Overview: Charter Schools

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From the course by The University of Chicago

Critical Issues in Urban Education

35 ratings

The University of Chicago

Critical Issues in Urban Education

35 ratings

Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy. We will consider three broad topics in this course: 1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform? 2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools? 3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability? Learning Goals This course will enable participants to: 1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States; 2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling; 3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy. Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.

From the lesson

Charter Schools

This week, we will focus our attention on charter schools. We will explore the history of charter schools in the United States, examining fundamental questions about their theory of action and effectiveness. In these lectures, we will gain critical knowledge about how charter schools came to be, whether they are effective, and why they are so controversial.

Overview: Charter Schools5:21

Meet the Instructors

Sara Ray Stoelinga
Sara Liston Spurlark Director and Clinical Professor
Urban Education Institute

[MUSIC]

Today we're going to continue with our discussion of School Choice, and

to start, i'm going to go back and

remind you of where we are in the kind of unit overview of the School Choice unit.

You'll recall that the last set of segments was focused on

a summary of the school choice issues.

Today, we're going to be talking more specifically about charter schools.

And learning more both about the theory of action of charter schools,

the kind of history behind them, and some of the controversy or

disagreement about the ways in which charter schools

are improving schools experiences and improving outcomes for students or not.

So to start with, I've picked out a couple of quotes that I think illustrate

the divergent opinions about charter schools, and these are two well known

leaders expressing their viewpoints on what charter schools accomplish and

in some ways I think gives a high level flavor of what some of the disagreement of

what charter schools are and what they're accomplishing, or not.

And so in the first quote, really highlighting this idea of charter schools

being kind of centers of innovation, of kind of giving

schools more space to innovate without the kind of restrictions that come along

with the typical kind of public school setting, or typical school system setting.

And also emphasizing the need for a set of strong accountability factors

to ensure that only high quality charter schools persist in the education space.

And then the second quote focusing on one of the kind of critiques of charter

schools, of whether or not this actually leads to increased segregation,

or kind of separating haves and have nots in the school system.

And so you see in this both the issues, the underlying issues around charter

schools, but also the kind of strength of the emotion and

the emotional aspects of this debate which I think are really strong.

So in this segment I'm just going to provide a high level overview of what

charter schools are, and then we'll move into the different lenses and

digging deeper into each aspect of the historical lens,

the summary lens, and the analytical lens.

I think the important thing to understand about charter schools is that they

are public schools.

I think there's a common misconception.

You often hear people say charter schools and public schools, but

it's important to understand that charter schools are public schools.

And they are public schools because they receive public money.

So the same kind of stream of per pupil expenditures that come along with

each individual student that we discussed in the foundational tenets lectures,

go to charter schools, as well as to traditional public schools.

What differentiates charter schools Is a set of autonomies or

what I'm calling autonomies.

Meaning, charter schools have control or are autonomous from

a set of requirements that traditional public schools have about how they spend

their money, about how they select their professionals and

about how they organize themselves relative to the accountability systems

that occur at the district and the state level.

So, these autonomies are what characterize and

kind of define what a charter school is.

We're going to go into more detail on this but, overall in the United States charter

schools only educate about 5% of the overall student population and so

in some respects the lenses on this, there is a perception that

charter schools have educate a very large proportion of students.

And while that is the case in some states and localities,

overall It's just 5% of students that are a part of charter schools.

The theory of action behind charter schools is this idea of removing some of

the constraints and removing some of the requirements

that traditional public schools have in order to increase innovation, in order to

promote competition between schools and in order to give students and parents

more options in terms of the educational settings that they have available to them.

We're going to talk in more detail about all of these summary pieces.

The types of autonomies that charter schools have,

about how we understand the prevalence of charter schools over time.

And also digging into these perceptions of the theory of action and whether or

not charter schools actually kind of live up to that theory of action.

So we'll move into next into the historical lens and then that will be

followed by the summary lens, and the analytical lens on charter schools.

[MUSIC]

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