Measuring diversity in charter school offerings - AEI

Measuring diversity in charter school offerings - AEI:

Measuring diversity in charter school offerings

Education, K-12 Schooling

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Key Points

• Part of the promise of charter schooling is that deregulation could allow for more diverse types of schools than would otherwise exist. Yet little attention has been paid to evaluating the diversity of the charter school market.
• After coding every charter school in 17 different cities, we found an almost 50/50 split between “general” schools and “specialized” options such as STEM, art, no-excuses, or progressive schools.
• We also found important differences in cities’ charter school markets, which can be attributed in part to demographics, the age and market share of the charter sector, and the number and type of authorizers.

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Executive Summary

There are two main reasons given to support charter schooling: (1) that charter schools will improve academic achievement by taking advantage of flexibility not afforded to traditional public schools; and (2) that deregulation will allow for more diverse schools than would otherwise be created. The academic achievement argument tends to get the most attention, but research strongly suggests that parents want more from schools than just high test scores.

So what do we know about the diversity of charter school options across the country? In this paper, we offer the beginnings of an answer to that understudied question by coding 1,151 charter schools educating more than 471,000 students in 17 different cities. We searched the website of every charter school for descriptive words about their mission, vision, educational philosophy, academic model, or curriculum. We used these words to code the school as “general” or “specialized.” Specialized schools were further broken down into 13 possible types, including no-excuses; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); arts; single-sex; and military schools.

Looking at the number of schools and enrollment data for each type, we uncovered several important findings. We discovered that there is an almost exactly even split between general and specialized charter schools, with the most common types of specialized schools being no-excuses and progressive schools. We also found significant variation in the charter market between cities. This can be partially explained by city-level factors including demographics, the age and market share of the charter sector, and the number and type of authorizers. For example, we found that the higher the percentage of black residents that a city has, the larger the enrollment in no-excuses schools (r = 0.491). We also found that the poorer the city, the more likely it is to have specialized charter schools (r = −0.394), and the more authorizers a city has, the more students it enrolls in specialized schools (r = 0.188).

To explain our findings, we offer three plausible theories. The first is that communities and charter operators might organize themselves around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Academic achievement is often the primary concern for low-income communities; thus, there are more no-excuses and STEM schools in poorer communities. But in wealthier communities, families have the luxury of looking for specialized options such as international and foreign language schools, and thus we see the positive relationship between city wealth and enrollment in such schools. Second, operators and authorizers might be inclined to support established models over models that are truly innovative but harder and riskier to implement; hence we see replication of proven no-excuses models like KIPP. Perhaps as more purposefully diverse schools crop up around the country and demonstrate their ability to create high-quality schools, we’ll see an increase in the desire to scale them. Finally, it could be the case that market diversity is related to maturity, in which case it could be too early to judge market diversity in some of these cities, as charter schools are still a small part of their educational landscape. This paper is an attempt to bring some descriptive analysis to a question that we believe should be the focus of a more sustained inquiry.



Introduction

The growth of charter schools over the past 25 years has been quite remarkable. In 1990, there were zero charter schools in America. In the 2013­­–14 school year, 2.5 million students—more than 5 percent of American public school children—attended 6,440 charter schools, and those numbers are only increasing. Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced charter schools. Hillary Clinton is on record saying, “I stand behind the charter school/public school movement, because parents do deserve greater choice within the public school system to meet the unique needs of their children.”[1] The Daily Beast called charter schools “the issue bringing Ted Cruz and Black Democrats together.”[2]

The arguments for charter schools tend to fall into two buckets. First, advocates argue that charter schools will increase student achievement. Charter schools were created to give teachers more freedom to teach how they see fit. By removing regulations and red tape and decentralizing the operation of schools, students’ education will be more closely tailored to their particular needs. All of this is intended to improve the instructional quality of the education that children receive.

Twenty-five years in, we have a robust body of evidence examining this argument. From random-assignment studies of charter schools in Boston and New York to matched-comparison studies of tens of millions of students around the country to numerous smaller-scale studies of individual school models such as KIPP, we have an increasingly clear picture of the academic performance of charter schools.[3]

But in this quest to better understand the academic performance of schools, a second part of the argument for charter schools can get swept aside. Part of the charter school theory of action is that the freedom given to charter schools will allow for the creation of schools with more diverse offerings than might be created by traditional school management mechanisms. This is what Clinton alluded to when she argued for greater choice to meet the unique needs of children.

We know far less about this facet of the charter school landscape. This is unfortunate because we have reason to believe that parents want more diverse offerings. In 2013, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a survey entitled, “What Parents Want: Education Preferences and Trade-Offs.”[4] After using a polling firm to contact more than 2,000 parents, researchers were able to identify six different market “niches,” or preference clusters that would drive families to choose a particular type of school. One of these groups, “test-score hawks,” wanted—you guessed it—high test scores. These are the folks with whom studies that compare the test scores of charter school and non–charter school students particularly resonate.

But there were other groups of parents as well. “Pragmatists,” for example, wanted vocational preparation. “Jeffersonians” wanted citizenship education. “Multiculturalists” wanted to expose their children to students from diverse backgrounds. “Expressionists” wanted strong arts and music instruction. “Strivers” wanted their children to get into top-tier colleges. Clearly, parents want more from schools than just to maximize test scores.

Charter schools have seen large market penetration in several cities. More than 90 percent of students in New Orleans now attend charter schools. Around 50 percent of students in Detroit and Washington, DC, do as well. In Los Angeles, more than 117,000 students attend charter schools, which would make its charter school market the 20th largest school district in the United States. As these markets expand the number of families that they serve, they will increasingly serve families with distinct tastes. In order to grow and thrive, they will need to figure out how to meet these families’ needs. Failure to do so is a liability.

In this paper, we set out to ask a very simple question: how diverse are the offerings of charter schools today? We examined the charter markets of 17 cities chosen to reflect diversity in both size and charter market, comprising a total of 1,151 charter schools educating more than 471,000 students, and coded them by their curricular or pedagogical specializations.

We uncovered several important findings:

1. There is an almost even 50/50 split between “general” and “specialized” charter schools. That is, half of schools do not have a particular pedagogical or curricular emphasis; they are traditionally organized and operated schools that focus simply on providing a good education.
2. In terms of the number of schools, the two most common specializations are progressive and no-excuses schools, with 101 schools identifying themselves as no-excuses and 101 schools identifying themselves as progressive.
3. There is variation in the charter market from city to city.
4. There are city-level factors that appear to relate to the diversity of charter school offerings, including the number and type of authorizers, the age and market share of the sector, and the demographics of the community.

In the following sections, we will first describe our coding mechanism. Then we will present and discuss the results, taking city context into consideration. Finally, we will close with some reflections on diversity of offerings and policy.

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Measuring diversity in charter school offerings - AEI: