Religiously Affiliated Charter Schools

There is a long-standing debate in public administration as to the differences and similarities in management practices across sectors. A number of scholars have argued for market-based reforms as a means to transform and improve public sector services, including the educational system. Charter schools have emerged as a reform that proposes to improve the educational system through choice, competition, and autonomy from the bureaucracy of traditional public school districts, but their implications are not fully understood. This mixed-method study analyzes differences in human resource management practices across traditional public, charter, and private schools, with a focus on formalization and autonomy. In support of other research on public-private management differences, this analysis suggests that traditional public schools are more formalized and have less autonomy than private and charter schools. Findings provide support for the utility of a core approach that distinguishes between public and private organizations based on ownership. The study suggests that ownership has a significant influence on personnel management practices, but that funding generally does not.

The meteoric rise in charter schools has several implications for traditional public schools and their students. One understudied implication is the geographic competition for students. Given traditional public school boundaries are often fixed while charter school boundaries are more flexible, charter schools can draw students away from existing traditional public schools, and we have very little information about how distance matters in the competition for students. Because of this, traditional public schools and school districts have little ability to plan for enrollment changes in the face of charter school growth. Our paper uses data on enrollments and demographics in all charter and traditional public schools in Los Angeles from 2000 to 2013 to better understand these dynamics. We find that traditional public school enrollments clearly decline with competition from nearby charter schools. However, we also observe that charter schools tend to locate where traditional public school enrollments are on the decline. Competition is more relevant for elementary schools at short distances—within about 1 mi appears to be where the associations between charter school enrollments and TPS enrollment declines are the strongest. For middle and high schools, those connections are apparent within 2 to 6 mi in some models.

Much has been written about how public schools in the United States are funded. However, missing in the current literature landscape is a nuanced discussion of funding as it relates to public charter schools. This text, authored by researchers and professionals working in the charter school world, provides readers with a comprehensive overview of issues related to the funding and operation of charter schools.The book opens with an introduction to charter schools and how they are funded. The financial management and oversight of charter schools and issues related to funding equity, including how charter schools impact district school finances, are addressed. Special considerations for charter schools related to serving special education students and transportation issues are also addressed. After reading this book, readers will have a thorough understanding of how charter schools are funded and managed financially.

Grounded in analysis of specific features of the federal school reform undertaken in the U.S. in early 21st century, this article demonstrates that the U.S. government attempted to reduce the number of students lagging behind and thus to increase students’ average performance by means of stimulating them to transfer from underperforming to better schools, including from public schools to schools of other types, which offer higher quality of teaching. The article distinguishes three stages of the reform. On the first stage, in late 20th century, new types of schools emerged in the U.S.: in addition to pre-existent public, private and religious schools, as well as home schooling, magnet schools emerged in 1970s, and charter schools emerged in 1990s. On the second stage, during George W. Bush Administration, U.S. government assumed the powers to stimulate transfer of students from underperforming public schools to charter schools, and to stimulate increase in the number of charter schools. On the third stage, during Barack Obama Administration and the first year of Donald Trump Administration, U.S. government faced the impossibility to significantly increase the number of charter schools, to stimulate mass transfer of students from public schools to charter schools, and to significantly improve average students’ performance over short time. Even if U.S. government assumes the powers to stimulate transfer of students also to private schools, as Donald Trump Administration proposed, it will hardly have a positive effect in the short run. The article concludes that the model of school reform applied in the U.S. cannot solve the puzzle, because it concentrates available resources around elite schools, while most students lagging behind concentrate around traditional public schools.

In this study, we analyzed public school teacher employment data from 2009 to 2015 to understand why teacher attrition is 54% higher in charter schools compared to traditional public schools. We investigated the factors associated with the differences in exit rates of teachers from traditional public and charter schools in Arizona which has a large charter school sector. Our findings suggest that the major factors behind the gap in retention rates between school sectors in Arizona are teachers’ professional characteristics: less experienced teachers and teachers with alternative certification are more likely to exit schools and, in particular, charter schools which also employ a significantly larger share of these teachers. We argue that charter school and school district leadership might consider interventions, mentoring, and support for teachers in the early stages of their career targeted at novice teachers.

