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By Susan Caba
Charter
school quality—and ways to reach and maintain high standards—was
the topic of the latest session of the St. Louis Regional Education
Roundtable, a collaborative of community and civic organizations
dedicated to improving education in the St. Louis region.
"We want
to encourage a much more robust, well-developed and mature oversight
structure," said Aaron North, of the Missouri Charter School
Association. "We want to educate schools and sponsors about
the resources that are available."
Composed of
advocates of charter schools, the most recent panel focused on
successful strategies for evaluating and holding charter schools,
their administrative boards and their sponsors accountable for
providing consistently high quality education.
"Since
the first Missouri charter school opened in 1999 (there are 28
in the state), they have essentially operated in isolation from
one another," said North. "We wanted to help schools
understand what resources are available. We want to engage them
with one another."
Creating clear
standards for evaluation and holding schools accountable for results
are the keys to successful schools, the panelists said.
Panelist Jennifer
G. Sneed, Ph.D. and senior vice president of the Charter Schools
Institute at the State University of New York (SUNY), told the
audience of business and civic leaders that her organization sponsors
and evaluates almost half of New York's 96 charter schools.
"What
SUNY has in place is a system for guaranteeing accountability
in exchange for academic autonomy," she said. "And over
the years, our standards have been ratcheted upÑin fact, the standards
are higher than those for district schools."
As a sponsor,
SUNY requires each prospective charter school to develop an accountability
plan with, for starters, the goal of having 75 percent of the
students reaching academic proficiency. The schools are visited
and evaluated annually. They are provided explicit guidelines
regarding how they will be evaluated.
"You
can't do what's expected if you don't know what's expected,"
she said.
On its website,
the Institute provides sample accountability reports with explicit
examples, such as:
GOAL:
All City Center Charter School students will become proficient
readers of the English language.
Absolute
Measure: Each year, 75 percent of third through fifth graders
who are enrolled in at least their second year will perform at
or above Level 3 on the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP)
ELA assessment.
The 19-page
sample report goes on to spell out results and how they were measured.
In addition
to academic excellence, the Institute assesses how a school is
managed by its board and administration and how well it is doing
financially. Every year, the schools are asked not only to assess
the previous year's performance, but also to "reflect directly
and carefully on whether it is moving along the road to renewalÑand
even more importantly, toward excellence."
Charter schools
are publicly funded schools, open to any student who wants to
attend. Each is governed by its own board, responsible for academics,
administration and finances. The school operates under a contract
(charter) with a sponsoring organization (also called an "authorizer").
Sponsors, usually a university, supervise and evaluate the schools.
If the school is failing, its charter may not be renewed.
The idea is
to provide a structure and curriculum tailored to students with
particular needs—for example, a less structured or more-structured
academic day or classes focused on international affairs or vocational
training.
In St. Louis,
said North, almost 20 percent of the public school students attend
a charter school. Missouri has 28 charter schools, all in Kansas
City and St. Louis. By contrast, Minnesota has 150. Forty states
and the District of Columbia have charter schools. Some of those
states have highly developed oversight structures for the schools.
North's organization,
as well as the National Association of Charter Authorizers (NACA)
aim to create similar standards and procedures. Missouri will
soon be added to NACA's priority list of just four states to receive
the organization's most focused efforts.
"The
goal is for the schools to always get better," said North,
"to be able to measure the progress that each student makes
from the beginning of the year to the end of the year."
In New York,
said Sneed, charter schools have gotten better—in fact, the
standards have become so high that the first charter schools might
not have been approved under the current standards.
"We have
learned a lot through the application and renewal process,"
she said. "You never want a school to fail—we really
look across the breadth of evidence as we evaluate a school. It's
about results."
The St. Louis
Regional Education Roundtable is a region-wide collaborative of
community and civic organizations focused on finding best practice
education policy solutions for the St. Louis Region. Each month,
its Gateway to Twenty-First Century Education panel addresses
a different topic. The Roundtable plans to compile information
gathered at these sessions into a regional report with suggestions
for reforming the education system in the St. Louis region. Previous
sessions have focused on issues such as vouchers and tax credits,
special needs programs and early childhood programs. Future programs
will address after-school programs, open enrollment, teacher incentives
and recruitment, and school finance. the rcga is a civic partner
in the roundtable.
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