There's been a lot of controversy about the charter schools that are popping up all over the country in response to under-performing public schools in low-income areas. One of the most commonly made complaints made by critics of the movement is that charter schools do not solve the problem for the majority of kids that aren't lucky enough to win the lottery to enter the school. Another, less studied, response to the idea of charter schools is, "why don't we just fix the public schools?"
Both of these positions express valid concerns, and education policy makers would be wise to consider them. Many who have these and other strong reactions to the idea of these quasi-public charter schools, however, seem to be missing a critical, but not immediately apparent, function of charter schools in this country.
Many opponents of the charter school movement cite the consistently successful public education systems of such countries as Finland and Denmark, where charter schools and even standardized tests are non-existent. Finland and Denmark, however, have homogeneous populations just over 5 million people with some of the highest rates of economic equity in the world. The United States on the other hand, is a relatively new country faced with serving the needs of 300 million plus demographic that is divergent in race, socio-economic status, culture, language, and religion.
For such a population, semi-privatization of education through charter schools may not be the final solution to the growing and distressing problem of the education gap between the poor and the rich, or the performance gap between America's children and those of other nations. Charter schools, are, however, an intermediate stage in our progress toward an education system that works not just the lucky few that can afford all of the aspects of what it takes to be academically successful. Because "fixing the public schools" is not as simple as it sounds. You might think, "why doesn't someone just go in there, tell everyone what to do, and make things run right?" It seems the most straightforward answer to that is that we don't really know what it takes to make a system that has to educate such a diverse demographic "run right".
It is unlikely that a real, inclusive solution will involve progress only in one direction. There are simply too many people, with too greatly varying needs to make a panacea likely. And barriers to academic success are not only found in the classroom, so it follows that the solution cannot be found only in the classroom.
With the complexity of the problem established, perhaps it has become more clear why charter schools might be necessary in order to ultimately "fix the public school system". The public school system is called a system precisely because it shows some basic consistency amongst schools. These schools are governed on a larger scale by a set of policies that all schools must follow. These schools are also obligated to accept all students in their district, which means they're almost always over capacity with a limited amount of flexibility in terms of their policy making and hiring and firing capabilities. By definition, a system must act together as one and work together. We've already established that the America public system is already inundated with the demands of a huge population, and, moreover, a heterogeneous population.
Imagine trying to implement untested policies and models on such a system all at once, without establishing a control against which to compare the results of such policies. It would be chaos. In order for educators to glean what it takes to make the public school system to run right, there must be a lengthy, rigorous, peer-duplicated period of experimentation. Once we do discover what works in raising the academic performance of each and every student in the, as it is well established to be, uniquely challenging climate of the country, the model or models would need to be developed and adapted for implementation on a large scale.
Charter schools are an excellent way to allow testing of many variations of models on manageable sample of the population. They are experimental groups that are then commensurable to the control group of the public school system as it is. Should the ultimate solution to the problem be that all public schools are transformed into charter schools (a growing trend referred to as "school turnaround"), the entire system will have been transformed into a more horizontally governed system, but one which still functions under similar principles and is subject to similar standards and funding. Such a horizontally governed system will allow individual schools to respond to the needs of their community, rather than attempt to apply a blanket model that may or may not serve the cultural needs of its demographic.
The interaction between charter schools and the larger system of public education that governs them can be characterized as a complex adaptive organization, laid forth in complexity theory. Applying principles of complexity theory to the interaction of charter school and school system can clarify the role that charter schools are playing in actually strengthening our public school system, rather than destabilizing it, as it may appear on the surface. While the functioning of less stringently governed entities within a historically highly traditional organization can be disconcerting, complex adaptive systems functioning under the principles laid out by complexity theory have been shown to evolve in ways that cause the least amount of functional disruption for a maximum positive effect.
