Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony

April 9, 1997, Wednesday

SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 11191 words

HEADLINE: TESTIMONY April 09, 1997 AMY STUART WELLS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES (UCLA) HOUSE ECONOMIC AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES EARLY CHILDHOOD, YOUTH AND FAMILIES CHARTER SCHOOLS

BODY: STATEMENT OF AMY STUART WELLS

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES (UCLA)

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies

Moore Hall

405 Hilgard Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90095

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

HEARING ON CHARTER SCHOOLS

April 9, 1997 at 10:00 a.m.

Room 2175 Rayburn House Office Building

My name is Amy Stuart Wells, and I am an associate professor of educational policy at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). My area of expertise is in understanding the effect of educational policy on racial inequality, and my research has examined such policies as school desegregation, school choice plans. and tracking within racially mixed schools. Currently, I am directing the UCLA Charter School Project -- a two-year study of charter schools in ten school districts in California funded by the Ford Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are also conducting an evaluation of the National Education Association's Charter School Initiative in six states. To the best of my knowledge, I have not received any federal money via contract, subgrant or subcontract within the last three years.

We are still in the data collection phase of our study at UCLA so my testimony today will focus less on specific research fundings and more on what I see as the political roots of charter schools and how these roots relate to emerging issues. In particular, I will focus on the potential opportunities and threats of this reform as they relate to the educational opportunities of the most disadvantaged students. I will also discuss what role I think the federal government should play in charter school reform.

Charter School Reform: An Overview

In the last six years, 25 states have passed charter school legislation, opening the door for parents, educators, and students to develop more independent and innovative schools that are publicly funded but not government run. Demand for such freedom from the state-run public educational system has lead to the creation of about 450 charter schools nationwide.

The perceived benefit of charter school legislation is that it permits schools to operate autonomously from state and local regulations while receiving tax dollars. usually equivalent to the average cost per student in the district in which they are located. In exchange for their autonomy, charter schools are to be held accountable to the charter granting agency, usually a school district, for proposed student outcomes.

The expectation many policymakers hold for charier schools is that in a deregulated environment, educators will be more effective at meeting the needs of their students, which will lead to improved student achievement. Also, because charter schools are supposed to be innovative, "break the mold" schools that can draw students from anywhere in their district or state, policymakers argue that they will provide parents and students with more educational choices.

These policy assumptions resonate with long-held American beliefs about liberty and individualism and thus contribute to the strong bi-partisan support for charter schools across the country (Pipho, 1993). But the next few years promise to bring political struggles over the principles guiding charter school reform as we learn more about what charter school reform looks like within divergent states and communities across the country.

I am arguing today that the Federal government should pay special attention to the disparities across communities engaged in charter school reform and play an active role in targeting resources and support services toward those students who have traditionally been least well served by the regular public education system.

Diverse Historical Roots

Libertarians in Arizona, members of the religious right in Colorado. home schoolers in California, progressive educators in Minnesota, Afrocentfic educators in D.C., and teachers' union activists in Connecticut are all drawn to charter school reform and the independence it promises from the state-run schools.

Charter school reform delivers autonomy to people choosing to design and run unconventional schools, but does not bound them to any shared set of principles regarding which conventions they shun or why. Some want to use their new-found freedom to create quasi-private schools that compete with public schools. Others are committed to developing "public" charter schools that help revitalize the government-run education system. This range of purposes stems from the divergent historical roots of the charter school movement.

Over the last 40 years. advocates as dissimilar as civil rights leaders. black separatists, progressive or free school educators and conservative free-market economists have argued for various types of school choice policies, including alternative schools. magnet schools, voluntary transfer and open enrollment plans, and tuition voucher programs allowing students to spend public money at private schools (see Henig. 1994; Wells, 1993). Members of these groups and many others have been 'instrumental in bringing about charter school reform.

For instance, many charter schools would not exist today had it not been for progressive educators who are creating alternative public schools for students who have experienced academic failure, poverty, homelessness, chemical dependency, delinquent behavior, truancy, and physical or sexual abuse.

The chartering concept was also broadly advocated in the 1980s by teachers union leader Albert Shanker after he read a report by Ray Budde, an educator who saw charter schools as a way to support the efforts of innovative teachers. Shanker hoped that charter schools would release teachers from the "obligations that follow particular sets of bureaucratic routines" (Shanker, 1996).

Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration has consistently supported charter schools. The President cited these new school in his 1996 re-election campaign as an important aspect of his education policy to allow schools more autonomy and flexibility while holding them accountable to high academic standards.

Yet, at the same time, charter schools grew from more conservative roots. with some early advocates inspired by the British "grant-maintained" schools, which operate on a grant from the national government. These schools, autonomous from the mostly Labour-controlled Local Education Authorities. were part of the Thatcher government's agenda to infuse more deregulation and competition into the public system. and provide schools greater latitude in controlling who they admit (Whitte. 1996).

While in the past these different political players and the varied policies they supported were fairly distinct, charter school reform has blended their distinctions. This blending of different political and philosophical perspectives plays out differently in the various states across the country, leading to state charter school legislation that varies along several dimensions, including which agencies are authorized to grant charters. In more than half of the states, for instance, charters are granted by local school boards only; in other states they can also be granted by universities and state departments of education (Millot, 1994).

Charter laws also vary in terms of who can organize and write a charter proposal and whether teachers and/or parents must vote to support the charter before it can be approved. But in most states, educators and/or parents write the proposals, stipulating curriculum, assessment, teacher rights, and goals for student outcomes in their charter school. Yet in some states, such as Massachusetts, non- or for-profit organizations from outside the regular educational system can apply for charters to start schools.

Most charter school laws enable existing public schools to apply for charters and, in some states, allow groups of parents, educators, or entrepreneurs to start new charter schools. Charters are granted to schools for specific periods of time, usually about five years, after which granting agencies review the school's progress against its projected goals and decide whether to renew the charter or contract

In all states, the laws stipulate that charter schools must be non-sectarian, may not charge tuition, and according to the U.S. Constitution, as public schools, are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity. national origin, religion or gender. Still, most of the states' statutes do not specifically prohibit charter schools from instituting admissions requirements based upon such criteria as students prior achievement, expressed interest in the charter school theme, or parent involvement. While several of the state laws stipulate that charter schools' enrollment should reflect the racial make up of the district as a whole, in half of the states there is no provision for charter schools to transport students from other neighborhoods. Only one state, Kansas, stipulates in its charter school legislation that students enrolled in these autonomous schools should roughly reflect the social-class composition of the district (Millot, 1994).

The rush among state legislatures to pass charter school legislation, coupled with several unaddressed access and equity issues embedded in these new policies, raises important questions, especially whether educational opportunities be equitably distributed under charter schools in different communities. Instead of searching for the answer to the question of whether charter school policy "works," our study at UCLA is asking who is most affected by this reform, in what way, and why. Our goal is to illustrate both the opportunities and threats for children, particularly disadvantaged children, of charter school reform. Our concern is that while the charter school movement has remained broad enough to accommodate people with divergent political perspectives, it is increasingly defined as a reform more grounded in efficiency than equity, in market forces and competition between schools as opposed to collaboration among them.

Opportunities and Threats of Charter School Reform

Cutting across the divergent political and historical roots of charter school reform are two dominant themes in current educational policy discourse, namely, the market metaphor for school improvement and the demand for greater local control of schools. In this way, charter schools are part of a broader wave of decentralization and devolution of educational governance to the school level.

The U.S. public education system has been, throughout most of its 150-year history, a fairly decentralized enterprise with a great deal of power and control vested in local communities. Yet during two particular periods -- the Progressive Era of the first half of this century and the Civil Rights Era, roughly from the mid- 1950s to the mid-70s -- a shift toward greater centralization of educational governance Occurred, leading to an Overall trend in the last 60 years toward less local control (Tyack, 1990).

During the Progressive Era, trained educational professionals began to wrestle control of the local schools and their districts from lay people, in part to apply the practices of scientific management, which grew out of the industrial revolution, to the schools. During this era, schools were modeled, to a large extent, after factories. and the search for educational efficiency within "the one best system" had begun (Tyack, 1974).

The Civil Rights Era brought a new and different wave of centralization to the educational system, as lawyers and advocates called upon the federal government to force local educators to provide equal educational opportunities to poor and minority students. This movement led to federal court rulings and legislation designed to assure that powerful Political actors at the school and district level were impeded from systematically denying African-American students, in Particular, educational opportunities. U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 strengthened the role of the federal government in assuring equal protection and thus denied local educators, parents, and politicians their "rights" to segregate and discriminate against black children. Through this new federal presence, the Civil Rights Era brought about greater centralization of educational governance in the name of democratic principles such as liberty and justice (Plank & Boyd, 1994; Lewis & Nakagawa, 1995).

