A Judicious Overview of the Charter Movement: Authors Consider the Controversies and the Promise
2017; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1539-9664
Autores Tópico(s)School Choice and Performance
ResumoCharter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities by Chester E. Finn Jr., Bruno V. Manno, and Brandon L. Wright Harvard Education Press, 2016, $62; 270 pages. As reviewed by David Steiner [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Here a very useful, synoptic guide to the American charter-school sector upon its 25th anniversary. Charter Schools at the Crossroads begins with the first charter-school law (Minnesota, 1991) and chronicles the sectors growth to todays 6,800 schools serving 3 million students, or 6 percent of the K-12 public-school enrollment. The text replete with interesting facts, such as the number of rural charters in the nation (785), the percentage of charter schools that belong to national networks (40 percent), and a comparison of annual teacher turnover (18.4 percent in charters, 15.7 percent in district schools). Those who have encountered the delightfully acerbic animadversions of which Finn a master will be disappointed. This not the voice that once opined that teachers can be ignorance factories.... Why not get rid of the people who aren't getting the job done? Now president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Finn co-written the book with Bruno V. Manno, senior advisor to the Walton Family Foundation and emeritus trustee of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and Brandon Wright, who serves as the editorial director at the Fordham Institute. All of these authors and organizations can plainly be counted in the pro-charter camp, yet the book takes a balanced approach and a judicious tone throughout. The authors provide a mostly even-handed summary of the research that evaluates and compares charter-school performance to that of other public schools. They explain that the challenges for researchers are that the school effect must be disaggregated from family background, and that their methods must account for bias--the likelihood that children whose parents choose a charter school are already different from those whose parents do not. Few researchers would quibble with their methodological preference: When it comes to pupil achievement, assessment of gains over time (panel studies), rather than absolute levels at a specific point in time, superior. Their summary of the sector's academic outcomes, which draws heavily on a series of studies by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, likewise relatively uncontroversial: there a positive achievement effect for poor, nonwhite, urban students, but suburban and rural charters come up short, as do online charters, about which the authors duly report negative findings. All fair as far as it goes, although readers who want to dig into the controversies around selection bias, methodological research issues, or a final reckoning of impact will be disappointed. The critical literature from Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, the thinking from Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute on what those extra days of learning do or don't mean in terms of movement from one percentile of performance ranking to another--these and other such debates are simply passed over. Is it possible for an empirically oriented book, presumably designed for students of the contemporary education scene, to be too careful? Fifteen years ago, having judiciously reviewed the record and the criticisms of charter schools (Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education), Finn and Manno were willing to render a judgment, arguing then that schooling based on choice, autonomy, and accountability can undergird a new model of public education. In their current book, are assured that the charter-school model is here to stay, but that we cannot claim today that the word charter any more determinative than district when it comes to analyzing or explaining school performance. A few pages later, are told that the charter sector has advanced public education as a whole. …
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