Looking Backward to Charter Schools

Charter schools are promoted as a contemporary American invention. But the documented history reveals that charter schools actually evolved over the centuries in England, structured to reflect the highly stratified British class system. The last stand to hold onto the charter-school system in England was waged by Margaret Thatcher under the banner of “parental choice.” But her campaign went down to defeat as the British public opted for the American-style, inclusive and comprehensive secondary school. The charter-school movement raises the clear and present danger of splitting up the American unitary, comprehensive school system at cost to the American democratic experience.

Tracing the Historical DNA and Unlikely Alliances of the American Charter School Movement

More than three million children in the United States are currently enrolled in charter schools, with increasing enrollments despite strong evidence of academic gains. This historical analysis moves beyond a focus on academic outcomes and traces the success of the charter school movement, in part, to the foundational premise of restoring agency to educational stakeholders. State-mandated schooling was a counterintuitive feature of American policy that chafed against the founding ideals of the Republic and gradually engendered resentment among mostly white conservatives. Concurrently, in the aftermath ofBrown,factions of African American policymakers began to look for equitable educational alternatives. The unlikely alliance of these two antithetical constituencies resulted in the creation of a unique—albeit fragile—coalition and the passing of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and paved the way for the nation’s inaugural charter school policy passed in Minnesota in 1991.

Religiously Affiliated Charter Schools

Charter schools have grown significantly since 1991, when Minnesota became the first state to enact charter school legislation. Charter schools are public schools, as defined by federal and state law. Thus, when it comes to issues of religion and education, charter schools are bound by the same laws and legal precedents as public schools. As a result, local developers and state chartering agencies that seek to establish religious or faith-based charter schools are likely to fail in state and federal courts. This chapter examines this legal framework in the larger charter school movement.

School Characteristics and Teacher Policy Influence: Evidence From New York City

Proponents of the charter school movement often claim that the decentralized, autonomous nature of charter schools from district and state authority allows teachers greater influence over school policy both instructionally and administratively. Using a data set of 1,427 New York City schools, we empirically examine the extent to which organizational characteristics predict the amount of policy influence charter schools and traditional public schools grant to teachers. Results indicate not only do charter schools grant their teachers less policy influence but also other organizational features are stronger predictors of teacher policy influence including several nonlinear relationships. Directions for future research are discussed.

Getting to Scale: Ideas, Opportunities, and Resources in the Early Diffusion of the Charter Management Organization, 1999–2006

Background/Context The concept of scale has gained purchase across social sectors in recent years as organizational leaders and funders seek to maximize the impact of promising social innovations. Purpose/Objective We apply insights from recent scholarship on ideas as mechanisms for change to explain how the idea of “getting to scale” intersected with political opportunities and human and financial resources in the early diffusion of the charter management organization (CMO). Research Design As the birthplace and a political locus of the CMO form, California is an ideal vantage point from which to understand the early years of the form's diffusion. We conducted interviews with California CMO and non-CMO leaders, principals, and funders. Our interviews were designed to understand when and why CMO leaders thought about growth, the challenges and opportunities associated with growth, organizational goals and strategic priorities, and whether and how funders shaped CMO development and plans. In addition, we constructed a school-level panel dataset for the 1991–92 to 2006–07 school years using data from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data and the California Department of Education. We included charter organizational form, enrollment, and school founding and closure years. We also joined multiple Foundation Center datasets to create a grant-level dataset for the years 1999 to 2006 that includes grant amount, grant type, recipient, and funder. Finally, we conducted participant and nonpar-ticipant observations at CMO board meetings, foundation staff meetings and presentations, and charter school conferences and meetings. Findings/Results Understood and framed as the vehicle for getting to scale, the CMO form drew a disproportionate share of private philanthropy dollars, appealed to a new class of professionals from outside of education, and was successfully distinguished from alternative charter forms, all of which contributed to its early diffusion. Conclusions/Recommendations We develop a fuller understanding of the charter school movement, describing how the diffusion of the CMO form displaced ideas about school-level autonomy and decentralization in favor of ideas about getting to scale and tipping the system. The study also offers insight to scholars analyzing current and past efforts at educational reform by emphasizing the roles played by ideas, opportunities, and resources.

Music Programs in Charter and Traditional Schools

Since the arrival of the first charter school in Minnesota in 1991, charter schools have become one of the largest movements in educational reform. In recent years, research has emerged that has compared the effectiveness of charter schools with their traditional school counterparts. The purpose of this study was to compare the extent of music offerings between charter schools and traditional public schools in the same urban district and geographic location within the city. Results indicated that while all schools in the sample offered significantly less music than national averages, significantly more charter schools offered music during the school day. Charter schools were more likely to offer traditional music (band, choir, orchestra) as electives. Schools with music programs, regardless of school type, had higher test scores and higher attendance rates even when controlling for differences in socioeconomic status between music and non music schools. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the charter school movement, arts education policy, and suggestions for future research.

Occupational Control in Education: The Logic and Leverage of Epistemic Communities

Most current approaches to improving teaching and learning in American public schools rely on either market pressures or bureaucratic controls to leverage performance. In this article, however, authors Joshua Glazer and Donald Peurach examine occupational control as a third approach, whereby the internalization of norms, technical language, and practices among educational professionals drives coordination and knowledge generation and supports the implementation of ambitious instruction. To investigate the dynamics of occupational control, they use the concept of epistemic community to identify the mechanisms that unite practitioners into a community of practice extending beyond the borders of local work environments. They argue that underlying this is a shared set of theory, codes, and tools that govern interpretation and practice and, in their interaction, facilitate the continuous generation of knowledge. Illustrating the utility of this framework are two examples of school networks that employ the principles and mechanisms of an epistemic community and that can be interpreted as systems of occupational control. The authors conclude by arguing that the development of educational epistemic communities is critical to the success of current approaches to improving instruction in schools, most notably the Common Core State Standards and the charter school movement.