Yet by the late 1960s and into the 70s, when the federal government was attempting to assure that some of the rights of African Americans were protected, scattered grass-roots coalitions, mainly in northern urban communities, were demanding greater community control of the schools in their neighborhoods. These community control movements, leveled against school boards and district administrators who were seen as unresponsive to the needs of low- income and minority students, led to fragmented centralization as local school districts were under attack from two sides -- the federal government and community coalitions. Both efforts, in most cases, focused on empowering those who had traditionally been disenfranchised from the political power structure (Lyke, 1970; Tyack and Hansot, 1982).

This fragmented centralization mirrored other War on Poverty efforts of that era as the government initiated policies promoting maximum feasible participation of low-income community members in federally funded programs such as Head Start and Community Action Programs. In this way, the federal government used public policy and tax dollars to try and increase the political and economic power within poor, urban communities (Lewis and Nakagawa, 1995). Rather than anti-government in nature, this movement relied upon the federal government to fight discriminatory practices through the courts and redistribute resources and opportunities by targeting poor urban and mostly African American communities with funded work and job training programs run by and employing people who lived there.

The political philosophy that legitimized the federal government's role in assuring community control shifted dramatically in the 1980s. In fact, much of the current political push for decentralization of the educational system and other government-run institutions is rooted in the early years of the Reagan presidency. According to Henig (1994), the two broadest unifying themes of the Reagan administration were privatization and New Federalism. The goals of privatization were to shrink the size of the government at all levels and to increase reliance on market forces, volunteerism. and individual demands to achieve social ends. The goal of New Federalism was to shift power from the national government to the state and ultimately the local level, thus returning greater power and control to local governments and their constituents while getting big government out of their lives (p. 84).

Similarly, in his book Chain Reaction. Edsall (1991) argues that Reagan's political popularity and success was due in large part to his ability to convince thousands of white working-class voters that the federal government had gone too far in its efforts to protect the rights of minorities, and later working women and gays, becoming far too large, bureaucratic and intrusive in the process. For many of these Reagan Democrats, as they came to be known, the federal government and the "welfare state" it had become symbolized what is wrong with this country - the infringement upon the rights and freedoms of one group of individuals for the advancement of another. Within this anti- government framework, the dual themes of privatization, which translates into the market metaphor for education, and demand of greater local control go hand in hand.

Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between those who Call for greater local control from a Reagan-era New Federalism perspective and the more liberal view of community control as a form of empowerment in the 60s The first standpoint is generally taken by those who already have social, economic and political power and are thus resentful of the government's infringement on their right to exercise that Power. Those who subscribe to the second view are generally people who have little power to begin with and thus seek public policies that will make local control more meaningful to them through the redistribution of resources.

The Market Metaphor Educational Reform: Deregulation and Privatization

In fact, since the 1950s theorists such as Milton Friedman have argued that the laws of the free market are better regulators of the educational system than the government. The well-known by John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets and America's Schools (1990), supported this view, stating that market forces that respond to the demands of individual consumers are far more effective and thus Preferable to democratic and more pluralistic forms of governance for our nation's schools. "The schools' most fundamental problems are rooted in the institutions of democratic control by which they are governed" (P. 216).

Chubb and Moe's central focus on the individualized demands of consumers and the ability of the market to respond to them has molded the market metaphor into a compelling argument for privatization of the educational system. A shift to decentralize and privatize schools will, according to this metaphor, force them to compete for clients. In such a deregulated system, educators must become better at delivering their services or face going out of business. The implication is that professional educators should become very narrowly focused on the immediate requests of their clientele and not on broader needs or demands of the larger society. This shift should according to Chubb and Moe, lead to a more effective and efficient -- i.e. less expensive - educational system. The privatization of other formerly government-run public services, such as garbage collection and street repair, are held up as examples of the success of this metaphor (Henig, 1994; Handler, 1996).

This educational free-market theory or market metaphor for school improvement reflects what has been the dominant reform ideology in both the U.S. and the U.K. for nearly 15 years, with more recent impact in countries such as Australia (Hellawell, 1992; Kenway et. al., 1993). But researchers and policy analysts have begun to question the applicability of this economic metaphor to non-profit, public institutions such as schools (see Willms & Echols, 1993; Kenway et. al., 1993; Lee & Bryk, 1993).

Critics, for instance, argue that the education of our nation's children calls for very different types of government and institutional arrangements than other state-provided services such as the collection of garbage. These critics also note that the untested promises of privatization and competitive market models-- i.e. greater efficiency and effectiveness in the educational system -- would be realized, if at all, only at a cost to our society as a whole. If individual schools and communities are able to pull out of the public system and become more like private institutions (even as they continue to be supported by public funds), then the larger public has lost its voice in helping to define the future of our society (Henig, 1994). According to Handler (1996). "privatization involves a shift from public action to private concerns, from the public to the private sphere... it calls into question the need or capacity for collective action" (p.11).

Furthermore, skeptics of the free market as a panacea for the ills of public institutions argue that not only does our democratic society as a whole stand to suffer under such shifts, but that some of members of that society will suffer more than others. According to Handler (1996), privatization shifts power to those who can more readily exercise power in the market. For instance, people with the most private resources fare better in a competitive market situation than those who have few resources to bring to the exchange process (Wells, 1993). Clearly, there is no room for the redistributive role of the government in the market metaphor.

Much of charter schools' popularity and appeal derives from the fact that these autonomous schools of choice more strongly resemble competitive, deregulated institutions than other publicly funded schools. Because charter school policy is not targeted specifically to help schools serving low-income communities improve, it is important to consider which communities benefit the most from charter school reform. For instance, do educators and parents with the most resources -- money, time, educational background, etc. -- stand to reap the greatest rewards from the charter school movement? Are charter schools that are being founded in "inner-city" neighborhoods started by community members or by entrepreneurs from outside these communities? It is important to learn whether low-income communities are truly empowered via market-driven policies.

A related concern is that charter schools, in their attempts to distinguish themselves in the educational market, will become increasingly competitive within their local community -- that is drawing in the highest-achieving students from their nearby public school. Competitiveness among educational institutions, as is illustrated in the higher education system, translates into competition for the most desirable and most successful students (Astin, 1992).

When they serve those students who have traditionally not been well-served by the public system, charter schools may appear "emancipatory" in their rejection of class- and race-based narratives of schooling. Despite their emancipatory allure, the overall result of this deregulated educational market may be greater differentiation of access to broader opportunities along the lines of social class, race, ethnicity and handicaps. Indeed. research in other countries has shown that these "quasi-market" educational systems emphasizing competition, parental choice and school autonomy may help create a handful of inner-city schools that are more directly focused on the needs of disadvantaged students, but that they do so within a context of greater inequality which seems to overall further "disadvantage the disadvantaged" (Whitty, 1996b). The danger of the market metaphor as the driving force for educational reform, is that markets respond more directly to the needs of those with economic power.

Local Control: Hopes and Fears of New Federalism

But it is important to realize that the market metaphor is not the only metaphor driving charter school reform. The demand for more local control of schools is also significant. The most recent call for greater local control in education reflects, in part, a backlash against past government efforts to level the playing field through policies that create equal access -- and sometimes equal outcomes -- for members of disadvantaged groups. Such redistributive policies, according to Edsall (1991), require government action to "forcibly redistribute private and public goods goods ranging, on the one hand, from jobs to education to housing, and extending, on the other, to valued intangibles such as cultural authority, prestige, and social space..." (p. 7) According to Plank and Boyd (1994), many of the educational policy changes in the last 40 years have been aimed at trying to overcome inequality: "In nearly all instances, the interventions of courts or federal authorities in support of minority demands was sought to overcome the Indifference or opposition of local communities to their Minority members" (p. 269).

Historically, the call for local control has been a response to this federal role. For instance, in the 50s and 60s the call usually came from white southerners who strongly resisted the federal government's effort to desegregate their schools or to assure blacks the right to vote. Since that time the relationship between local control and the constitutionally guaranteed nights of blacks and other disenfranchised groups has been suspect as the federal government has period' ally used it power push for greater access and equity (Orfield, 1988, Plank & Boyd, 1994).

Yet, at the same time. poor parents of color who Live in the inner-city are vocalizing their demands for greater local control of schools as a pathway to community empowerment. This "empower the poor" argument harkens back to the community control movement of the 60s. Today, however, there is, obviously, no simultaneous push for a strong civil rights enforcement role for the federal government as their was during the War on Poverty era. Still, present-day advocates of local control in education proclaim that greater decentralization will allow poor communities to take their schools back from the unresponsive and oppressive educational bureaucracies and thus become politically empowered to reshape their schools to better meet the needs of their children (Lewis & Nakagawa, 1995).

But the history of education policy in the United States makes critics of New Federalism skeptical that empowerment of poor people will occur simply through decentralization. Historians have noted that regulation in American education has usually been aimed at correcting serious inequities such as segregation of African-American students or neglect of disabled, immigrant and limited-English-speaking children (Wise, 1979; Guthrie, 1996). Wholesale deregulation has the potential of reintroducing social injustices if schools are controlled locally by political groups that do not choose to serve students with special needs or those who are politically disenfranchised and thus discriminated against (Tyack, 1990). According to Plank and Boyd (1994), "The withdrawal of federal or judicial supervision of policies aimed at improving the relative standing of minorities, in these and other instances, might lead to the reassertion of majority control and the reversal of policies that favor minority interests" (p. 269).

Others see New Federalism as a politically safe way for the federal and state politicians to cut budgets while decentralizing authority, control and costs to the local level. The move toward more federal block grants and away from categorical funding for states is one method of decentralizing decision making about how the money is spent. But it also leaves state and local governments with greater responsibilities and the same or less funding. Thus, "the Federal Government continues to mandate state programs, and states continue to mandate county and local programs, but without sufficient funding" (Handler. 1996, p. 2).

Lewis and Nakagawa (1995), in their research on the five cities undergoing various forms of decentralization with no additional resources. found that while low-income parents and community members are now "at the table," so to speak, when important decisions are made, they almost always defer to the authority of the educational professionals.

We found that the reform shifts merely the appearance of control to the new participants; that it ensures that the balance of information power stays firmly with the traditional elites. and that it does not guarantee an effective hearing for a multitude of outside voices but rather, transforms those outsiders into mere bureaucratic operatives... (Lewis and Nakagawa. 1995, p. 168).

Resources appear to be an important factor in effects to empower low-income parents and communities through decentralization. In the 1960s and 70s, for instance, community control models in low-income black communities, in particular, often failed in part because of inadequate funding (Fantini and Gittell, 1973). According to Cohen (1990):

If decentralization is to work. the schools and neighborhoods most sorely in need of improvement will need a major, long-term infusion of new political and organizational resources. Lacking that, some opportunities will languish, and others will be seized by existing political agencies Those agencies that already have power will accumulate more. This too has happened before... (p. 366).

In fact, the history of the community control movement of 30 years ago offers some interesting and important lessons -- not only regarding resources but also empowerment -- that should inform the current movement toward decentralization. Reformers of that era noted that "decentralization in and of itself is only an administrative device, a reaction to the inefficiency and unreality of a massive bureaucracy. It does not necessarily result in a more responsive system or one in which the community has a determining voice" (Fantini, Gittell, & Magat, 1970, p. 97- 98). Nor does decentralization alone necessarily force educators to focus on their failure in dealing with the poor, and more particularly, with black children (Fein, 1970, p. 85).

Decentralization via charter school reform promises to create a greater degree of local control in those schools and neighborhoods that apply for charters. But what is not clear is who will be empowered or better served as a result of this local control. Charter schools are in essence unfunded mandates, and in most states there is little or no start-up money available to help educators and parents who want to write a proposal and- create an innovative school program. When federal or state start- up funds are available, they are not necessarily targeted towards those with the fewest resources. Thus, communities with private resources to supplement the pupil funding that charter schools receive -- which, in some cases is ' less than what regular public schools receive -- may well be at an advantage when it comes to designing and implementing a "break the mold" school. Charter schools in poorer communities may be at greater risk of going bankrupt or providing less innovation as they struggle to stay afloat.

Early Lessons from the Field

Charter school advocates have noted in an analysis of aggregate data on charter schools in six states that overall. these schools are serving a higher percentage of nonwhite to white students, given that African-American, Latino, Asian, and Native American students comprise 31 percent of all students in public schools and 40 percent of those enrolled in charter schools (Finn. Bierlein, and Manno, 1996). The authors did not, however, break this data down by individual state, district or school. Nor do they provide any data regarding racial or ethnic segregation across schools.

