SECTION 1

Introduction to the Issues and Our Study

Archived Information

There are differing points of view about charter schools. Supporters see
charter schools as ways to allow groups of parents, teachers, and
educational innovators to create new options in public education.
Opponents see them as potentially divisive escape routes from the
structure of necessary public education regulations.

Charter schools are quasi-independent public schools authorized by
agencies of state government to operate outside the normal public school
administrative framework.[^1] They receive public funds on a per-pupil
basis and decide autonomously how to spend their budgets---how many
teachers to hire, what textbooks and materials to buy, what
extracurricular activities to offer, and so on. Charter schools are also
schools of choice. Parents can choose whether to enroll their children
in a particular school. Charter school leaders offer jobs directly to
teachers, and teachers decide which offers to accept. In return for
these freedoms, charter schools must state in advance what their
students will learn, and schools that do not produce the expected
results can have their charters revoked. Charters are granted for fixed
terms, typically 5 years, and they can be renewed only if the school
shows that it has lived up to its promises.

Theoretically, charter schools can avoid some of the trappings of late
20^th^ century public education. They are not operated by centralized
bureaucracies; they must attract students, who are not compelled to
attend them; they do not need to respond to daily changes in school
district politics and policies; they have real-dollar budgets and can
decide how to allocate funds among teachers, materials, and technology;
and they hire teachers who fit the school's mission and needs rather
than automatically accepting the most senior teacher who wants a job.
Still, however, charter schools are intended to be public---open to all,
bound to principles of fairness and equality, and required to teach the
same basic subjects and meet the same standards of quality as
conventional public schools.[^2]

In fact, the 36 states and the District of Columbia that have charter
school laws require charter schools to be public---nonexclusive, covered
by civil rights laws, and obligated to demonstrate performance as a
condition of their continued existence. However, legislatures have
recognized that they were creating a new kind of public entity and the
original charter school laws left many questions unresolved. Many of
these questions concern accountability:[^3] how would school performance
be measured; how would decisions be made about schools that became
controversial or when schools' initial charters expired and they
petitioned to have their charters renewed; and what would happen to
low-performing schools that nonetheless retained the strong support of
parents or teachers or to high-performing schools that could not attract
enough students to pay their bills? Responses to these questions of
accountability are outlined in state charter school laws to some degree,
but ultimately they will be answered only in practice, by state and
local education agencies, by charter school operators, and by teachers,
parents, and students.

####### Charter Schools and Accountability

One way to understand charter schools is that they are public schools
that have made a novel bargain, gaining freedom from detailed external
control in return for accepting strict accountability for performance.
Charter schools do gain some freedom of action, though as subsequent
sections of this report will show, what they are free to do varies from
place to place and is often subject to redefinition. Similarly, charter
schools are nominally accountable, but to whom they are accountable, for
what, and with what consequences varies from place to place and from
time to time.

By law, charter schools are answerable to the government agencies that
sponsor them for faithful execution of their charters and for
demonstrating student learning. Though some are answerable to local
district school boards, many are authorized by special state agencies,
other state institutions like colleges and universities, and state
departments of education. Also by law, charter schools are
simultaneously accountable to parents and teachers for fulfilling
promises made about instruction, school climate, and student learning
and for operating in ways that maintain those parties' confidence.

The legislators who enacted charter school laws hoped to make schools
more effective by clarifying to whom they are accountable and for what.
Charter school advocates do not claim that conventional public schools
are answerable to no one. To the contrary, they argue that conventional
public schools are answerable to so many external parties and for so
many different things that staff cannot focus on the core task of
providing effective instruction. Supporters of charter schools hoped
that charter school legislation could eliminate the demands on schools
that compete with the goal of providing instruction that leads to
student learning. They acknowledge that the real work of teaching,
self-assessment, and collaborative adaptation to the needs of individual
children must be done within the school. Supporters of charter schools
believe that the adults who run and staff schools will work more
effectively if performance matters.

Charter school laws intend to make schools' very existence contingent on
performance in two ways. First, they empower state and/or local agencies
(hereafter called *authorizers*) to enter into school-specific
performance agreements with schools eligible to receive public funds and
to withdraw the charters from schools that do not operate or perform as
promised. Second, charter school laws allow parents and teachers to
choose whether to be part of one school community or another.

Thus, though charter school laws vary from state to state, most charter
school laws intend to create new roles and new relationships among key
adult parties in public education. In theory, charter schooling allows:

-   Authorizers to contract with a wide variety of qualified parties to
    operate schools and to shift contracts from nonperforming parties to
    more promising ones.

-   Parents or guardians to choose schools and also to take part in
    founding and operating new public schools.

