A Bit Too Much Editorial Freedom

I couldn't help read the The New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorials on charter schools over the last couple of days without injecting into the conversation a publication on the status of big-city charters issued recently by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).

The two newspaper editorial pages squared off over a new study of charter school performance conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by researchers at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. The study found that students in traditional public schools outperformed their counterparts in charter schools in reading and math. The Times declared the study to be evidence that charter schools are not a "cure-all" for what ails American public education. The Journal cried foul, declared the study unreliabled, and insisted that other studies "have repeatedly shown charter school students outperforming their counterparts in traditional public schools."

Both papers "marshalled" evidence on charters aggressively. But there's another assessment of charter schools out from a far more credible source, CRPE, a University of Washington think tank headed by the respected researcher Paul Hill. Hill and his colleagues recently published a summary of a symposium on the state of the charter school movement involving 22 charter advocates and researchers.

The gathering, organized by CRPE, was a who's who of the national charter school movement. And their take on the charter movement was sobering. "I think the issue of attaining academic quality was highly underestimated by all of us," said Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture fund, a non-profit organization that invests in charter school management organizations. "We can only grow as fast as we can find good people, and we are not able to find all the people we need," said Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP Academies, which has opened over 50 charter schools nationwide. "This isn't McDonalds," added Nelson Smith, the head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. "The process of replicating a good school isn't easy or predictable." The report on the symposium concluded that "all agreed that the road to scale is much rockier than anyone imagined."

There are some truly inspiring charter schools run by smart, committed people who would probably shun education rather than put up with the stifling bureaucracy of many traditional public schools. But creating good schools of any sort is hard work, these earnest educational entrepreneurs have discovered. Admitting that reality, and that many charters have not emerged as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools, as Paul Hill's conferees have done in a public report, is a gutsy step for charter leaders to take, and a step towards increasing the supply of stronger charters. Someone call the polemicists that the Journal and the Times and tell them to take the rest of the day off.