Given that this research team studied less than a tenth of all the charter schools in the nation and were not able to say anything definitive about their educational effectiveness, their proclamation may sound a bit premature. In fact, solid data on the impact of charter schools on student learning and achievement is not yet available, although a large-scale study funded by the federal government should provide some insight in this area in the next few years.

Still, any research on charter school effectiveness will be marred by the fact that there is no systematic base-line data on the academic achievement of students before they enrolled in charter schools. Furthermore, most of the new state-level assessment programs are in such a state disarray at the moment, that meaningful results for charter and non-charter schools alike are hard to come by.

Based on our preliminary data collection, I suspect that, like the regular public schools, the quality of the learning and instruction 'in charier schools runs the gamut. Some are outstanding 'institutions that challenge students to do their very best work (however that may be defined within each particular school). Others offer learning environments that are not much, if at all, better than the worst regular public or private schools.

But the fundamental questions that Finn, Manno and Bierlein (1996) fail to ask is how are meaningful learning experiences 'in charter schools dispersed across various communities. How do the options for poor students compare with those of students in wealthy communities? And what new or profound opportunities are the most disadvantaged students exposed to as a result of charter school reform?

In fact, Finn et. al.'s (1996) Hudson report only addresses equity issues in its conclusion that "students attending charter schools are diverse," a full 63 percent of the students are "minority group members" and 55 percent are poor. Using data from just 34 charter schools, some of which were chosen specifically to include schools serving at-risk populations in their sample, Finn and colleagues try to dispel concerns that charter schools cream off the ablest students from the regular schools.

Again, sufficient data about the racial make up of students in charter versus noncharter schools across the country is not yet available. A study by Lopez (1997) shows that in California, there is no significant correlation between the type of school district -- urban versus suburban -- and the number of charter schools within that district although both urban and suburban districts tended to have more charter schools than did rural districts.

Still, it is reasonable to assume that the percentage of non-white students is high given the demand for school-level autonomy in large urban districts, where many African/American, Latino and Asian students go to school. But an aggregated percentage of nonwhite students in all charter schools across the country is not the central equity question to be asked. Rather, more significant data needs to be collected examining how isolated poor and non-white students are within certain charter schools and comparing resources and curriculum available in these versus other charter schools in wealthier areas.

As researchers in a recent report on charter school in Minnesota note (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1996), starting new schools is very hard work, and the lack of resources, difficulties in balancing planning and implementation and outside pressures are a fact of life.

Instead of focusing on the differences in educational opportunities available across charter school sites, Finn and other charter school advocates have developed a rating system for "strong" versus "weak" state charter school laws based solely on the degree of autonomy from regulation or oversight granted to the schools. Under this rubric, strong laws are those that authorize agencies other than the local school boards to grant charters, provide all charter schools automatic exemptions from most state laws and local policies, allow any individuals -- not just certified educators or parents -- to start charter schools, permit private schools to convert into publicly-funded charter schools, have no or very high limits on the number of charter schools that can be created, and guarantee that charter schools have complete fiscal autonomy and thus total control over the public funds generated by their student count.

The central argument is that in states with statutes not including these provisions, few charter schools will be started. This assertion is discredited by the experience in California, where charters are granted through the local school boards, charter schools cannot be started without teacher's approval, private schools need not apply, and most charters do not have complete fiscal autonomy. Despite all these so-called "weaknesses" in its law, California has about 125 charter schools, second only to Arizona with 164 in the total number of charters granted per state.

Potential Federal Role in charter School Reform

While the bulk of federal education legislation that passed in the 60s and 70s was designed to assure that certain categories of poorly served students -- e.g. low-income, minority, handicapped and non-English speaking students -- had access to educational services, clearly many educators and parents have become frustrated with the rigidity of some of these programs, even as recent revisions of federal regulations have made school level innovation easier.

Efforts to allow educators more flexibility in how they serve students should not lead to an abandonment of the basic redistributive principles that created these programs. Rather. those very principles must be part of the current policy debate about charter schools. Such a debate would make the one- dimensional discussion of charter school autonomy more problematic and force hard questions about how federal and state policymakers can assure that the most disadvantaged students are well-served.

