State Caps and Charter Schools

Calls for removing caps that limit the number of start ups of new charter schools have landed support this year from two important voices, including that of President Barack Obama, who, in March, cited the innovation charter schools bring to the country’s educational landscape.

The other important voice was that of Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who in January urged New York and other states to drop their caps and increase funding. He too cited educational innovation and improved teacher effectiveness as benefits of the charter-school movement.

Charter school caps challenges these benefits.  They limit the number of charter schools allowed in a state and place restrictions on individual authorizers of charters; still other caps restrict the numbers of students a charter school can have. Considered arbitrary by professionals in the movement, caps fail to take into consideration school quality, academic achievement and progress of students enrolled in charter schools and proponents of charter schools worry that caps will stymie efforts to improve public education.

Why we Have Caps

Existing caps can be traced to early opponents of charter schools: public school boards, their administrators and financial managers feared a draining of quality students and significant loss of public funds; teacher unions worried that non-unionized teachers would gain an advantage; and politicians were concerned about threats to the traditional pubic funding mission of government. All worried that students of low socioeconomic families and the disabled would be turned away from charter schools, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.

In some states, if not all, caps also exist to limit charters’ share of money.  While the pros and cons are debated about the repercussions of caps, the important questions about charter schools are overshadowed, their growth and improvement stunted, and their benefits overlooked.

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), 26 states and the District of Columbia currently have caps.  The number of schools allowed in each state is often tied to political motivations such as policy-makers being concerned with how charter schools will affect the school district as a whole.

Arguments most often cited in cap debates don't go deep enough, noted Andrew J. Rotherham in "Smart Charter School Caps," a study published in September 2007 by Education Sector, an independent education policy think tank in Washington, D.C.

"Unfortunately, the debate about charter schools rarely accounts for such performance variation, just as charter caps do not differentiate between good schools and lousy schools," he wrote.

Rotherham's conclusions call for the removal of the politically and emotionally charged caps now in force and the implementation of "smart caps," in which charter school successes and failures would be monitored. "Smart charter caps," he wrote, would allow "for deliberate capacity-driven growth," would direct new resources to high-achieving schools and "work within today's political reality." Poor-achieving or financially troubled schools, under such an approach, could be shut down to maintain efficient charter-school numbers within jurisdictions.

Benefits of Removal

While arguments to maintain caps reappear repeatedly in media coverage, supporting data to do so is rarely offered that compares academic assessments of traditional public and charter schools. Such studies provided conflicting results or failed to find significant differences.

Charter school supporters say their schools offer a diversity of schooling options, reduce public funding because they receive on average 22 percent less than traditional schools, provide comparable or superior instruction, cater to minority students and meet demands by parents. Caps have only stifled these improvements from reaching more students and led to waiting lists of thousands of students, particularly in Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

According to a national poll cited by the NAPCS and conducted in April 2008, 77 percent of registered voters favored giving parents more options for where to send their children to school.  Removing caps on charters would only increase these options as the numbers of charters grow within each state.

Another surfacing argument to remove caps is that competition for students will drive overall improvement in schools across the board.  This argument also appeared in North Carolina's General Assembly in March, when a trio of Democrats, responding to a Republican call to lift or expand the state's cap, said they would support the move if existing schools were shown to be functioning fully, reported the Durham Herald-Sun.

"It will remove some money from our traditional schools, but these [charter schools] are public schools [too]," said State Rep. Verla Insko about the proposal. "The traditional [school districts] should not be afraid of the competition from charter schools."

President Obama’s vision for education includes the removal of caps.  In his March speech to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he criticized state caps that limit new charter schools without consideration of student progress. "That isn’t good for our children, our economy or our country,” he said.

Nelson Smith, NAPCS president and chief executive officer, praised Obama's remarks: “With 365,000 students on charter waiting lists, there is no excuse for state laws that stifle the growth of these schools. President Obama has taken a bold step by challenging states to get on the reform bandwagon. He’s right to couple the promise of growth with a demand for accountability -- and nowhere will you find stronger support for high-quality chartering than in the charter movement itself."

With support from our new president, charter caps may yet begin to go by the wayside.  Were this to happen, increased charter school numbers would not be the only benefit.  Administrators and others could then focus more energy on accountability, improving charters already innovative service the education in America.

(Sources: http://www.publiccharters.org/aboutschools/factsheet; http://www.publiccharters.org; http://www.publiccharters.org/node/786; http://www.educationsector.org; http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/Pages/2009-bill-gates-annual-letter.aspx; http://cell.uindy.edu/transformingeducation/charterschoolstudy.php)