools that cite at least one of the key barriers in a cluster.

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[VI. VI. Challenges in the Implementation of Charter Schools (part 2 of 3)]

[Appendix A: Overview of the National Study's Research Design]

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