So give charter schools some time to show us what, at this point, only such specialized and methodical experimental pools can show us. Perhaps they will help us transform the system, perhaps they will help us to apply a new model to the system, or perhaps they will become the system. Critics and supporters a like will play an important role in making sense of what we learn in the next several years and decades from the charter school movement.
Both of these positions express valid concerns, and education policy makers would be wise to consider them. Many who have these and other strong reactions to the idea of these quasi-public charter schools, however, seem to be missing a critical, but not immediately apparent, function of charter schools in this country.
Many opponents of the charter school movement cite the consistently successful public education systems of such countries as Finland and Denmark, where charter schools and even standardized tests are non-existent. Finland and Denmark, however, have homogeneous populations just over 5 million people with some of the highest rates of economic equity in the world. The United States on the other hand, is a relatively new country faced with serving the needs of 300 million plus demographic that is divergent in race, socio-economic status, culture, language, and religion.
For such a population, semi-privatization of education through charter schools may not be the final solution to the growing and distressing problem of the education gap between the poor and the rich, or the performance gap between America's children and those of other nations. Charter schools, are, however, an intermediate stage in our progress toward an education system that works not just the lucky few that can afford all of the aspects of what it takes to be academically successful. Because "fixing the public schools" is not as simple as it sounds. You might think, "why doesn't someone just go in there, tell everyone what to do, and make things run right?" It seems the most straightforward answer to that is that we don't really know what it takes to make a system that has to educate such a diverse demographic "run right".
It is unlikely that a real, inclusive solution will involve progress only in one direction. There are simply too many people, with too greatly varying needs to make a panacea likely. And barriers to academic success are not only found in the classroom, so it follows that the solution cannot be found only in the classroom.
With the complexity of the problem established, perhaps it has become more clear why charter schools might be necessary in order to ultimately "fix the public school system". The public school system is called a system precisely because it shows some basic consistency amongst schools. These schools are governed on a larger scale by a set of policies that all schools must follow. These schools are also obligated to accept all students in their district, which means they're almost always over capacity with a limited amount of flexibility in terms of their policy making and hiring and firing capabilities. By definition, a system must act together as one and work together. We've already established that the America public system is already inundated with the demands of a huge population, and, moreover, a heterogeneous population.
Imagine trying to implement untested policies and models on such a system all at once, without establishing a control against which to compare the results of such policies. It would be chaos. In order for educators to glean what it takes to make the public school system to run right, there must be a lengthy, rigorous, peer-duplicated period of experimentation. Once we do discover what works in raising the academic performance of each and every student in the, as it is well established to be, uniquely challenging climate of the country, the model or models would need to be developed and adapted for implementation on a large scale.
Charter schools are an excellent way to allow testing of many variations of models on manageable sample of the population. They are experimental groups that are then commensurable to the control group of the public school system as it is. Should the ultimate solution to the problem be that all public schools are transformed into charter schools (a growing trend referred to as "school turnaround"), the entire system will have been transformed into a more horizontally governed system, but one which still functions under similar principles and is subject to similar standards and funding. Such a horizontally governed system will allow individual schools to respond to the needs of their community, rather than attempt to apply a blanket model that may or may not serve the cultural needs of its demographic.
The interaction between charter schools and the larger system of public education that governs them can be characterized as a complex adaptive organization, laid forth in complexity theory. Applying principles of complexity theory to the interaction of charter school and school system can clarify the role that charter schools are playing in actually strengthening our public school system, rather than destabilizing it, as it may appear on the surface. While the functioning of less stringently governed entities within a historically highly traditional organization can be disconcerting, complex adaptive systems functioning under the principles laid out by complexity theory have been shown to evolve in ways that cause the least amount of functional disruption for a maximum positive effect.
So give charter schools some time to show us what, at this point, only such specialized and methodical experimental pools can show us. Perhaps they will help us transform the system, perhaps they will help us to apply a new model to the system, or perhaps they will become the system. Critics and supporters a like will play an important role in making sense of what we learn in the next several years and decades from the charter school movement.
