Every year, Newsweek publishes a list of the country’s best high schools. This year’s list was accompanied by an analysis of the performance of charter schools when compared to their regular public-school counterparts. As so many others have tried to do, the piece attempts to gauge whether the national “charter experiment” is working.
Charter schools are public schools that have the freedom to try new things, from methods of teaching and instruction to the length of the school day and year. In Nevada, R&R Partners has worked with the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy charter school since its creation 10 years ago. Founded when Nevada’s charter school movement was in its relative infancy, Agassi Prep has been the poster child for the successes and challenges faced by charters. The school has also been a leader in helping to shape the state’s charter-school legislation to ensure that state laws don’t interfere with what we are all trying to accomplish – innovation and the overall improvement of all public schools.
The article refers to a study by Stanford University, which found that 37 percent of charter schools produce worse academic results than their public counterparts, and only 17 percent outperform them. In a vacuum, these results may be cause for concern. However, the author also points to the possible reason for these results: while some states have laws that make it easy to create a charter school, they fall short with respect to closing down those that shouldn’t be in business. Any charter school administrator worth his or her salt would agree that certain standards should be met in order for a school’s charter to be renewed.
It is difficult, though, if not impossible to assess the success or failure of the “charter movement” based on studies such as this one. Every charter school has its own ways of operating. Each has its own unique teachers, administrators, lesson plans, curricula and different state laws with which to comply. The very flexibility these schools are given is what makes them an incubator for other public schools – we should learn from them what works and what doesn’t, and improve all public-school education according to these lessons.
