# **SECTION 6**

# 

# **Conclusions and Recommendations for People**

# **Engaged with Charter Schools**

Archived Information

Charter school laws put schools in a situation of mixed accountability
to private parties as well as to government, in pursuit of a public
purpose. The public purpose is student learning. In theory, charter
schools' accountabilities serve that public purpose---parents, teachers,
and other private parties, as well as authorizers, care about student
learning and reward or punish schools accordingly. Also in theory,
schools are more likely to attain that public purpose if they are
accountable to all those parties than if they are accountable to only
one of them. No party, not even government, knows exactly what students
need to know, nor can any party, not even government, be completely
trusted to act purely in students' interest.

Using mixed accountability mechanisms to serve public ends is not
exactly a new idea. Public utilities, for example, are accountable both
to government and to their investors. In recent years, they have also
become accountable to customers, who are free to switch from one
provider to another. Publicly funded social services are now delivered
both by government agencies and by private organizations that are
accountable to government via contracts but remain accountable to their
boards and members of their parent organizations. Even conventional
public school systems make promises in order to get private donations
and rely on voluntary unpaid effort by parents and teachers. These are
all examples of enterprises that combine government oversight and
private accountability in pursuit of broader public ends.[^1]

Not everyone accepts the idea that public ends can be achieved by mixing
governmental and private accountability. For many, accountability in
public education means accountability to government and nothing else.
Though most analysts of public education readily concede that government
does not always articulate the public interest in education
well---allowing a succession of different self-interested groups to
write laws and regulations to create advantages for themselves---many
still argue that government can do the job right. Some assume that
government's now-chaotic actions can all be realigned to emphasize
student learning over all other interests. Advocates of "alignment-"
based reforms intend to hold individual schools accountable for student
learning. Unlike charter school laws, however, alignment-based proposals
do not expose schools to the pressures of free choice made by families
and teachers or create autonomous governing boards for individual
schools.

Schools that do only what they are told cannot be held responsible for
the results. If schools are to be accountable they must have more
control over their budgets, schedules, methods, and staff selection than
is possible in a conventional public school system. Moreover, school
level freedom of action in turn implies some degree of free choice for
teachers and for families. A school to which students and teachers are
subject to involuntary assignment has little chance to establish a
well-defined approach to instruction; it must focus instead on coping
with the demands and limitations of the people who happen to be there.
Whether they are public or private, schools that work for their students
start with communities based on informed consent, not involuntary
assignment.

By design, charter schools must reconcile pressures from many sources.
They depend on many different parties---authorizing agencies, families,
teachers, donors, volunteer governing boards, and other government
agencies---each of whom has reason to expect evidence of performance.
Each external party hopes the school will produce high levels of student
performance, but some have their own peculiar concerns. Authorizers are
also concerned about financial propriety, teachers about job security
and working conditions, families about safety and caring, and other
government agencies about maintaining regimes of regulation that they
think benefit their particular clients.

Despite many false starts and some outright failures, charter schools
are learning to face the problems of multidirectional accountability.
They are helped by the fact that the most significant parties to whom
they are accountable, parents and teachers, care more about maintaining
a school climate conducive to learning than about any other dimension of
school performance. Though some authorizers, other government agencies,
and assistance groups create pressures that do not reinforce schools'
focus on teaching and learning, on the whole, the schools we studied are
creating internal accountability mechanisms that allow them to deliver
enough of what everyone cares about to maintain their charters and
survive financially. Though some charter schools cannot handle all the
pressures on them and go out of existence, charter laws allow other
schools to form and, potentially, learn from others' failures.

Nevertheless, there are still unresolved issues about charter school
accountability:

-   Some charter schools have managed to produce acceptable student
    outcomes but are still a long way from creating strong internal
    accountability arrangements and stable working relationships between
    the governing boards and management.

-   Only a few of the hundreds of legally designated charter authorizing
    agencies have faced their own responsibilities in holding charter
    schools accountable. Some authorizers fall back on process and
    compliance monitoring and avoid acting on measures of student
    performance, rather than opening themselves up to the criticism that
    they will not close or replace any of the conventional public
    schools for which they are also responsible.

-   Charter schools can be exposed to forms of pressure from other
    government agencies that other public schools simply do not
    encounter.

No one could expect all these problems to be solved within 5 years of
the beginning of such a radical shift in methods of public service
provision. Moreover, charter schools, their supporters, and some
authorizers (including the states of Massachusetts and Colorado,
special-purpose authorizing agencies in the District of Columbia and
Michigan, and school districts in Chicago and Colorado) are making real
headway.

