0.3 Allen, a., & Gawlik, m. (july 2009). preparing district and  (Page 3/10)

Charter school theory and research

Central to the charter school theory of action is the idea that through various organizational and policy mechanisms, charter schools will lead to increased student achievement. The theories that underlie these organizational and policy mechanisms include theories that suggest a market approach to schooling will prompt all schools to improve so they can compete in the marketplace of education (Buckley&Schneider, 2007; Chubb&Moe, 1990). The market mechanism focuses on the private interests of parents, with a central tenet that these private interests will drive competition, increase pressures of all schools to improve, and put the power and motivation to engage back into the hands of parents. Hence , one pressing research question to date has been whether charter educators can increase achievement of weaker students, especially given their early success in providing access to low-income families.

A synthesis of charter school achievement studies was compiled for review and analysis and overall, the charter school impact on achievement is mixed (Miron&Nelson, 2002). Past studies have found that students attending charter schools do not consistently outperform those enrolled in regular public schools, at least on standard achievement measures. In Michigan, Horn and Miron (1998) assessed test scores, comparing students enrolled in charter and regular public schools. They found that charter students displayed weaker learning gains than students attending conventional schools. Eberts&Hollenbeck (2002) found that charter school students in Michigan scored two to three percent lower than comparable non-charter public schools. No achievement advantage has been detected in average school-wide scores among charter students in California, compared to regular schools, after taking into account social-class, language, and other student characteristics (Brown, 2003). In Arizona, researchers tracked student-level scores over a three-year period, and charter students demonstrated slightly higher reading gains across the grade levels on SAT9 scores, while a mixed to positive impact could be detected in math performance (Solmon, Paark,&Garcia, 2001). Encouraging findings have emerged in Texas, where low-income and “at risk” students attending charter schools outperformed similar students in regular public schools on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (Texas Education Agency, 2001; 2002). Yet for other students, charter attendees did less well than those in regular schools. This research team also found that newly opened charter schools were not as effective in raising achievement as were older ones.

While one of the early goals of charter schools was to create innovations that would then be shared and transferred to district schools, Lubienski (2004) reports that little evidence exist to show that charter schools have, indeed, been innovative in terms of new instructional strategies. Although charter schools are granted a substantial degree of autonomy as an opportunity to innovate, they are often situated in some of the most competitive environments where market forces are unleashed thereby constraining innovation. According to the evidence obtained, charter schools are engaging in a wide array of educational practices that are innovative yet many of these activities are already in use in bureaucratically administered districts (Lubienski, 2004). Although educators and policymakers expect decentralization, autonomy, and deregulation to spur innovation, it may be that these forces are more successful in inducing innovations in administrative behavior than in the classroom (Lubienski, 2004).