-   Professional and community groups, including teachers and
    independent private parties agreeing to work within a public
    charter, to operate schools.

-   Teachers to choose the schools where they will work and schools to
    choose teachers from among a broadly defined set of eligible
    individuals.

Chartering also introduces new actors into public education---the
governing boards of independent nonprofit organizations that enter into
contracts to provide schools. These boards become, in effect, the
intermediaries between members of politically responsible state agencies
and the people who operate schools day to day. These independent
governing boards assume public responsibilities by entering into
contracts with authorizers and by accepting the obligation to operate
under government's principles of equitable student access and careful
stewardship of public funds. However, the school-level governing boards
remain independent entities with the obligation to keep their schools
financially solvent and the freedom to adjust their schools' staffing
and program as necessary to meet student needs. The governing boards of
individual schools also enter into *de facto* private contracts with
families, to whom they make promises about what children will experience
and learn while in the schools.

Chartering also limits the roles of state legislatures and local school
boards. Theoretically, these agencies do not control charter schools
directly, nor do they decide whom charter schools will hire or how they
will spend their money. Chartering may, however, enable school boards
and other state entities to be more effective than before in ensuring
that all children have access to good schools.

The many rules that now constrain conventional public schools---civil
service hiring, standard staffing tables requiring heavy layers of
administration, and constraints on days of instruction and minutes of
teacher time---also greatly restrict district school boards. When
dealing with conventional public schools, boards are often unable to do
much to influence staffing, alter the relative emphasis on
administration versus instruction, or change the use of

teacher or student time. These constraints severely limit what they can
accomplish in dealing with a low-performing school. A school board can
only put so much pressure on a school whose staff members are all
tenured and whose principal has little influence over hiring and firing
of staff or the spending of money.

Those district boards that can charter schools gain new and valuable
opportunities to guide and influence schools. When schools are not
performing to expectations, district school boards and other state
agencies can put pressure on school managers who have the authority to
change staffing, methods, and use of time. Authorizers can also cancel
the charters of nonperforming schools and find other providers.

By making authorizers responsible for the performance of individual
schools, not of system aggregates, chartering makes it less tolerable to
have a few bad schools just because the system is doing pretty well on
average. Chartering makes every school responsible to mount an effective
instructional program and maintain teacher and parent confidence.
Chartering deprives schools of the excuse, "we did what we were told and
if it did not work it is not our fault."

Chartering also potentially opens public education to new ideas, new
people, and new investments. It replaces a hermetically sealed education
bureaucracy with a more open set of contracts between public officials
and school operators and among private parties who want to design,
operate, teach in, or send children to publicly funded schools. Whether
charters lead to better schools, greater equality of educational
opportunity, a better educated populace, happier and more productive
teachers, more satisfied parents, and smarter children remains to be
seen. But it is already clear that charter schooling opens up many new
possibilities and can lead to significant new flows of human and
financial capital into efforts to educate the public's children.

####### Differences in Accountability: Charters and Conventional Public Schools

The accountability mechanisms created in the theory of charter schools
are quite distinct from those in action in conventional public schools
today and from the accountability established in the standards-based
reform movement.

Figure 1.1 illustrates accountability relationships in conventional
public education. The figure is complicated because accountability is
complicated. Schools must answer to many masters, including the school
board, superintendent, and many separate central office units. Many
other actors also deal with schools indirectly through the school board
and central office since individual schools have little freedom of
action.

Specifically, figure 1.1 illustrates three different accountability
relationships.

First, thick lines (between the school, the board, and the
superintendent) represent strong reciprocal accountability. The school
depends on support from the superintendent and board and, in turn, a
school's performance can reflect well or badly on them.

Second, narrow lines (e.g., between the school and different central
office units) represent relationships that are important to the school
but less important to the other party. Central office units can make
demands on schools but because central office units' funding and
existence is based on state rules and federal grant requirements, their
continuation truly does not depend on whether their actions enhance or
interfere with school performance.

Third, dotted lines represent weak accountability relationships in which
both parties have real, but relatively unimportant, stakes. Thus,
individual families or neighbors can petition the school for changes,
but school staff have little freedom of action and often claim that the
central office will not allow requested actions. These parties usually
try to get what they need indirectly by putting pressure on the
superintendent or board members who need their support. Unions and other
government agencies can also deal directly with school staff, but
schools' responses are strongly constrained by rules. Those parties have
their greatest influence by making rules that constrain the whole
district (in the case of other governmental agencies) or entering
district-wide contracts (in the case of unions). Thus, the parties with
dotted-line relationships with individual schools have narrow-line
relationships with the board and superintendent. They get what they need
through the board and superintendent, and provide political support
(often votes and financial contributions) that keep board members in
office and maintain or threaten superintendents' board majorities.

Kentucky's standards-based system, now adopted in some form by the vast
majority of states, tries to simplify accountability in conventional
public education. It sets high expectations, measures school and student
performance against those expectations, and rewards and penalizes
schools on the basis of academic performance. As is the case with
charter schools, schools under standards-based reform have a direct and
reciprocal accountability relationship with their school districts based
on performance under state standards, and they are not accountable to
myriad independent central office units. However, like conventional
public schools, schools under systemic reform are only indirectly
accountable to families, teachers, unions, neighbors, and other
government agencies.

Figure 1.2 illustrates the accountability relationships that are
supposed to exist for charter schools in most states. It uses the same
kinds of symbols as figure 1.1. Charter schools have strong reciprocal
accountability relationships with their authorizers, whether they are
school district boards or other public agencies. These relationships are
defined in each school's charter and they focus on student learning
results.

Unlike conventional public schools, charter schools are not supposed to
have any accountability relationships at all with the many
quasi-independent district central office units that affect conventional
public schools. However, a charter school has many other direct
accountability relationships: with the teachers whom it hires but on
whose performance the school depends; with families whom the school must
attract and satisfy but on whom the school can also impose some
requirements; and with unions, which represent teachers at the school.

Charter schools also have direct accountability relationships with other
government agencies (e.g., fire marshals, building inspectors, and civil
rights agencies). As figure 1.2 shows, these entities can also try to
influence a school indirectly by complaining to its authorizing agency
and trying to induce the authorizer to intervene in the school's
operation (that is how these agencies operate in the context of
conventional public education). However, since these agencies are in a
position to deal with a charter school directly, relationships with the
authorizer are represented by dotted lines.

What a diagram cannot make clear is that all these direct accountability
relationships are critical to the continued existence of a charter
school. If a school does not provide the quality of services promised or
show expected levels of student learning gains, its authorizer can
cancel its charter. The authorizer is also free to charter other schools
so that children from a closed school have someplace to go. Charter
schools' other accountability relationships are also very high-stakes; a
school that cannot attract students does not get funds and cannot
operate; and a school that cannot attract and keep teachers cannot stay
open.

Charter schools and conventional public schools are held accountable
very differently. Charter schools are directly accountable to many
different parties, and must balance the needs of all their
constituencies without losing the support of any. In conventional public
education, government does the balancing. The district school board,
superintendent, and central school administration listen to the parents,
teachers, and community members, and try to create policies for all
schools that reflect a vector sum of all parties' demands.

####### The Purpose of this Report

There are many books and articles on the subject of accountability under
standards-based reform.[^4] They show that standards-based reform is no
different from any other policy idea: more complex, harder to implement,
and more in need of refinement than its originators imagined. The same
must also be true of charter schools. However, there is no
correspondingly large body of evidence and analysis about how charter
schools are held accountable.[^5] The new roles and relationships
introduced by charter schooling are challenging and unfamiliar. All the
actors involved inevitably have a lot to learn, and many can be expected
to clash as they try to establish themselves.

This report is the first national study of charter school
accountability. It aims to provide knowledge for use in the real world,
by three audiences: Charter school operators (or persons interested in
seeking charters); charter authorizing agencies; state legislators and
governors interested in establishing new charter laws or amending
existing ones; and funders (including the federal government and private
foundations) willing to invest in resources needed by charter schools.

We set out to inform these audiences by answering four main questions:

-   Does the need to maintain the confidence of authorizing agencies,
    parents, teachers, and other private supporters strengthen or
    disable charter schools as places of teaching and learning?

-   How are charter school leaders learning to balance all the pressures
    on them, and what (in the inevitable cases of failure) renders some
    schools unable to meet all their obligations?

-   How do the actions of key external entities, including government
    agencies that authorize charter schools, private financial
    supporters, and assistance providers, influence charter schools? In
    what ways do the actions of these entities enhance or weaken
    schools' focus on instruction?

-   What lessons are government agencies and private supporters of
    charter schools learning about how to fulfill their own obligations
    without weakening charter schools as teaching and learning
    institutions?

Aside from the information specific to charter school accountability,
public officials and school board members need to know what the charter
school experience implies about accountability in the rest of public
education. The accountability challenges posed by charter schools arise
in the course of any reform that tries to focus initiative and
accountability at the school level. Any such reform---including
standards-based reforms that offer schools increased freedom of action
in return for strict accountability on student outcomes---requires
authorizing agencies to ask whether a school is performing as expected.
Any community attempting standards-based reform, or even more modest
initiatives like site-based management, will need to replace the
traditional system of compliance-based accountability with one based on
school-specific performance. Charter schooling provides a laboratory for
discovery and testing of school-specific methods of accountability.