In general, the preceding sections have shown that charter schools'
multidirectional accountability can work, in the all-important sense of
promoting effective instruction for children. For this to happen,
however, charter schools must be more than neutral registers of the
external pressures upon them. They must be real organizations, capable
of organizing the effort of adults and children in pursuit of a mission
and using data and expertise to solve problems. In short, if a school is
to be externally accountable it must also be internally accountable.

Charter schools develop internal accountability because they need to do
so. Charter schools can develop internal accountability because they
control the resources and decisions that count. Internal accountability
is *necessary* for charter schools because:

-   A school receives public funds only if it meets the conditions of
    its charter---to deliver a coherent instructional program, show a
    government authorizer that students are learning, and maintain
    equitable admissions practices.

-   A school must compete for students, whose families send them only if
    the school provides credible instruction and maintains a motivating,
    safe, and caring climate.

-   A school must compete for teachers, who can choose schools they
    believe are stable enough to pay them and that provides a satisfying
    professional climate.

Internal accountability is *possible* because:

-   Schools control funds and can therefore decide how to allocate
    resources between instruction and other objectives. They can also
    purchase the exact kinds of materials and advice they need to
    improve instruction.

-   Schools have hiring authority over staff, which allows them to
    select the combination of skills it needs to manage its
    instructional program and gives schools the leverage they need to
    ensure that all faculty members work to provide the kind of
    instruction promised.

-   Schools control their schedules and staff work assignments, and they
    can adapt programs to the needs of students and respond to
    information about their own performance.

However, based on the research reported in section 2, it is evident that
these six conditions are not in themselves *sufficient* to create
internal accountability. Some charter schools encounter all these
conditions and still fail to become internally accountable. Becoming

internally accountable requires something more: compelling ideas about
what makes a good school; leadership to help staff, parents, and the
governing board converge on a common image of the school; and continued
hard work to update general agreement about the school's purposes and
methods and apply it to current circumstances.

People outside the school can create the conditions that make a school
need to be internally accountable and enable a school to take
responsibility for its results. Outsiders can even help the school
community converge on shared ideas about good instruction. The fact that
a charter school must establish enough guiding principles up front to
write a compelling proposal starts it on the way toward establishing
internal accountability, but it is clear that many charter schools
nonetheless struggle, and a few ultimately fail, to develop it. Based on
our research, we do not have a complete theory of how schools develop
internal accountability. We can, however, identify the ways that key
actors, both within and outside the school, enable and help schools
develop internal accountability. The remainder of this section suggests
how charter school leaders, governing boards, parents, teachers,
authorizers, state governments, and philanthropists and other
private-sector friends of charter schools can contribute to the
development of internal accountability.

####### How Key Actors Can Improve Charter School Accountability

Most actors care more about whether a school gives children a positive
learning environment and provides effective instruction than about
whether it is punctilious about following rules. However, rules are part
of life. The key to the success of charter schools---and to public
education in general---is to find a way to reconcile the compliance
pressure on schools with their need to focus on issues of teaching and
learning. To make this possible, all parties must accept some
responsibilities.

**Charter school governing boards need to:** understand that boards of
directors must follow Osborne and Gaebler's[^2] dictum to "steer, not
row," formulating the school's mission and making decisions that set
long-term directions, such as hiring the school head and establishing
the criteria against which her performance will be judged. Directors who
are also school founders must accept the fact that, like parents, they
must learn to "let go." Stable and productive board-management
relationships depend on the board's acceptance of the limitations of its
"steering" role, supporting management whenever possible and replacing,
rather than hobbling, managers who cannot be trusted.

New boards must expect a serious shakedown period that requires
continual clarification of mission, governance relationships, and
staffing. Neither boards nor staffs can always operate on the basis of
consensus, and some conflicts might be serious enough to lead some board
members or school managers to depart. However, the board must
continually ask whether its actions are strengthening or weakening the
instructional program and whether its actions clarify or blur the
divisions of responsibility on which internal accountability is built.

**Charter school leaders need to: s**eize the initiative on external
accountability. Though some charter school leaders think the less they
can have to do with their authorizers the better, avoidance leads to
trouble. School leaders need to initiate contact, define the terms under
which they hope authorizers will hold them accountable, and create a
flow of relevant information. Schools that avoid assessment or resist
tests that the government is clearly authorized to require only increase
the likelihood that government will do what comes naturally---try to
control the situation by imposing new rules, demanding compliance, and
imposing penalties.

Schools in states that require standards-based testing can critique the
tests but they must not resist administering them. School leaders must
avoid first encouraging staff opposition to the tests, and later telling
staff they have no choice but to go along.