Several key equity issues regarding charter school reform should be explored. For instance, many who work in urban or rural schools in poor communities recognize the existing inequalities in our society and have a keen sense of what this means to people attempting to start charter schools. A strong argument could and should be made at the federal level for charter school reform to include some redistributive element that would help skew the benefits of these laws in favor of students who have the least in terms of private resources and parental support and guarantee that the greatest advantage would be targeted toward these students and their communities.

Policy makers could accomplish this by setting aside federal and state funds for community-based charter schools in inner-city and poor rural area. They could also provide low-income students free and accessible transportation to charter schools outside their communities, assure these students receive information on their school choices and guarantee their equal access to charter schools in wealthier areas.

Furthermore, recent research by Orfield (1995) has shown that the vast majority of parents in this country want their children to attend racially diverse schools. A recent Phi Delta Kappan poll found that 84 percent of public school parents believe that it is desirable to have students of different races and ethnic groups represented in public schools.

Currently several state laws stipulate that charter schools' enrollment should reflect the racial make up of their local districts, but only hall of the states include a transportation provision, usually a reimbursement for low-income parents able to drive their children to school.

The South Carolina charter law, however, requires charter school proposals to describe how the schools will meet the transportation needs of all students and notes that while the legislation seeks to provide flexible, innovative, and substantially deregulated public schools, "the General Assembly will not allow greater flexibility and deregulation to result in segregation of students by race, gender. ethnic background, income, disability or religious belief, whether in public charter schools or in public noncharter schools."

The South Carolina law comes closer than any other state statute to guaranteeing that charter school enrollment opportunities are skewed toward students who want to leave racially isolated schools for those that are more diverse. The federal government could mandate that some portion of the federal funding for charter schools go toward urban-suburban transfer programs, creating an incentive for parents and educators to create racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Such targeted funding would place charter schools in the center of policy efforts to alleviate racial segregation while providing greater educational opportunities.

Furthermore, the federal government could play a powerful role in assuring, that charter school reform helps to revitalize rather than dismantle the public education system. Rather than arguing that the current public education system is universally bad and thus must be replaced by more innovative, less political and more market driven entities such as charter schools, many of the community-base educators and parents who are toiling daily to start charter schools are doing so because they are very committed to public education.

These grass-roots reformers acknowledge that some democratically run public schools regularly do not meet the needs of students from the least politically powerful communities. Yet they also realize that educational markets have the potential to fail these same students in even more devastating ways because of their lack of economic power in the system. Thus, they see charter school reform as a way to re-invigorate the public education system and not a way to dismantle that very system. These educators proudly proclaim that they are founding "public" charter schools, and many try to reach out to neighboring public schools to build sharing, collaborative as opposed to competitive, relationships. Federal funding could be used to support such efforts.

And finally, the balance between school autonomy and public accountability must be struck in such a way that tax payers and voters in the states and communities where charter schools are founded have access to information about how their public funds are being spent and how these charter schools are preparing students to become citizens of these communities.

Another potential concern related to charter schools and local control is that decentralization of educational governance was supposed to he only one half of the widely supported effort known as systemic reform. Proponents of systemic reform argue that while schools could be safely decentralized as long as they were to be held accountable to national standards and state frameworks, thus assuring that poor and minority students were not being given short shrift (O'Day and Smith, 1993). Yet while efforts to implement national standards and state frameworks and assessment systems have run into several political roadblocks, attempts to decentralize educational governance have moved forward rapidly, as is evidenced by the proliferation of new parental choice policies such as charter schools (Diegmueller, 1995a, 1995b; Richardson, 1995).

This means that schools are gaining more autonomy without the accountability measures in place. Educational research should be focused on how this political shift toward greater local control is affecting the educational opportunities of children. If standards and new exams have become victims of political battles in Washington D.C. and state capitols across the country, then charter schools are being freed of their bureaucratic constraints with very little systematic accountability. This freedom without accountability recalls the dangers of local control -- that those with power and influence at the local level will not meet the needs of the more politically disenfranchised.

Unlike the War on Poverty programs of the 60s, charter schools are a state-level reform that comes with virtually no resources and no strong federal government presence to assure that low-income communities are benefiting from this program. While the market metaphor for school improvement is appealing more attention must be paid to the potential of charter school reform to reinvent more powerful and effective school communities. The federal government must step into charter school reform by helping to equalize the unequal conditions that encompass this reform. thus enhancing the potential of charter schools to empower those who have traditionally been the least empowered 'in the public educational system.