Do We Want More Charter Schools—Or Better Ones?

Charter school proponents fear a proposed federal regulation will impede the sector’s growth. While charters have improved education for many kids, mere growth isn’t the issue to focus on if we want all students to reach their full potential.

Charter schools used to be a bipartisan issue—opposed by teachers unions and some on the left but enthusiastically embraced by many politicians on both sides of the aisle. Now, a proposal from the Department of Education appears to signal a new skepticism within the Democratic Party.

The rule would govern how the department prioritizes applications for a decades-old program that provides grants for new or expanding charters. One provision that has drawn protests from charter advocates would ask applicants to collaborate with traditional public schools on things like “best practices” and transportation. Another would require an analysis of whether a proposed school would increase racial or economic segregation. A third calls for evidence of demand for charters, such as over-enrollment in regular district schools.

To many in the charter sector, the proposal appears to be based on longstanding—and, in their view, groundless—complaints that charters increase school segregation and drain resources from traditional public schools. And given the inherent and sometimes fierce competition between charter and district schools, they say, asking charter applicants to pledge “collaboration” is like asking the occupants of a henhouse to cozy up to a hungry fox.

The proposal wouldn’t affect existing charters unless they want to expand, and the Biden administration isn’t cutting any funding from the $440 million-a-year program. Still, the rules have drawn over 26,000 public comments, prompted a protest at the White House that attracted a crowd of 1,000, sparked numerous opinion pieces, and gotten front-page coverage in The New York Times. The issue has long evoked strong emotions, and the remaining Democratic charter proponents see this relatively modest move—along with then-candidate Biden’s statement that he was not “a charter school fan”—as a betrayal of Obama-era policies.

But to be “for” or “against” charters is, to my mind, like saying you’re for or against novels, or movies. There are great charters, terrible charters, and everything in between—just as with traditional public schools. Of course, when people argue over charters, they’re usually talking about those in urban districts that serve mostly low-income Black and Hispanic students. Proponents point to higher test scores at many of those schools, while opponents claim they achieve those scores by cherry-picking more able students.

The truth, as usual, is no doubt more complicated. For years I served on the board of a charter school in Washington, D.C., that admitted applicants by lottery and, from what I could tell, did its level best to educate some extremely challenging kids. At the same time, teachers and administrators at traditional D.C. public schools have told me they regularly see a midyear influx of difficult students who have left or been pushed out of nearby charters, and I have no reason to doubt them.

Even if the test scores of high-performing charters are legitimate, questions can be raised about how much they tell us. Reading scores generally lag behind math scores—and reading is important. Plus, we have little test-score data past eighth grade—aside from graduation rates, which don’t necessarily reflect actual learning. Even in elementary and middle school, scores usually decline at higher grades, as the tests get more challenging. Are younger students acquiring the academic concepts and vocabulary they need to do well in the future? Are they learning to express themselves coherently in writing? These are questions test scores often can’t answer.

Nor is a school’s reputation always a reliable guide. I’ve visited highly regarded charters where I’ve been dismayed by some of the instruction. And I’ve been to obscure charters where I’ve been blown away.

Beyond questions about what charters are doing for the 7% of American public school students that attend them, there’s the equally contentious question of their impact on non-charter schools—a question that relates directly to the Biden administration proposal, which is about charter growth.

Advocates point to evidence that the existence of charter schools in a district boosts achievement generally, including in traditional public schools. Facing competition, they say, district schools tend to up their game. But again, the test-score evidence is much stronger for math than for reading. And one study found that the benefits don’t continue to increase once charters achieve a 15% market share.

As I’ve seen from living in a place where the charter share is more like 45%—Washington, D.C.—at some point, non-charter schools start to suffer. It’s possible that improvement in D.C.’s district schools, uneven as it is, has to do with competition from charters, but it’s hard to know for sure, and it’s not clear more charters would help. When students move to charters, funding goes with them, while many district expenses remain fixed. And highly engaged families are more likely to enroll their kids in charters, leaving regular schools in low-income areas with a more challenging population. Even the D.C. charter authorizing authority, which is independent of the school district and generally enthusiastic about charters, has been approving fewer applications recently.

As the Department of Education sifts through thousands of public comments on its proposal, there are a couple of tweaks I’d like to suggest. First, why not distinguish between a district like D.C., which is well-supplied with charters (even if some still have long waiting lists) and districts where there are few or none? Perhaps that’s included in the proposal’s “demand” criterion, but it could be stated more explicitly. One possibility would be to have more stringent requirements where the charter sector exceeds, say, 15%.

I’d also like to see some evaluation of whether a new or expanding charter is experimenting with non-standard instructional approaches—which, theoretically, charters could do more easily because of their freedom from bureaucratic constraints.. The language of the Biden administration’s proposed rules makes it clear that it rests on a concept of charters as laboratories of innovation, but it doesn’t do much to promote it.

Why not prioritize funding for charters that adopt an approach grounded in what cognitive scientists have discovered about how learning actually works? Most of the education system, regardless of sector, is mired in practices that, while well-intentioned, make teaching and learning much harder than they need to be. That’s especially true of everything that goes under the umbrella term “reading.”

The place to start would be evaluating a school’s curriculum, particularly at the elementary level. Is the charter using a program that teaches phonics and other foundational reading skills in a systematic way? Is it using a coherent, content-rich curriculum that builds academic knowledge and vocabulary? Or—like most traditional public schools and many high-performing charters—is it having kids spend hours trying to acquire largely illusory reading comprehension “skills” of the kind that appear to be measured by standardized tests?

Those criteria are a lot more complicated than test scores, and unfortunately hampered by some political baggage. But they’re crucial. I’m sure there are charter schools that are doing brilliant work. But right now, it’s almost impossible to identify them, learn from their experience—and perhaps, enable them to grow.