School leaders must also take the initiative in creating well-informed
expectations among parents, teachers, and governing board members.
Leaders must clearly communicate to parents and teachers what the school
intends to accomplish and what it will not attempt. Vaguely
characterizing the school as a happy place that values diversity and
helps everyone learn does not discourage parents and teachers from
maintaining irreconcilable fantasies about what the school will be. The
school must be characterized clearly enough so that people can know what
it will *not* do, and so that people whose expectations cannot be met
will look elsewhere.

Attaining this degree of clarity takes time. No one can know in advance
all the expectations that people might carry with them into the school.
But at every juncture, school leaders serve everyone best by creating
clarity, not ambiguity.

Internal accountability depends on clarity, which is in turn a function
of leadership. Educators accustomed to conventional public schools, in
which staff and parents are assigned to a school and must find ways to
live with their differences, have learned to paper over conflicts with
glittering generalities. Charter school leaders must operate very
differently, constructing specific expectations, selecting and
socializing staff, and creating internal divisions of responsibility
that allow the school to meet them. This requires setting action
priorities on the basis of hard performance data, not staff politics.

**Parents need to:** become wise consumers. Parents who know what to
expect from a school, and can both effectively demand what was promised
and avoid making demands that a school clearly was not constructed to
meet, make an indispensable contribution to internal accountability.
Charter schools need to be held to their promises, and parents who do so
strengthen their school. But parents who import their own secret hopes,
especially for instructional programs, facilities, and extracurricular
activities that a charter school obviously lacks the capacity to
deliver, only diffuse the efforts of board and staff.

Parents need to understand that not every charter school is for every
child. It is their responsibility to perform due diligence before
enrolling a child in a school. Parents need to ask questions: What will
students experience every day? What will the school's climate and
academic standards be? What kind of help will children get when they are
struggling? and What is expected of families?

**Teachers need to:** understand that joining a charter school is an
opportunity to change the type of educational relationship teachers have
with students and other teachers. Charter schools are problemsolving
organizations and the survival of the school depends on each teacher's
success. Teachers and leaders must consider themselves as co-owners and
comanagers, not as bureaucrats with limited responsibility.

Like parents, teachers need to perform due diligence about whether a
charter school's expectations match theirs. They also need to hold board
members and school leaders to their promises about instructional
quality, school climate, and professional development opportunities.
Teachers strengthen schools if they demand quality. But teachers must
expect to be challenged and to work under performance pressure.

**Authorizers need to:** take their responsibilities toward charters
seriously. School districts, in particular, need to overcome habits of
letting schools slide until something dire happens. This requires
creating routines for monitoring and assessing schools, and rules of
thumb to use early in a school's development to distinguish schools that
are having normal startup problems from those that are seriously at risk
of failing to deliver. Authorizers should consider creating or
contracting for school inspection organizations, as have the
Massachusetts and Chicago charter schools offices.

Authorizers must fulfill their public duties to ensure that charter
schools are held accountable for performance, and to protect students
from failing schools. This requires clear definitions of performance
measures of schools' value added. It does not require exhaustive
measurement of every aspect of a school's operation, but it does require
sharp, valid, and tamper-proof measures of student learning outcomes,
especially in core subjects. Parents and teachers can be trusted to
assess and react to important but hard-to-measure school attributes like
climate and morale. But authorizers must collect and act on hard
measures of whether students are learning.

Authorizers must also adapt to the realities of dealing with schools
that are independent organizations responsible for demonstrating student
performance. Schools cannot be expected to develop as educational
institutions if they are constantly surprised by rules and constraints
newly discovered by disorganized authorizers. Charter schools can live
with rules, but rules must be stable and the accompanying administrative
burdens predictable. Unstable rules and sporadic enforcement can drive
schools in one of two directions: toward either slavish compliance to
the rule of the day or arrogant disregard of compliance obligations.

**State governments need to:** hold authorizers accountable for their
responsibilities.[^3] All states that allow local school districts to
charter schools must understand that districts are not accustomed to
holding schools accountable for performance. Many need help
understanding their responsibilities and exposure to districts that have
learned how to fulfill these responsibilities. State-funded professional
development for administrators responsible for charter school oversight
and for school board members is essential, but no state has accepted
this responsibility.

States need to provide enough guidance and training so that a
conscientious authorizer can determine whether it is fulfilling its
responsibilities toward potential and current charter operators. States
also need to make sure local districts and other authorizers face
negative consequences if they do not follow the intent of state law in
processing charter school applications and overseeing charter school
performance.

State governments might also help other agencies like fire code
enforcers and building inspectors by issuing guidelines for dealing with
charter schools. These guidelines should make it clear that charter
schools are not to be held to more rigorous standards than existing
public or private schools.

