"Charter school supporters are advocating that the legislature increase the number of charter schools allowed from the current cap of 100, but the center's research indicates that such a move would be premature," said Mike McLaughlin, editor of the NCCPPR publication North Carolina Insight. "Too many of the schools are mediocre-to-poor academic performers, too many are in financial disarray, and too many are segregated by race. That's not what the legislature hoped for when it began the charter school experiment."
Charter schools are essentially public schools whose charters are awarded by the state and whose affairs are governed not by a superintendent or elected school board but by a board of volunteer citizens. The goal of charter school legislation passed in 1996 was to allow citizens to create schools separate from the education establishment to try to teach academically gifted and academically challenged students in ways the traditional public schools cannot. The hope was that charter schools, cut off from the bureaucratic leash, would be free to innovate and would compete with traditional public schools for students, making both stronger. But because of these rules, there is also little formal oversight of how they're run on a day-to-day basis.
The three math teachers who taught at Crossroads -- school administrators claim they were fired from the school -- say the way the schools are set up left them virtually no one to take their complaints to other than the media. They've asked politicians and the state and federal education departments to investigate their claims that about a third of the school's graduating class failed math -- and likely other subjects as well -- but were handed their high school diplomas anyway. The school's attorney denies the teachers' charges.
The teachers, the original author of the school's charter, and other employees of the school interviewed by CL over the past month, say the day-to-day reality at the school was very different from what was proposed to state education officials in the charter application. They claim administrators lost control of the kids early on, creating an atmosphere in which teachers were regularly threatened and could barely control their classrooms. They say many of the kids spent their time in a kind of in-house detention center where they watched movies all day rather than attending classes, and as a result missed critical classroom instruction. Again, the school's lawyer denies these charges.
The state Department of Public Instruction views a charter school as its own school district, says Vernon Robinson, president of the North Carolina Education Reform Foundation. The school's volunteer board is subject to open meetings and documents rules like any other school. The line of responsibility for the school goes to the appointed state Board of Education, which has ultimate responsibility over public education in North Carolina. Robinson says the state board usually defers to the decisions of an appointed charter school advisory committee that reviews matters of concern at the school and can recommend that a charter be dissolved.While the Department of Public Instruction doesn't get involved in the day-to-day running of the schools, the schools must turn in an audit each year and Dr. Otho Tucker, director of the Office of Charter Schools, receives a monthly principal's report including absentee reports from each of the schools.
"We watch for fluctuation in enrollment," said Tucker. "Then we check to see what is going on. We have the discretion to step in and assess the situation."
If Tucker found a problem or concern at a school, he could take it to the charter school advisory committee or the state Board of Education, he says. But beyond that, the charters are on their own.
In a regular public school, parents and teachers can take their complaints to a school superintendent, the elected school board or, ultimately, to the state board. But to have more state or local oversight of charter schools would defeat their purpose, say those who lobbied for them. The idea was to set up a system in which the charters compete for students with the public schools. Every time a traditional public school lost a student to a charter school, the school would also lose a few thousand dollars in funding to the charter school as well.
But that's one of the areas where charters and regular public schools aren't on an equal playing field, according to a response to the NCCPPR report by The League of Charter Schools, a pro-charter school advocacy group located in Chapel Hill.
The response, which the group posted on its website, claims that charters have a harder time competing because they receive state and local funding that matches the per pupil amount spent by the county's public schools minus any capital or bonding money used for building. The League says that means the charters have about $1,000 per child less to work with than traditional public schools, so charter schools must dip into education dollars to pay the rent on the buildings they use to house students.
Many of the schools are also having financial problems, the league claims, because of special education expenses. Charters tend to attract a significant special education population, they say, and those students require very expensive services which are already available in traditional public schools. This places what The League of Charter Schools calls a "potentially fatal burden" on small charter schools. A small school can be faced with the choice of financial ruin or violation of special education laws. The League says the schools and the state need to work out a better revenue or resource sharing plan to stretch special education dollars further.
That may sound like a simple solution, but it's not. From the beginning, traditional educators have been worried that the charters would drain resources from the already cash-strapped public schools.
Jan Crotts, the executive director of the North Carolina Association of School Administrators says the migration of students from the public schools to charters can cause fiscal problems in small, rural school districts."For a large and growing district like Wake County, the opening of another charter may be a relief because there are so many students crowding into the system, but for a small, rural district, the loss of average daily membership funds caused by the opening of a charter can have a negative effect," said Crotts.
Charter advocates have little sympathy for rural districts.
"Be good enough not to have students leave your school," said Roger Gerber, director of the North Carolina League of Charter Schools.
But charters have a long way to go to prove that they are the best outlets for precious education dollars. For the 2000-2001 school year, 15 charters (19 percent) achieved exemplary growth in test scores, seven charters (9 percent) matched expected growth, 43 (55 percent) received no recognition and 13 (17 percent) were low performing. That compares poorly to traditional public schools, of which 24 percent achieved exemplary growth, 36 percent saw expected growth, 39 percent got no recognition and one percent were deemed low-performing.
Despite the disappointing test results, advocates say the schools need to be given more time to turn students' performance around. Many charter schools serve students who are already at high risk of academic failure, which makes it difficult to achieve high end-of-grade scores. But, the advocates say, they're making progress. They point out that for the 2000-2001 academic year, 53.6 percent of charter school fourth graders passed the state's writing test, up from 36.2 percent the previous year (compared to 68.8 percent for the state's public schools). For seventh graders, charter schools' passing rate increased from 55.2 percent to 62.8 percent, compared to 73.3 percent for public schools.
The Department of Public Instruction and NCCPPR are divided on whether charters do a better or worse job of serving African-American children. NCCPPR's study found an increase in the achievement gap between white and black students in charter schools compared to their peers in regular public schools. But the Department of Public Instruction's office of charter schools found when their academic performance in their first year at a charter is excluded, African-American students showed a greater academic growth in charters than in traditional schools.
Either way, legislators will likely have a tough decision to make about what to do with charter schools. The number one ranking school on the state's list of 10 Highest Performing Schools on end-of-grade tests for 2000-2001 was Magellan Charter in Wake County. Exploris Middle School, another Wake County charter, also ranked in the top 10. But six charter schools also ranked among the state's 10 Lowest Performing Schools.