Becky Zhao | Student Life

In 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter-school legislation in U.S. history, igniting a debate over the true social benefit of alternative education. Within the laissez-faire charter concept, schools are largely ungoverned by the regulations of traditional public schools and free to experiment with new teaching and administrative methods. In return, they must achieve certain test score benchmarks each year to maintain their public funding. Yet 18 years later after the first charter, the efficacy of this model has been challenged by a shocking study conducted by researchers at Stanford University. Its results: While 17 percent of charter schools performed better than traditional public schools in the same state, 37 percent provided a worse education. The remaining 46 percent of charter schools reported results that were statistically identical to those of public schools.

Given the enormity of the tax dollar investment in charter schools, this data is alarming. Why should the government continue to fund an alternative to a broken system that itself is faulty? The answer is a complete and shameless cop-out, but it is the only answer: Be patient. Society must judge charter schools with a long-run outlook; these data reflect the mere growing pains of a complex, nationwide solution to an even more complex, nationwide problem.Undoubtedly, the potential benefit of the charters outweighs their short-run social cost, for without innovation, the bad habits of American public schools will repeat perpetually.

Luckily for society, charter schools have the freedom to form their own habits, and while some fail, others succeed, and these successful models disseminate throughout the public school system. As social laboratories, charter schools serve as live testing grounds for the hypotheses of experts and academics. In Massachusetts, the Community Day Charter School deviated from the typical principal-assistant principal-teacher leadership chain and created multiple principal posts, each with narrowly defined roles. Able to more closely monitor teaching from classroom to classroom, the school soon became one of Massachusetts’s top five highest performing charter schools. Encouraged by these empirical successes, Massachusetts has begun to implement this model in other troubled public schools. This progression—from idea to implementation to dissemination—demonstrates the potential efficiency of the charter system to implement change.

Innovation such as Community Day’s could only occur within the unique incentive structure of a charter school. While traditional public schools may become complacent with their guaranteed funding, charter schools must achieve a certain benchmark of success, sometimes higher than the public school standard, to preserve their charter. Thus, creativity is a charter school’s greatest asset. With more than 4,000 charter schools in the United States working to improve on current educational conventions, a burgeoning culture of change has begun to gain momentum—and the groups that need the change the most are getting it the most. Demographic analysis in the Stanford study reveals significant improvement in the test scores of low-income and English-language learners who switched from failing public schools to charter schools. In America, where 12 percent of the public schools are responsible for 50 percent of the nation’s dropouts, the changes in environment and teaching style offered by a charter school can catalyze vast attitude shifts in the psyche of the American student.

Still, one cannot ignore the findings of the Stanford study. How can governments spend large amounts on programs whose results are long-term and nebulous? The answer (a little more concrete this time): Spend more. In many cash-strapped school districts, charter schools receive significantly less funding per student than TPS. Forced to ration resources, charters often settle for low teacher quality, poor facilities and little individualized attention. Without proper funding, a failing charter school is no different than a failing public school. To me, the ability of charter schools to test the hypothetical educational practices and provide real results overshadows their potential failures. If state governments have any interest in investing in their intellectual infrastructure, they should spend more on charter schools—the potential for long-run improvements are too tantalizing to reject.