Charter schools have been categorized as "everyone's reform" (Bracey, 2004); they are a type of public school, first established in 1992, that normally has fewer restrictions than most public schools and that serves a student body that, in many circumstances, has consciously opted to attend the school. Charter schools have promised high student achievement and program options that would create healthy competition in the American educational market. Currently, in California alone, there are approximately 800 active charter schools that serve more than 340,000 pupils. As we close in on nearly twenty years of charter school reform, many charter schools could be considered successful. Every year, however, some have their charters either revoked or not renewed due to a variety of reasons including deficiencies in academic programming, poor student achievement, or improper fiscal mismanagement. According to the California Department of Education (2010), twenty-five percent of the 1,152 charter schools that have opened in California since 1992 have closed permanently, with more than forty closings due to charter revocation. To date, however, there has been very little research on charter school closures. This qualitative study attempted to (a) determine which types of California charter schools have closed, (b) discover the reasons the schools' former leaders give for the closures, as well as compare official reasons for closure with the schools' former leaders stated reasons for closure, and (c) solicit any advice the former leaders would offer others wanting to begin, or continue to successfully operate, a charter school. Reasons the former directors gave for their schools' closures included: (a) conflict with their sponsoring agent, (b) a negative relationship with their superintendent, (c) problems with facilities, (d) financial problems, (e) working ineffectively with a business partner, and (f) perceived unethical behavior by a business partner. Advice offered by these directors included the importance of securing and controlling finances at the site level, developing and maintaining collaborative relationships with sponsoring agents, beginning a charter school with a specific vision, not allowing a business entity to operate a charter school, and maintaining a high level of energy and enthusiasm.

Teacher Attrition in Charter and Public Schools

This article presents the results of an investigation involving the provisions for special education services in state charter school legislation and highlights selected special education issues within Colorado's charter schools. The research included document reviews, a survey of individual charter schools, interviews, and site visits in four schools. The results of this multilevel effort reveal significant variability across states and among charter schools within Colorado in how students with disabilities access the schools as well as how special education is provided. There is a general lack of information flowing to charter schools about special education and a disparity in how services are funded and provided. Legal and administrative responsibilities for special education are often ambiguous. Nonetheless, charter schools appear to offer individualized educational approaches that are perceived by many parents and teachers as meeting the needs of many students who had experienced learning as well as behavior problems in the public schools.

A widely cited report by the federal Government Accountability Office found that charter schools enroll a significantly smaller percentage of students with disabilities than do traditional public schools. However, thus far no hard evidence exists to definitively explain or quantify the disparity between special education enrollment rates in charter and traditional public schools. This article uses student-level data from Denver, Colorado, to map the creation and growth of the special education gap in elementary and middle school grades. The gap begins because students with disabilities are less likely to apply to charter schools in gateway grades than are nondisabled students. However, the special education gap in Denver elementary schools more than doubles as students progress between kindergarten and the fifth grade. About half of the growth in the gap in elementary grades (46%) occurs because of classification differences across sectors. The remaining 54% of the growth in the gap in elementary grades is due to differences in student mobility across sectors. However, the gap does not primarily grow—and in fact tends to shrink—due to the movement of students with disabilities across sectors and out of the city’s school system. Rather, the impact of student mobility on the gap is driven primarily by nondisabled students: Regular enrollment students are more likely to enter into charter schools, thus disproportionately reducing the percentage of students with disabilities within the charter sector.

