The image above is from the website of East End Preparatory Academy, a successful Nashville charter school serving high numbers of low-income minority students. Kentucky charters may provide similar opportunities for some our most vulnerable students.
In 2017, the legislature passed a law making Kentucky the 44th state to allow the creation of charter schools, but did not approve a permanent mechanism by which education dollars could follow students to a charter if their parents select that option. The 2018 biennial budget passed last week (and, as of this writing, still awaiting Gov. Bevin's approval or veto) also fails to address this issue, leaving the future of Kentucky charter schools in doubt.
I wrote about this problem on my blog (which was then picked up as an op-ed for the statewide online newspaper Kentucky Today), and that generated a lot of online discussion, including with several former colleagues from my days as a district administrator. Some folks wanted to argue with me (or just condemn me), but many more posed thoughtful questions about charters and how they work. It became clear that many teachers, and many more ordinary Kentuckians, are largely unaware of what charter schools actually do, particularly under Kentucky's law. Their opinions, to the extent that they have any, are mostly shaped by the rhetoric and misinformation spread by professional educator groups which don't seek to inform others about the pros and cons of charter schools, but rather are dedicated to preventing Kentucky families from having such options.
I have written about this topic in numerous places on this blog and elsewhere, but in this post I'd like to condense all that information to provide an overview of what charter schools actually are, what they'd look like under Kentucky law, and especially to address the many legitimate questions and concerns educators and others raise about charters and their potential side effects. The specific statutes and regulations upon which this information is based are included in the note below.
What are charter schools?
Charter schools are public schools of choice. Families must choose a charter for their child; no one can be forced to attend, just as no one can be turned away. They may not charge tuition and, specifically under Kentucky law, they must take all comers, including students with disabilities. Charters are operated independently from local school districts which gives them a high degree of flexibility and capacity for innovation. In exchange for their autonomy, charters face a much higher degree of accountability. For one thing, they are entirely enrollment driven. If they cannot attract and retain students, they must close. Secondly, they face all the same testing, accountability, public safety, and civil rights rules as traditional public schools (TPS). Thirdly, they are governed by a performance contract, so that if they consistently fail to achieve certain student outcome targets, they may also be closed.
With 7,000 charter schools nationwide serving over 3 million students, there's no way to talk about a typical charter school, since they follow so many different models, instructional philosophies, and curricular emphases. But charter schools do tend to serve populations of students who have traditionally struggled in TPS, enrolling higher percentages of minority students, students of poverty, and students who perform lower on standardized assessments. I'll discuss the good results of many charter schools, especially in urban areas, below, but charter principals like Jim Lacrone of East End Preparatory Academy in Nashville (which I profiled here) attribute the success of charter schools to their independence from bureaucracy and many of the regulations that stifle innovation, individualization, and rapid change in TPS.
How do charter schools perform in terms of student achievement?
Most educators acknowledge that student test scores are a fairly limited measure of what students have learned. Nevertheless, they represent an important metric for assessing overall progress of students in large groups. Large scale analyses of student achievement comparing all charter schools to all traditional public schools (TPS) do not reveal many differences. Overall, charters and TPS perform about the same. This is actually an encouraging result for charters given that they typically receive lower per pupil funding than TPS while enrolling higher percentages of traditionally at-risk students. But deeper analysis reveals that Black and Hispanic students and students of poverty tend to outperform their peers who attend TPS, especially in urban areas and particularly when students attend a charter school for more than one year (see the series of charter school research studies conducted by CREDO at Stanford University over a number of years).
There is no doubt that parental involvement plays some role in these effects. But research conducted in Boston, New York, and also in nationwide samples comparing students who won lotteries to attend a charter school (see how lotteries work below) versus students who applied but did not win a lottery (and therefore remained at a TPS) provide a rough way to control for this variable. And these studies also confirm that charter students, especially urban students of poverty, tend to do better overall than their TPS peers.
Of course some charter schools will struggle with student achievement outcomes, just like traditional public schools, while others will be successful. The same goes for individual students. These research studies only confirm general trends for large groups. And I believe there are good reasons to support school choice policies like charter schools, even if we could find no large-scale differences in student test score results. Please contact me for a full list of research references on charter school effects if you'd like to know more.
Why should we have charter schools in Kentucky?
The arguments for school choice are complex and nuanced. I've addressed this question at greater length in a separate post, which I recommend to readers. But to summarize that post, I believe we should provide options like charter schools for Kentucky families for three reasons. First, despite the steady educational progress we've made as a state, the current structures of educational delivery are insufficient to make the kinds of rapid improvements our current economic and cultural situation requires, especially in terms of accelerating outcomes for historically under-achieving groups. There are no single "magic bullet" solutions that will fix all our educational problems. Certainly there is little evidence that simply increasing education funding alone will bring the kinds of rapid results we need. Likewise, there is no reason to assume that educational choice by itself will reverse generations-long trends in low educational achievement. But given the positive evidence for charter schools described above, we would be foolish not to include educational choice as one improvement strategy, among many others.
The final argument for school choice requires us to confront how differently we have treated education from most other highly individualized public services (like health care and higher education), all of which typically afford beneficiaries a choice of provider. It is inconsistent logically, practically, and ethically to deny low-income families such choices, especially when they get to make provider choices for most other personal public services, and doubly so when affluent families face no such restrictions. Again, I refer readers to this post for a more thorough discussion of these arguments.
How will charter schools be created in Kentucky?
Under Kentucky law, a group of parents, teachers, community leaders, or civic groups could apply to open a charter school. They must organize as a non-profit entity and may not be a religiously sectarian group, nor can they operate a charter school as a religious entity or with a religious identity. In other words, charter schools are as strictly secular and non-religious as traditional public schools (TPS). The group must submit a lengthy application, described under 701 KAR 8:010, describing how they intend to staff and operate the school, the kinds of students they hope to serve, the instructional vision of the school, and providing evidence that there is sufficient need for a charter school in the community and that as a group they have the expertise financially, operationally, and instructionally to be successful.
Applications will be submitted to an "authorizer," which under Kentucky law is the local school district where the charter school would be located. There are also provisions by which the mayors of Lexington and Louisville (Kentucky's two largest cities) may also serve as authorizers, if they request this status. As of the date of this writing, neither mayor has made such a request. The board of the local school district will review applications and make a determination about approval of the charter school on its merits (boards may not reject an application simply because they do not want a charter in their district). There is an appeals process involving the Kentucky Board of Education (where, by disclosure, I serve as a member) if an application is rejected. The KBE has options by which it may either uphold a rejected appeal, require an authorizer to reconsider an application, or order an authorizer to approve an application.
If a charter school application is approved, the charter school board of directors enters a 5-year contractual relationship with the authorizer stipulating its performance goals and many of the operational features outlined in the application. This contract (or charter, from which such schools get their name) and the performance outcomes of the school's students are monitored and supervised by the authorizer, who may bring action against the charter school if it fails to meet terms of its contract. The contract is subject to renewal every 5 years and the authorizer makes a decision about renewal based on the school's performance under its existing contract.
There are also provisions within the law that allow parents to petition to convert an existing traditional public school (TPS) to charter status, with local district board of education approval. Local districts may also request the submission of charter school applications. A district might do this in order to broaden the scope of services it currently provides students under existing school models.
We have no way of knowing at this point how many charter schools will be initiated in Kentucky, how many will be approved, or where they will be located. But we know from the experience of other states that, with a few exceptions in rural or metropolitan areas, most charters will probably cluster in larger urban regions where there is a higher demand for a wide diversity of education options.
How will students by enrolled in charter schools?
If a charter school is approved to open, students who live in the same district may apply for admission (there are also provisions in the law that allow groups of contiguous districts to combine and authorize charters that serve students from a wider geographic area). Under Kentucky law and regulation, charter schools must admit all applicants unless applications exceed the school's enrollment capacity (to be outlined in its application and charter; many charters open with a multi-year start up plan, adding one grade per year until it reaches its intended scope of grades).
If a charter school receives more applications than its enrollment capacity, it must hold an open lottery to randomly identify which students will be admitted. Students not selected in the lottery will then be drawn randomly and placed on a waiting list, and invited to enroll in that order if space becomes available. This process ensures that charter schools may not selectively pick certain students for enrollment and that if students leave, they may not be replaced in a selective way that would somehow advantage the charter school.
What are other charter school rules under Kentucky law?
Charter schools in Kentucky must employ teachers fully certified for the grades and subjects they teach. Charter teachers will participate in the Kentucky Teacher Retirement System (KTRS) and will bring their pension plan and years of service with them to the charter school if they've been previously employed in a Kentucky school. However, charter schools may establish their own salary schedules and employment terms and contracts.
Charter schools must offer free or reduced-price lunch to all students who are eligible and must provide special education services for qualified students. All their operations are subject to the same open meetings and records requirements as TPS. Fully online charters (sometimes called "virtual schools," some of which have had quality problems in other states) are forbidden in Kentucky.
Charter schools may offer sports and extra-curricular opportunities. If schools do not offer extra-curricular activities then charter students are eligible to participate in those activities at the public school to which they would normally be assigned. However, if a charter school does provide any sport sanctioned by the Kentucky High School Athletics Association (KHSAA), students may not participate in any KHSAA activity at any other school.
Charter schools must arrange for their own facilities. Federal and private grants are sometimes available to assist charter schools with start up costs. Local school districts will transport charter school students to their charter school, or if that proves burdensome or the district doesn't want that entanglement, they may transfer per pupil transportation dollars to the charter school based on its enrollment, which can then arrange its own student transportation using those funds.
How will charters be funded and how will this affect traditional public schools?
Typically, some portion of education dollars allotted for the education of each student would follow a student to his/her charter school when admitted and enrolled. In most states this allotment is considerably less than the per pupil amount spent on TPS. Nevertheless, this is how charter schools must fund their operations, usually along with some degree of private fund-raising. Tuition may not be charged.
With the failure of the state legislature to prescribe such a process, it is unclear right now how this will work in Kentucky (making it more unlikely that aspiring charter schools will apply to open and harder for local districts to determine an applicant's financial sustainability - and thus more likely to deny an application).
Some opponents claim charter schools "drain money" from traditional public schools. They want to forbid charter schools from opening because if a family selects a charter for their child, education dollars will flow with the child to his or her new school, leaving less money in their assigned district school. Notice this flow of money is the effect of the parent's choice. Parents could (and most will) choose to keep their children in an assigned district school, meaning education dollars will (continue to) flow there instead. The only way to oppose giving families (who are inevitably more low-income and less white) this option is to say you value the dollars for their assigned public school more than you value the potential opportunities giving them a choice would provide (understanding that affluent families already have such choices and always will).
I've written about this funding argument at greater length here and here. People have become so conditioned to the idea that education dollars are for specific schools, rather than for the students, they struggle to imagine a scenario where anybody can (or should) have choices and take for granted how families with some resources make such choices every day (see more about the paradigm shift school choice presents here). Instead of funding schools, and then dictating to poor and middle-class families where their children must attend, school choice is based on the idea that education dollars are for students, who should then have some choice in which school they use those education dollars (just like low-income students and veterans use Pell grants or the GI Bill to choose a college; just like Medicare and Medicaid patients choose a doctor or hospital). The range of those choices will vary from one community to the next, but the bottom line is we don't deliberately tell poor people they shall have no options.
Furthermore, for school choice to work, we need generous education funding levels. Low funding makes it harder for anybody to successfully operate a school, whether charter or TPS. Let's stop arguing about whether we should have more education spending or school choice and start arguing, as I have consistently tried to do, for both, understanding that while both are good, neither is, by itself, the perfect cure-all for everything that ails education.
How do we ensure charter schools provide high quality learning?
Opponents sometimes point to unflattering stories from other states about charter schools engaging in unseemly tactics to influence their enrollment process or student achievement results, or shady financial practices, or a lack of transparency in operations. Of course, you can find isolated examples of unethical conduct in traditional public schools too. That's a problem with human nature, not with charter schools.
Charter laws differ widely across the U.S. and provide varying levels of oversight and accountability. Kentucky's law and regulatory framework provide what is possibly the most rigorous regime of charter school oversight and quality control in the nation. I believe it is probably the most district-friendly charter law in the country in that local school boards are the key players in charter school authorization. In fact, I worry that Kentucky's system actually presents too many obstacles to new charter start ups and too many opportunities for districts to unfairly shut them out. But this should be reassuring to those who worry about negative consequences from charter schools.
We cannot guarantee every charter will succeed, just as we can't guarantee success for every TPS either. And while charter schools help address some existing problems, they present others. If a charter school has to close, that creates serious disruptions for families and schools, of course. If a charter school is approved in a community, families need information about their new choices, school districts need training and support for authorizing, etc. There are no perfect policy frameworks for anything, only pros and cons and trade-offs that must be weighed.
I believe the potential benefits of school choice are worth the new policy challenges they present, and I believe we can meet those challenges without hurting traditional public schools for the families who continue to select that option for their children (and the evidence shows that's the choice the vast majority of families will continue to make in the vast majority of communities). My entire life's work is about education, meaning the search for high-quality learning experiences for every student in every school. Charter schools are one part of a many-pieced puzzle and I hope they will get more consideration from other dedicated, student-oriented educators as well.
Note: The information about charter schools in Kentucky comes from KRS 160.1590, 160.1591, 160.1592, 160.1593, 160.1594, 160.1595, 160.1596, 160.1597, 160.1598, and 160.1599; also see regulations 701 KAR 8:010, 8:020, 8:030, and 8:040.
Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I have served as a member since 2016).
Related posts:
- Lawmakers fail Kentucky families on school choice
- Is education in Kentucky "under attack?"
- Does giving parents education options "divert money" from schools?
- Why the education establishment feels so deeply threatened by school choice
- A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III.
- Charter schools and the profit question
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