####### The Evidence We Assembled

We studied charter school accountability from many angles. First, from
the perspective of charter school staff who faced the need to balance
the diverse accountability relationships described above. Second, from
the perspective of authorizers---local school boards and other state
agencies empowered to authorize charter schools---who faced the need to
oversee public schools in a new way. Third, from the perspective of
state officials who make rules defining the responsibilities of
authorizers and individual charter schools. These groups were the main
focus of our work. But we also tried to understand how parents,
educational interest groups, and independent financial donors were
learning to deal with charter schools.

From the beginning, we understood that the whole charter school
enterprise was new and rapidly evolving. As our inquiry began, few
people had much experience with charter schools. Both when the study
began in 1997 and now in 2000 as this is written, more than half the
charter schools in the country are in their first 2 years of operation.
Charter schools, and their relationships with the entitles to which they
are accountable, are just being invented. No statistical profile of
charter schools is likely to be valid for more than a few months. No
single generalization about charter school accountability is likely to
hold for all schools, or for very long.

In light of these facts, we decided to focus on understanding and
explanation, rather than on counting. This report, then, is an effort to
explain relationships: how chartering defines responsibilities; how
schools and other entities are learning to work within the context of
new laws, powers, and responsibilities; what lessons school leaders and
public officials have already learned; and with what issues they are
still struggling. We expected that many other studies would follow ours
and that, as the charter movement grew and stabilized, efforts to create
national statistics would be justified.

We drew information and ideas from many sources.[^6] A 2-year study
funded by the U.S. Department of Education was the centerpiece of our
research strategy. This study focused on six states---Arizona,
California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan---selected to
represent the main differences in state charter school laws. These
states also contained the vast majority of charter schools in existence
(at the time of our field work in 1998 and 1999) for at least 3 years
and represent the vast majority of states with charter schools in
existence for at least 3 years. We studied state charter school laws and
administration in those states, and then studied a sample of school
districts and other government agencies that authorize charter schools
within those states. We also then conducted case studies of charter
schools authorized by the government agencies in our sample. We:

-   Studied the ways that state governments, local school districts, and
    other state agencies empowered to authorize schools have implemented
    policies about charter school approval and oversight.[^7]

-   Collected documentary evidence on charter schools' correspondence
    with and submissions to authorizing agencies, and on authorizing
    agencies' decisions on charter school applications and renewals.

-   Surveyed authorizing agencies about their policies and bases of
    decisionmaking, and link these results with data from a larger
    federally funded general study of charter schools.[^8]

-   Surveyed charter schools about their relationships with authorizing
    agencies, admissions and hiring practices, and student body and
    teacher force composition and turnover, and link these results with
    data from a larger federally funded general study of charter
    schools.[^9]

-   Conducted case studies of particular charter schools' relationships
    with authorizing agencies and other audiences to whom they might be
    considered accountable (i.e., families, teachers, professional and
    accrediting associations).

In all, we studied a total of 150 schools and 60 authorizing agencies.
We also conducted extensive case studies of accountability relationships
in 17 of the 150 schools, interviewing school principals, teachers,
other staff members, parents, governing board members, and authorizing
agency officials. We analyzed data at three levels of the sample: state,
authorizing agency, and school. We used combinations of mail surveys
with telephone follow-up, and site visits.

Every chapter of this report draws on evidence from the national survey,
smaller surveys, and visits to states, agencies, and charter schools.
Throughout the report, we also make reference to schools or agencies
(e.g., Chicago and the District of Columbia school districts) we visited
in the course of other studies conducted by the Center on Reinventing
Public Education.

####### Report Outline

This six-section report presents our results. Section 2 starts with the
schools, showing how charter schools---both schools started from scratch
and schools transformed from conventional public schools into
charters---have adjusted to their new accountability relationships. It
examines how schools have developed *internal
accountability*---productive relationships among teachers,
administrators, and students. Its most important finding is that charter
schools*' external accountability*---their need to maintain
relationships of trust and confidence with entities on whom their
existence depends, including authorizers, parents, teachers, and
donors---promotes internal accountability. The need to respond to
external demands leads charter schools to create explicit and
disciplined internal divisions of labor.

Section 3 shows how charter schools are learning to maintain internal
accountability in the face of disparate demands from parties within and
outside the school, including families, teachers, donors, and
authorizing agencies.