Traditional public school interests in North Carolina, or the BLOB—Big Learning Organizations Bureaucracy—as one study participant referred to them, successfully kept charter schools in a box from the passage of charter school legislation in 1996 until Republicans took control of the state House and Senate in 2011. They did not seek to eliminate charter schools in state. They accepted the state’s one hundred-charter school experiment and masterfully played political defense, stopping charter schools from encroaching any further on their territory. While charter schools in North Carolina during that period came to a permanent fixture in the public education landscape, they were a very small one. The majority of North Carolina’s one hundred counties did not have any charter schools at all. And even in Wake County, with the state’s highest concentration of charter schools, charter school students made up less than 1% of the county’s public school enrollment. Charter schools reached their cap in 2001 and after that, the State Board of Education was only able to grant new charters when existing ones were revoked or voluntarily relinquished.KeywordsPublic SchoolChoice PolicySchool LeaderCharter SchoolParent ChoiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

How have charter schools in Wisconsin performed relative to traditional public schools? Two analyses provide an answer: First, a comparison of achievement test scores for students in Milwaukee charter and traditional schools from 1998 to 2002 for grades 3 through 10 finds a relative advantage for charter school students using fixed effects and first difference specifications. Second, a methodological approach new to the debate over performance in choice schools assesses schoollevel standardized tests in the fourth and eighth grades for 2000–01 and 2001–02. The results for fourth grade are generally favorable for charter schools; those for eighth grade are mixed. Overall, the results from these two analyses suggest that charter schools in Wisconsin are performing somewhat better than the traditional public schools from which they draw students. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management

ABSTRACTFew evaluations have focused on the supply and demand within the education marketplace in a school choice environment. Because traditional public schools are not subject to the same level of competitive pressures as private schools, we expect that measures of school quality—enrollment, academic achievement, and safety—will be more likely to predict closures for private schools and public charter schools than Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). We employ survival analysis using data from private, traditional public, and public charter schools in Milwaukee from 2005 to 2016. Data on enrollment trends, demographics, and academic performance from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction were combined with data from other sources on school safety and closure. Results from our models suggest: (a) enrollment losses drive school closure in all three sectors, (b) low academic achievement only predicts closure for private schools, (c) families choose schools based on academics in all three sectors, and (d) academics and school safety are positively correlated.

ABSTRACTThe charter-school sector in the United States has grown steadily since the first charter school opened in 1992 and nearly 7,000 charter schools currently serve nearly 3 million students. Research suggests that the average charter school performs about the same as nearby traditional public schools, but there is great variation in the effects of charter schools. Some are successful in boosting student achievement and others are not, raising the question of what distinguishes good charter schools from bad. This article summarizes the research on factors associated with successful charter schools. The research suggests that urban charter schools have more positive impacts on student achievement than other charter schools. The policies most consistently found to be associated with positive charter-school impacts include long school days or years, comprehensive behavioral policies with rewards and sanctions, and a mission that prioritizes boosting student achievement. In addition, moderately strong evidence suggests that high-dosage tutoring, frequent feedback and coaching for teachers, and policies promoting the use of data to guide teachers’ instructional practices are positively associated with charter schools’ achievement impacts.

This study examines how charter school advocates and district administrators in a suburban US school district work in concert, although not in unison, to create a public charter school that reinforces the interests of White, economically advantaged families. Drawing on ethnographic data, interviews, census data and charter school documents, we find that district administrators, charter school parents, and charter school officials at the US Department of Education have a tendency to ‘pass the buck’ for responsibility about enrollment and admissions. We also find that district administrators are caught within the social and political dynamics of a school system that in this case compels them to make decisions and enact policies that reinforce existing hierarchies. Our findings contribute to mounting evidence that rather than liberate students from the educational inequalities inherent within the regular public school system, charter schools hold the potential to reproduce racial exclusion and class stratification.

This brief argues that charter school programs can have direct fiscal impacts on school districts for two reasons. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, we demonstrate how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated. We find that charter schools have had fiscal impacts on these two school districts. Finally, we argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives.