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By Lee Sherman

Customized schools matching local needs and expressing founders' philosophies are sprouting up in communities across Alaska, Idaho and Oregon

There's a new breed of pioneer in the Northwest. Descendants of the fur traders, gold miners, and homesteaders of the 1800s are turning their adventurous spirit toward another groundbreaking endeavor: Creating schools from scratch.

Charter schools are the educational equivalent of the Oregon Trail. The details are different: The covered wagons are likely to be minivans and U-Haul trucks. The supplies aren't bacon, hardtack, and buckshot, but pencils, textbooks, and software. Dangers aren't cholera, whitewater, or unseasonal snowfall but rent increases on crummy facilities, philosophical divisions among founders, and hostile editorials in local newspapers.

But the trailblazers of yesterday and today share the same goal — to find a place with room to breathe and to build, free of the old rules and constraints. The journey is long and arduous, with no guarantee of success. But for those educational explorers who can hang on, the destination is sweet.

"Building a warm, nurturing community within these human-scale schools, which average fewer than 200 students, is quite rewarding," observes Professor Bruce Fuller of the University of California at Berkeley. Within this "colorful garden of charter schools," he says, one can find "inventive pedagogy, strong ways of raising kids, and educators who are unsurpassed in their commitment to learning and to a variety of moral values."

The charter school made its debut in the U.S. exactly a decade ago. That's when Minnesota passed the nation's first law allowing educators and parents to open public schools under contract with a local school district or university. For-profit businesses may be hired to run the schools. The idea caught on and quickly spread. Today, 37 states have charter laws — three of them in the Northwest. But the region has lagged behind such quick starters as Arizona, California, and Michigan, which together have more than 750 of the nation's 2,000 charter schools. In contrast, Alaska, Idaho, and Oregon can claim only 35 charters, total. Washington and Montana have yet to join the movement.

The rapid spread of this innovation across vast geographic and political divides is a testament to its adaptability. Like a chameleon, the charter concept changes colors wherever it lands. In the howling winds of the Alaskan tundra, where native families are struggling to hold onto an ancient way of life, a charter school can become an immersion program for Yup'ik culture and language. In the dense forests and frozen fjords of southeast Alaska, where annual rainfall is measured in feet, a charter school can become a conservatory where children make music and art against winter's storms. Across the Gulf of Alaska on the oil-rich Kenai Peninsula, where commercial fishing families are being driven out of a dying industry, a charter school can become a rigorous prep school where "the basics" include Latin and Greek.

In short, a charter school can be just about anything for just about anyone. It's an idea whose time has come. Parents are dissatisfied. Teachers are disillusioned. Students are dispirited. Universities and employers are dismayed with the products of the public schools. New options have never looked better. As school choice goes, charters have a much broader appeal than their kissing cousins, vouchers. First, charters (along with the kids they serve and the per-pupil dollars they spend) stay in the public system. Vouchers, on the other hand, take money out of the public system and give it to private schools. And that's where the second big point comes in: charters can't be granted for religious instruction. Vouchers can. Liberals and conservatives, who will never agree on vouchers, have a rare meeting of the minds on charters.

"Republicans like the charter idea because it offers greater choice," The Economist reported in 1994. "Democrats like it because it keeps within the bounds of free public education."

Charters have clearly captured the imagination of education professionals and consumers alike. But as the movement enters its second decade, huge question marks loom: Can charters and regular public schools coexist happily? Will teacher unions tolerate charters' looser rules about certification, seniority, hours, and other employment issues? Do charters inadvertently promote segregation of ethnic groups? And, finally, the two vital questions beating at the very heart of the charter school movement — Do charters spawn true innovation? And do they reach new heights in student achievement?

The answers to these questions will, in the end, decide the fate of this burgeoning reform effort. For now, promoters and detractors alike are watching the research base grow and wondering where it will all lead.

To Realize a Vision

The motives for starting charter schools are as different as the schools themselves. In a 1999 evaluation report on Michigan charter schools, researchers Jerry Horn and Gary Miron identified the five most popular reasons as:

1. Dissatisfaction by a group of parents with the educational program being provided by the local district

2. Opportunity to obtain a more stable financial base for a private school

3. Personal mission of one or more individuals to develop a school with a particular emphasis

4. Opportunity to create a school designed to be safer

5. Opportunity to create a financial profit by one or more entities in the private sector

The first-year report of the National Study of Charter Schools sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Educational Research and Improvement identifies three general categories of charter founders: grassroots organizations of parents, teachers, and community members; entrepreneurs; and existing schools converting to charter status. This study found three slightly different top motives for starting charters, but overlapping the five above:

1. Two out of three newly created charter schools set out to realize an educational vision

2. Twenty percent of newly created charter schools were developed to serve a special population of students including at-risk, language minority, disabled, or ethnic and racial minority students

3. One-fifth of the surveyed schools cited autonomy with respect to personnel matters, educational programming, state laws, and independence in financial management

In the earliest years, founders had to scrape up money for start-up costs from personal funds, private donors, and banks that were willing to take a chance on an untried idea. But with three-fourths of the states now on the charter bandwagon and a half-million kids enrolled, federal start-up funds are making it far easier to found a school. Setting a goal of 3,000 charter schools nationwide, former President Clinton earmarked several hundred million dollars during his administration for planning, development, and start-up.

"There are certain things you have to tackle early — the right lawyers, a financial plan, a purchasing process," senior policy analyst David DeSchryver with the Center for Education Reform told Education Week in June. "It's a little harder on the budget because it's money spent up-front, but you have to have these things in place if you're going to be successful."

But federal money, which always comes with some strings attached, poses a dilemma for charter supporters. For while government largesse has helped fuel the movement, those encumbering twists of government red tape are exactly what charter schools were designed to avoid. In order to innovate, schools must not be bound by rules and regs that stifle experimentation, advocates argue. So while start-up cash is welcome, some critics charge that the feds might "love charter schools to death" by getting too involved. A conservative think tank called the Lexington Institute recently offered a series of proposals for "ways the federal government can further promote charter schools without squelching their development," Education Week reported in May. Among the proposals:

• Shielding charter schools from teacher-certification requirements, which prevent schools from hiring professionals from other fields who lack traditional training.

• Improving the availability of facilities, which is often the biggest obstacle to starting up charter school. This could include help in financing or freeing up second-hand facilities, such as buildings previously used as post offices, military bases, or other public schools.

• Extending grants beyond the first three years of a charter school's existence because some schools need more time to "gain necessary traction."

"Washington must maintain the right middle ground between neglect and smothering," Lexington's Vice President Don Soifer says. "It will be a difficult balancing act."

Old Meets New

Some observers and writers have noted another interesting twist in the charter school phenomenon. Charters, they say, are pushing the envelope backward as well as forward — reclaiming a Rockwell-esque idea of the old village school while blasting off into a Buck Rogers future, destination unknown. Many charter operators have looked to the past for inspiration, getting "back to basics" with direct instruction in phonics, grammar, math facts, and computation. Others feel the pull of small classes, close-knit school "families," and a return to character or values education and stricter discipline. Historian David Tyack suggests that charter advocates may be "reinventing the one-room schoolhouse," reports Fuller, editor of a new book of case studies from Harvard University Press, Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization. Fuller himself takes the notion even farther when he talks about the return to "tribalism" he sees in the charter movement — and the dangers it can pose to the public school system.

"If charter schools are essentially to serve the 'tribal' agendas of well-off white parents, faithful home schoolers, La Raza devotees, black nationalists, even Mormons and Muslims, then why would society continue to support the public purposes that hold together public education?" he posits. "And once we all win our own private places, like private clubs surrounded by high walls, who will be left behind to rely on public spaces?"

This fear — that charter schools will become "limited oases" or "elite campuses of excellence that will doom large numbers of children left out to mediocre education" — is just one of many concerns voiced by skeptics, notes the Little Hoover Commission in its 1996 study of charter schools in California. The report, The Charter Movement: Education Reform School by School, cites a widespread uneasiness over intended or unintended results of charter schools: Some critics, for instance, "worry that charter schools are a backdoor way of subsidizing religious teachings. Some unions believe that employees' rights will not be adequately protected and that hard-won benefits will disappear. Education administrators, deeply engrained with the habit of procedural accountability, believe that relaxed or nonexistent rules are an invitation to corruption, graft, and scandal."

A handful of charter schools have indeed gone down in a blaze of infamy. But the real threat to the health of the movement, many observers agree, is the accountability question. Charters have staked their lives on a simple-sounding trade-off: autonomy for accountability. The argument goes something like this: A school can't excel if it's mired in bureaucratic muck. Free us from the mess and we'll soar to unimagined heights of educational innovation and academic achievement.

But reality has a way of tangling up the simplest ideas. All tied up in this trade-off are some of the messiest questions in education. What, for example, is the best measure for student achievement? Standardized tests? Portfolios? Dissertations? Orations? If a school's approach is unique — soaring way beyond the usual answer-the-questions-at-the-back-of-the-book practices — does it make sense to have kids mulling over multiple-choice questions on discrete bits of knowledge? How can districts or states compare student scores across the board when one school stresses music, another phonics, and a third environmental studies? If schools rely on standardized tests, are they in danger of molding instruction to the test, thereby defeating their main mission of innovation?

