Michigan's state government recently approved an expansion of the number of charter schools in the state but only as long as they are high-performing schools. It was part of a political compromise needed so the state could qualify for federal education-innovation grants. But it was a quite different move from the usual charter movement calls for more charter schools. It was also a smart move on the part of the state's charter school players, who already have a larger "market penetration" than almost any other state. Here's a brief explanation of why the turn to a focus on quality matters:
Since the early 1990s, the strategy of creating charter schools to boost education system performance has evolved from a movement for public policy change and innovation into a large-scale field of practice involving thousands of organizations and millions of people. Still, the charter field is at an early stage of development: highly decentralized; pursuing many models and practices; without defining standards or norms. Meanwhile, policymakers, the media, and many charter proponents focus attention more on successful individual charter schools or the innovative operators of charter chains and less on the charter field’s collective strategic challenges and opportunities. During the past two decades, state laws, regulations, and financing for charters, as well as federal government supports, have become more established nationwide and the charter systems that emerged—authorizers, governing entities, and operators—have demonstrated their operational viability at substantial scale. Although charters have captured only a small share of the education market, these developments put the charter field on nearly equal footing with the traditional education system when many policymakers and parents of students consider their options.
Now the charter field faces a new and crucial strategic challenge: thanks to its successful evolution, the field must raise its level of performance—student and school achievement—to meet higher expectations and succeed in a highly competitive market. The field must rapidly generate many more high-performing schools.
Charter-school authorizers are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge, because they are situated between state policymakers and charter-school practitioners—so they engage with and link both policy and practice—and many operate at fairly large scale and have built management systems accordingly. However, authorizers have focused mainly on increasing the number of charters schools and ensuring their compliance with contracts and regulations. They have paid much less attention to improving the performance of schools and developing high-quality innovations. And authorizers have tended to work as “go-it-alone” entities rather than aggregating their resources to increase their leverage and impact on both policy and practice. |
