5-Year Charter Reauthorization Offers Model of Accountability for Public Schools

Opponents of school choice throw everything and the kitchen sink at charter schools in an attempt to protect the public school establishment from having to compete and innovate. Meanwhile, students do not receive the quality education they deserve.

Several recent studies have heralded the accomplishments of charter schools, while many other less carefully put together reports have attempted to shed doubt on the findings, arguing that the raw data suggests that charter schools underperform compared with traditional public schools in terms of student proficiency rates in the basic subjects.

In most cases where the data doesn't appear to show an improvement in student learning in charter schools, the researcher hasn't controlled for selection bias. When dealing with the raw data, it’s easy to compare apples to oranges and publish results that have little if any actual relevance.

In order to get an accurate picture of charter school performance, we should compare peer groups with relatively the same background and look at rates of test score improvement over time. When the numbers pass through this sort of analytical rigor, the picture becomes clearer. Using an apples to apples comparison, innovative charter schools generally far outperform public schools in terms of educating students and preparing them for the real world.  

Of course there are exceptions. There have been and will be charter schools that don’t live up to their promise. The beauty of the Charter School Act is that if a charter school fails, taxpayers don’t have to live with it. The school must apply for a new charter every five years, and if it has failed to properly educate students and be a good steward of the resources it receives, it can expect to lose its charter at reevaluation time.

This provision of the Charter School Act nullifies all arguments having to do with whether the studies that praise charter performance are flawed or not. The Charter School Act which establishes a new type of innovative school is itself innovative. If only every existing school was forced to adhere to the same accountability program, we could expect far more underperforming schools to either improve or shut their doors.

Today, the top ten underperforming schools in Washington State, as reported by the State Achievement Index, have been in operation for an average of 48 years. These are schools where sometimes less than half of the students know how to read and write, and failure is on autopilot.

The Charter School Act holds charter schools accountable to the students and parents they serve. Before the public school establishment warns about the possibility of average charter school performance, it would do well to address its own proven record of failure that continues unabated in certain schools for over half a century.