A hole in the school choice gospel: student outcomes

School choice conservatives have lost their love for measurable student achievement. It is a good thing charter school leaders are religious about it.

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.

- Helen Deutsch

What if something crucial was simultaneously too boring to grab the average person's attention?

Example: charter school authorizing.

See. You just went to sleep.

Even a long-time advocate for charter schools like me has overlooked authorizing, seeing it as an issue deeply entrenched in the domain of practitioners. I'm only writing about it now because I saw a lob shot by two free-market Doctorate holders from the Heritage Foundation's research chop shop.

They recently produced a study claiming that states with more regulation of charter schools have less innovation and variety. As is often the case with Heritage "research," it's sloppy, hampered by weird methodology, and acts more as libertarian advocacy than honest scholarship. If you appreciate conservative fan fiction, read about it for yourself here.

The push for deregulation of charters is old. If conservatives ever loved these schools, it was only a pit stop to the complete privatization of public education. Charters were always too goverment-ish for the private school choice folks hostage to an arranged marriage between bipartisan kissing cousins. Pedagogical and operational autonomy was cute, but public education's dissolution was the target.

Now that education savings accounts have successfully created education welfare programs for private school families in several states; charters are only attractive when religious zealots privatize them.

The most important lesson from the charter school movement is lost on the private schoolers: autonomy must come with accountability for results.

To gauge regulation, we looked at how the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) assessed the policies governing charter schools in each state. States with higher scores from NACSA are those that more heavily regulate who can open a charter school and how charter performance is evaluated, and force charter schools to close for failing to meet those performance goals, even if parents want them to remain open.

Though conservatives have championed rating and ranking systems that give schools letter grades, those in the school choice movement have continually attacked the ratings that the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) give states for the quality of their laws governing charters. States with more safeguards and quality enablers get higher ranks. States with a laissez-faire approach to chartering receive lower scores.

Enter Karega Rausch, the CEO of NACSA , who says, "outcomes for all students still matter. And outcomes matter now more than ever with accumulating evidence of inadequate progress in pandemic recovery efforts."

Choice isn't genuine freedom if those choices let students down academically. The sine qua non of charter schools lives or dies with the accountability and quality of the authorizers who hold their charters.

It's about producing educated students, not about the processes schools employ or their governance structures.

Rausch emphasizes this point, stating:

...charter schools are achieving impressive outcomes for students. Earlier this year, researchers at Stanford University produced a remarkable set of findings on charter school performance across the country. It's not hyperbole to say that the policy and practice framework for charter schooling—autonomy, accountability, and access—has produced the most successful school improvement evidence of the last two decades. That is especially true for students of color and lower income students. For example, Black students attending charter schools received the equivalent of 35 additional days of learning in reading and 29 additional days in the math. And there is emerging evidence that charter schools also positively impact non-test score outcomes, including high school graduation, college attendance, and higher earnings in adulthood.

His response to the Heritage study: "it's unfortunate the authors say nothing about quality and student outcomes."

That’s where our focus should be.

Charter school authorizers, often overlooked, serve as stewards of educational excellence—a role missing in ESA programs and private schools. They play a vital role in ensuring schools meet academic benchmarks and uphold the public interest, which involves addressing opportunity gaps and judiciously using taxpayer investments.

Conventional schools focus mostly on funding and staff. The private school sector mostly covets freedom. Between them are the adults in the room, the authorizers of charter schools that balance the bargain struck between autonomy and accountability.

We owe our children to follow the science of education rather than the political witchcraft of it. More facts, less Heritage.

If we are going to fairly debate the merits of charter schools on the education landscape, I encourage you to prepare yourself with knowledge of how charter authorizing works.

To start, see NACSA’s research page with resources on authorizing.

Also, watch this: