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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.
