Charter Schools and Minority Achievement

Charter schools are independent public schools created through formal agreement with a state or local sponsoring agency. Each school is designed and operated by parents, community members, or entrepreneurs, and is allowed to operate free from most state and local regulations governing schools—including staffing, curriculum, school calendar, resource allocation, governance, and school/classroom sizes. Foremost, charter schools are an organizational and governance innovation intended to encourage multiple stakeholders to build schools of choice that are linked to new locally defined accountability structures, including the creation of higher-quality schooling options that could serve disadvantaged families in neighborhoods where quality options have traditionally been scarce.

Over the past 20 years, charter schools have become a significant movement in public education. Both the popularity of the reform and the number of charter schools have grown dramatically. An estimated 5,100 schools now serve more than 1.5 million students in 39 states and the District of Columbia. In total, charter school students amount to approximately 3% of all public school enrollment in the United States.

Fundamental to the theory of action of charter school reform is that competition for students along with increased autonomy from state regulations sparks entrepreneurial thinking and innovation. Charters provide local control for teachers and parents with innovative ideas to open new schools, while market principles of choice may spur innovation as schools search for the best ways to improve performance and create efficiencies as a result of competition with one another for students.

Charter school research, however, is not conclusive in determining the extent to which the day-to-day experiences of charter schools support the assumptions inherent in the decentralized theory of action. As the charter movement continues to expand, it is important for policymakers, charter authorizers, and parents to know whether students in charter schools are performing better than their public school counterparts. However, achievement may be defined differently by the various stakeholders. Outcomes linked to student test scores are important to all constituents, but it is also important to account for diverse achievement indicators that are associated with how charters use their autonomy to promote new schooling models. For example, policymakers and state education officials are concerned with [Page 317]federal and state legal and regulatory compliance. Local charter authorizers are concerned with local accountability measures, which may include fiscal, governance, and academic program oversight, in addition to measures of success linked to upholding a school's original mission. Parents, as consumers in the market choice context, are concerned with academic program offerings, school safety, and additional services offered to the school community (e.g., before-/after-school programs, extracurricular activities). These diverse interpretations of what constitutes achievement, in addition to student test scores, are consistent with the original charter school theory of action, in which autonomy would yield multiple stakeholders in building new forms of local accountability beyond simple compliance with centralized regulatory demands.

This entry focuses on three domains of charter school research that have important implications for minority student achievement in charter schools. First the entry outlines issues of access to charters and the challenges of building effective schools and guaranteeing equal access to new schools of choice. Second, a review of charter school finance and resource distribution patterns presents the challenges to sustaining charter school organizations. And lastly, a review of charter school student achievement displays both the challenges of conducting quality research and the implications that achievement studies have for the wider movement. These and other research efforts have begun to use empirical evidence and careful analysis to provide more critical perspectives on issues raised by charter schools.

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