**The federal government needs to:** clarify key regulations as they
apply to charter schools. State laws differ on whether charter schools
are to be considered school districts or simply contractors working for
public agencies (e.g., Wisconsin, California, Arizona, and Connecticut).
This has meant that individual charter schools have been required to
offer special education programs that school districts, not individual
schools, normally provide. In conventional public education, no one
school must provide services appropriate to every disabled child: it is
enough for the school district to provide appropriate services at some
place in the district that is accessible to the student. Federal
enforcement of the rights of handicapped children should permit charter
schools that are not school districts under state law to make similar
arrangements, either by depending on school districts to provide special
education, or by forming consortia in which different charter schools
provide different special education services.

**Friends of the charter school movement need to:** help government
agencies and private actors support and effectively evaluate charter
schools. Foundations, charter school associations, and resource centers
should direct investments toward helping charter schools develop strong
governing boards and other internal accountability mechanisms such as
self-assessment models, effective grievance policies, and staff
evaluations. State and national associations should help disseminate
best practices on internal accountability to other charter schools and
to other public schools.

Those who hope to see the charter school movement expand and thrive must
also work to expose charter schools to technical tools that help them
get the kind of data they need to be held accountable.[^4] Likewise,
friends must help charter school authorizers and evaluators develop new
capacity to measure school progress, rather than rely on compliance
evaluations.

Perhaps most importantly, charter friends need to develop effective ways
to help parents evaluate the progress of their children and their
children's schools. Efforts in these areas are emerging and should be
fostered. In Rochester, New York, a local foundation has provided
planning grants to schools on the condition that they adopt a common
assessment model that can be used to create a charter school report
card. The Charter School Development Center at California State
University now offers accountability training and materials for
authorizers as well as schools. The Walton Foundation is funding a
multistate project to develop and disseminate new accountability methods
for charter schools.

While statewide associations and resource centers can do much to support
strong accountability and strong schools, these organizations now have
their limitations. Their main mission is help individual schools get
started and thrive. A new statewide independent nongovernment entity
must also serve a more specific role. Such an organization would be
charged simply with defending the integrity of the state's charter
school law. It would act as a watchdog on state government's faithful
implementation of the charter law, fight unnecessary new regulatory
demands, help central office and authorizing agency staff to shift from
a control mode to a support mode, and encourage multiple sources of
information about charter schools. These might include media,
associations, and parent groups.

####### Conclusions

Even this early in the development of charter schools, the stakes are
high. The majority of charter schools are less than 3 years old and most
are still developing their approaches to instruction and institutional
identity. If they face an unpredictable regulatory environment they may
never reach their full potential. Charter schools, and the broader
national movement behind them, can serve children well only if
authorizers and supporters create conditions friendly to internal
accountability.

The stakes are high for all of public education, not just for charter
schools and their supporters. Charter school laws did not create the
need to hold individual schools accountable for performance. That need
has been recognized for decades by educators and policymakers who knew
that compliance-based accountability weakened schools and diverted time
and energy away from instruction. Seeking to focus public oversight on
school performance, 49 states have

committed themselves to standards-based reform, which requires a form of
school performance accountability that has many of the elements of
charter schooling. Like charter schooling, standards-based reform
intends to make schools accountable for performance, not compliance;
gives teachers and principals the freedom of action necessary to improve
instruction; and promotes new investment in ideas, organizations, and
people.

Charter schooling is the laboratory in which governments and other
actors, both public and private, can learn how to play new roles in
public school accountability. Charter schools, once a marginal
enterprise, could offer new insights to renewal in public education.

[^1]: These ideas are more fully developed in Brandl, John, *Money and
    Good Intentions are Not Enough*, Washington, DC, The Brookings
    Institution Press, 1998.

[^2]: Osborne and Gaebler, 1991, op. cit.

[^3]: An Education Commission of the States report has suggested that
    states create sanctions for school districts that do not provide
    districts with the freedom of action and performance-based oversight
    contemplated by state law. These sanctions can include loss of
    control over the schools in question and even replacement of the
    existing school board. See The Education Commission of the States,
    *Bending without Breaking: Improving Education through Flexibility &
    Choice,* Denver, 1996. Sarah Brooks has also suggested that such
    sanctions might be applied to districts that do not fulfill their
    responsibilities under standards-based reform. See Brooks, Sarah,
    *How States Can Hold Schools Accountable: The Strong-Schools Model
    of Standards-Based Reform*, Seattle, Center on Reinventing Public
    Education, 2000.

[^4]: See, for example, Finn et al., 1999, op. cit., Appendix A:
    "Generally Accepted Accountability Principles for Education."