Section 4 explores how authorizing agencies are overseeing the schools
they charter. It shows how the various public organizations designated
under different state laws to authorize and oversee charter schools are
learning their jobs and how the ways they do their jobs affect schools.
These organizations include school districts, special state charter
school agencies, and state agencies like colleges and universities,
which have other primary missions.

Section 5 reviews the roles being played by other entities---private
philanthropists, lenders, and assistance providers on whom charter
schools often depend, and government agencies other than charter
authorizers (e.g., fire marshals, civil rights agencies) that can
require the schools to take particular actions. It asks whether charter
schools' need to maintain the trust and confidence of these entities
enhances or detracts from teachers' and students' focus on instruction.

Section 6 draws out the implications of what we have learned about
charter school accountability for government officials who authorize and
monitor charter schools, and for individuals and groups that operate and
assist charter schools. It suggests that all of public education has
stakes in the effort to learn how public schools can be held accountable
for performance.

[^1]: According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are
    1,735--1,790 charter schools operating in the 2000/2001 school year.
    In Spring 2000, The Center for Education Reform estimated charter
    schools are serving approximately 430,000 children.

[^2]: Disputes over whether public education is defined by its mission
    (so that any school that provides effective education and operates
    under principles of equity is a public school) or its administrative
    arrangements (so that only schools operated by specialized
    government education agencies are public schools) are not new. As
    early as 1967, psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research strongly
    influenced the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of
    Education, argued that identifying public schools by their
    administrative arrangements closed off many options that poor and
    minority communities need. He argued that public schools should be
    managed by colleges, universities, unions, businesses, industries,
    the Department of Defense, and other organizations, as well as by
    conventional public school districts. See Clark, Kenneth B*.,
    Alternative Public School Systems*---*A Response to America's
    Educational Emergency*, 1967. Available from the ERIC Clearinghouse
    on microfiche.

[^3]: Accountability is a relationship between two persons or
    organizations in which one acknowledges an obligation to perform
    some task or function, and the other expects that the task or
    function will be performed. According to the American Heritage
    Dictionary, to be accountable is "to be answerable for." Thus, a
    school is accountable when it is answerable *to* some other party
    *for* accomplishing some definite goals.

[^4]: See, for example, Fuhrman, Susan H. and Richard F. Elmore, Ruling
    Out Rules: The Evolution of Deregulation in State Education Policy.
    *Teachers College-Record*; v97 n2 p. 279--309 Winter 1995; Fuhrman,
    Susan H. and Jennifer A. O\'Day, *Rewards and Reform: Creating
    Educational Incentives That Work*, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1996;
    Fuhrman, Susan H., Challenges in Systemic Education Reform, *CPRE
    Policy Briefs*, New Brunswick, NJ, Consortium for Policy Research in
    Education, 1994; McLaughlin, Milbrey W. and Lorrie A. Shepard*,
    Improving Education through Standards-Based Reform*. Stanford CA,
    Academy of Education, 1995; Hill, Paul T. and Robin J. Lake, *State
    Standards and School Accountability*, Washington, DC, The Brookings
    Institution Press, 1999 (forthcoming).

[^5]: Useful ideas about charter school accountability are starting to
    emerge. See, for example, Manno, Bruno V., *Accountability:Tthe Key
    To Charter Renewal*, Washington, DC, the Center for Education
    Reform, 1998. See also Finn, Chester E., Bruno V. Manno, and Gregg
    Vanourek*, Charter Schools In Action*, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
    University Press, 2000.

[^6]: Private sources of funding for this study include the Boeing
    Company, the Exxon Education Foundation, the Brookings Institution,
    and the Spencer Foundation.

[^7]: At the state level, we interviewed legislators and their aides,
    governors' aides, senior staff of the state education agency,
    administrators responsible for issuing regulations and guidelines
    for charter schools, individuals designated to approve charter
    schools or hear appeals when local districts rejected charter school
    applications, charter school assistance organization heads, and
    senior staff members of other education associations that attempted
    to influence policy regarding charter schools.

[^8]: See the appendix A for a description of the survey and analysis
    methods and the questionnaire sent to charter authorizing agencies.

[^9]: National surveys were conducted by RPP Incorporated of Emeryville,
    CA, under contract with the U.S. Department of Education. We
    contributed questions on accountability to RPP's surveys and were
    able to conduct our own analyses of their national data files. For
    information on RPP's study, see Berman, Paul, Beryl Nelson, John
    Ericson, Rebecca Perry, and Debra Silverman*, A National Study of
    Charter Schools: Second Year Report*. Washington, DC, Office of
    Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education,
    1998.