Charter schools continue to be a hot-button issue. Despite the fact charter schools have been permissible by state law for about a year now but none have been created, the Legislature felt the need to ram through more charter school legislation, HB 2012, allowing for more than three times the original number of charter schools to open each year (up from three to 10) plus adding a virtual charter option.
Nationally, charter schools are a mixed bag. Some have seen soaring success; others have failed miserably and taken the students with them. According to Harvard’s education magazine, “The staggering range in charter quality starts with authorizers. Every charter school has a state-sanctioned organization that grants its license, reviews its performance, and renews or terminates its contract. … An undiscerning authorizer is the main root of weak charters.”
It next cited Ohio, where a 15-year free-for-all of 65 authorizers led to a plethora of underperforming charters: “A 2014 study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that the average Ohio charter student, compared with his or her public school peer, acquired 14 fewer days in reading and 43 fewer days of math in a 180-day school year. … CREDO cited many authorizers’ inability to ‘provide monitoring and oversight’ as the primary source of failure.”
In the new West Virginia charter school legislation, HB 2012, every county board of education can be an authorizer; that makes 56 authorizers, if you include the state board of education. But can every county board of education give the oversight needed to keep charters operating at or above traditional public school levels? Can the state board of education afford to pick up counties’ slack when it comes to monitoring charters? What mechanisms will exist to ensure charters provide at least the minimum standard of education?
And then there’s the virtual school. According to a 2015 CREDO study of all online charter schools, virtual charters consistently underperformed. For reading, 67% of online charters performed worse than traditional public schools; for math, that number was 88%. Virtual school has been a stop-gap measure to get us through the pandemic safely, but it is not the best vehicle for a student’s entire education.
The fundamental concern regarding charter schools is that the money follows the student — which means siphoning funds from traditional public schools. Schools are already cash-strapped. Programs are constantly getting cut — particularly the arts; there’s never quite enough money to cover all the building improvements needed; new textbooks are unheard of in some classrooms. These might be reasons to jump the traditional public school ship, but when only a handful of students from each grade level transfer to charter schools, then the overhead costs at public schools don’t diminish — but the funding does. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, where people abandon struggling public schools and the decreased funding causes them to deteriorate further.
Charter schools are touted as places of innovation and flexibility. But why can’t traditional schools be the same? Why aren’t we putting the effort into making the schools we already have into the kinds of places parents want to send their kids and students want to be?
