Arguments in favor of charter schools typically evoke the supposedly better learning outcomes for students, but thanks to a recent U.S. Department of Education determination that Pennsylvania must evaluate charter schools the same way it evaluates traditional public schools, new data is revealing that charter schools actually have worse learning outcomes for students than traditional public schools in Pennsylvania.
Charter schools receive tax-payer funds from local districts for each student, but despite that fact, they aren't subject to the same regulations and oversight that traditional public schools are subject to. According to Eleanor Chute of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (in an article brought to my attention by the great PA progressive policy website Third and State), charter schools do not have the same requirements to take competitive bids for supplies, to use students' grades as part of evaluating teacher performance, and, amazingly, only 75% of the teachers have to be certified to teach compared with the 100% required of traditional public schools. Because knowing how to teach can't be that important for being a teacher, right?
And that's not all. The same article says that while PA's auditor general is required to audit all 500 PA school districts every three years, the number of charter schools is growing so fast that the auditor general's office does not have the resources to keep up, and last year, it was estimated that only about one-third of PA charter schools have been audited. At the time, the PA auditor general also explicitly said that charter schools are receiving funds in excess of what it takes to run them, and that their oversight is insufficient and less stringent than that of traditional public schools.
Charter schools in Pennsylvania are also run with less democracy, both externally and internally. They do not have to have locally elected school boards consisting of and elected by people from the community that personally pay the taxes that fund the school. They don't have to have elected school boards at all. They're allowed to make their own rules for who will run the school and how they will be selected. So, no external democracy. In addition, most charter schools do not have teachers and other workers that are unionized; they can't band together for better facilities for themselves and their students or to fight for fair wages. So, no internal democracy either.
In early October of 2012, the Allentown Morning Call reported that, "Gov. Tom Corbett's education chief changed the PSSA testing rules in a way that makes it easier for charter schools to meet federal benchmarks than traditional public schools. Education Secretary Ron Tomalis' change, made without federal approval, might have skewed the results of the 2011-12 PSSA scores to make it appear charter schools were outperforming traditional public schools, according to a Morning Call review of publicly available test score data." Then, in late November, they reported that the U.S. Department of Education came down with a ruling that eliminated the preferential treatment of PA charter schools and said that PA must evaluate all schools the same way.
According to new reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, under the skewed rules, the Corbett administration was contending that 78 out of 156 PA charter schools, an even 50 percent, attained what is referred to as Adequate Yearly Progress. That is right on par with traditional public schools, and slightly better if you take out cyber charter schools that students attend through the Internet. However, once the skewed rules were barred by the U.S. Department of Education, a recalculation showed that the actual percentage of PA charter schools achieving AYP is just 30 percent, well below that of traditional public schools.
Just to be clear, even if it were true that charter schools are better, I would personally still oppose them. To me, having a lottery to allow in select students and leaving the rest in a traditional public school is not a viable education solution because it is structured to benefit only that select few rather than all students, and the goal of public education ought to be to benefit all students. Add to the equation this new data showing that charter school students have worse learning outcomes, and those concerned with the state of education throughout the commonwealth should be more focused than ever on education solutions that are designed to help all our students and not a select few.