Expanding school choices for parents remains a heated debate, from states providing families vouchers for their children to attend private schools, to school boards creating magnet schools and other public alternatives, to states and districts granting charter schools freedom to innovate the way schools serve children. You may or may not like those choices, but they stem from a common and important instinct: give parents more options for their children, especially parents whose neighborhood schools suffer from low expectations and children not learning at the appropriate grade level.
Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today editorial writer and author of Why Boys Fail (2010), reports on one of the most central elements in the debate: charter schools. Specifically, the strategies that top charter schools use. He emphasizes, at the outset, that The Founders is not about all charters, which are public schools that states or school districts grant freedom from numerous regulations so that they can experiment to improve student achievement. He pointedly, and rightly, says that many charters should be shut down.
That is one reason why this book matters. The Founders is clear that some charters fail, and authorities should close them. But by conceding at the outset that not all charters are good, Whitmire establishes himself as something other than an ideologue: His voice carries authenticity when he pivots to explain why quality charters succeed.
The first, counterintuitive lesson is that the best charter school operators freely share strategies with each other, and the broad and accepted sharing among leading charters of “secret sauce” (as Whitmire puts it) is remarkable, going back to the late Harriet Ball, a Houston schoolteacher who influenced Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) cofounders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Yet KIPP, arguably the nation’s best-known charter management organization, didn’t start that way. It began in Houston with Levin and Feinberg searching for ways to improve education for disadvantaged youth. Ball was a key factor in their quest, informing them about such strategies as using musical chants to teach mathematics. She implored her disciples to share with others what they knew.
As one example, we learn that top charters from the East and West coasts gathered on a weekend in Denver in 2004 to consider solutions. The Walton Family Foundation sponsored the meeting to see if common strategies could be identified so a successful charter model could be brought to “scale,” where innovators search for ways to apply proven strategies in a broader way. One key finding was that breakthrough charters are not solo operations: They often are part of charter management organizations, or CMOs. Equally important, CMOs tend to be led by people who embrace sharing best practices.
“The sharing among charter founders in that Denver meeting, more than any other factor,” Whitmire writes, “explains the very wide gap between the top 20 percent of charter schools and the rest of the field.”
This top 20 percent, which includes such operators as Uncommon Schools in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York, IDEA in Texas, and Green Dot in California, are driving achievement. By 2015, Whitmire reports, leading charters were “adding a year-and-a-half of learning for every year a student spent in their schools.” And studies of effective charters in places like Washington, Boston, and Denver confirm their impact on achievement. Let’s be clear, of course: There is no magic answer in education, and that includes charters. But there are strategies that make a difference, and one is using data to guide classroom instruction, particularly where students need interventions.
KIPP looked at its data and saw that its schools were succeeding in getting students into college but not getting serious numbers to graduate from college. Charter managers acted on that concerning data and modified their strategies, working with experts in the emerging field of social and emotional learning to change some of their regimented ways. The point is that successful charters don’t run from bad data: They use it to keep searching for the best strategies and do not blame the results.
Charter opponents like to argue that charters skim off the best students and ignore those beset by poverty. The Founders, however, reveals how many successful charters operate in low-income communities from Boston to the Rio Grande Valley to Los Angeles. One example is the Noble Street network of charters in Chicago. According to Whitmire, Noble’s students are 95 percent minority and 89 percent low-income. Yet the network also ranks as one of Illinois’s better school districts, with Noble students outpacing Chicago public school students on ACT scores.
Some districts offer charters as part of their portfolio of schools. Some traditional schools and charters exchange strategies. And some districts and charter operators learn from each other in side-by-side arrangements, even on the same campus. All to give families a choice, and in the case of leading charters, a very good choice.
William McKenzie is editor of the Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute.