A lot of charter schools are stuck on this pile of question marks without a solid plan for demonstrating student achievement that is measurable, practical, and applicable to their program. Depending on the state, charter contracts give schools anywhere from three to 15 years to show positive results, thus fulfilling the terms of their charter. The concept is built on what former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn calls "market-style mechanisms" that "regulate" the quality of education. In the free marketplace of schools competing for kids and dollars, this argument goes, only the strong will survive.

"If flaky people are operating a school with a weird curriculum, or money is squandered, or test scores are sagging," Finn and colleagues recently wrote in Education Week, the school's clients (parents and students) should have ready access to that information. Then, "either the school shapes up or finds itself without students (or its charter renewal). Conversely, a school that works well will find people beating a path to its doors."

But not everyone has Finn's rock-solid faith in the education marketplace.

"The rhetoric is that if you don't produce good results, you'll be closed down," Paul Herdman, a graduate student at Harvard University graduate school of education, told Education Week. "The reality is that virtually no schools have been shut down."

The Gordian knot of accountability will not be untangled anytime soon.

"Educators and policymakers have yet to agree on how the publicly financed but largely independent schools should be held accountable for their results," reporter Jeff Archer wrote in Education Week. "Pressure to reach some consensus on the issue is mounting," Archer said, noting that even as staunch a charter supporter as Clinton admitted that holding schools to the terms of their contract is hugely problematic.

"The one problem we have right now," Clinton said in a speech last spring, "is that not every state has had the right kind of accountability for the charter schools. Some states have laws that are so loose that no matter whether the charter schools are doing their jobs or not, they just get to stay open, and they become like another bureaucracy. Unfortunately, I think even worse, some states have laws that are so restrictive, it's almost impossible to open a charter school in the first place."

In response to a survey finding that accountability is the topmost priority for charter schools nationwide, a group of charter school and assessment experts have formed the National Charter School Accountability Network. Its goals are to help schools meet demonstrable performance standards and to improve state and local government oversight of charters, Ed Week reports. In its practical 1998 publication, Accountability for Student Performance: An Annotated Resource Guide for Shaping an Accountability Plan for Your Charter School, the network lays out key issues schools must tackle, along with useful resources to guide the process. (Find it on the Web at www.charterfriends.org/performance.html.)

"We can't, as a movement, allow charlatans and weak providers to get charter schools," says John Ayers, director of Leadership for Quality Education, a business-supported reform group in Chicago.

By Any Other Measure

Some researchers offer a bleak assessment of charter schools' track record so far.

"Charters have yet to demonstrate a broad ability to boost children's learning through more effective classroom practices, to nurture more accountable schools, or to create competitive pressures on still moribund urban systems," Fuller asserts.

Thomas Good and Jennifer Braden of the University of Arizona, who authored a study for the National School Boards Association called Charting a New Course, as well as a book titled The Great School Debate, concur. "A representative review of available studies suggests that charter schools have not had an immediate, dramatic effect on student achievement, as promised by many of their early proponents."

But, as the Little Hoover Commission notes, it's just too soon to make a fair judgment. "Charter schools have been operational too short a time to track achievement in a meaningful fashion," the commission insists.

If it's too soon to gauge achievement gains, by what other qualities may we judge today's charter movement? Here, the commission's view is hopeful: "By many other measures, these schools are successful." Based on its site visits and extensive research in California, the commission found that, "while the academic results are not yet clear, charter schools can be judged at least a partial success on the basis of a variety of criteria." Below, in the commission's words, are some of its conclusions:

• Test scores and other pupil assessment tools. Many schools have documented single-year improvements and are making progress on alternative assessment tools, such as portfolios and performance requirements. Without a statewide test and performance benchmarks, however, it is difficult to hold charter schools to a standard that is nonexistent for other schools.

• Parental satisfaction. The student population in charter schools is there by choice, meaning that parental satisfaction can be measured to a large degree by how many students continue to attend the school. Almost all charter schools have waiting lists for admission, and most have a high rate of retention year to year.

• Fiscal prudence and economical value. Many charter schools have found ways to cut corners and trim costs in order to redirect resources into the classroom. The examples range from saving a few hundred dollars by purchasing services from outside the district to saving thousands of dollars by streamlining cafeteria processes and using creative staffing.

• Academic innovation. Not only are charter schools different from their district noncharter counterparts, but very few resemble each other. Academic approaches range from Montessori and Waldorf to humanistic and open. Some schools share quarters with mainstream schools, while others inhabit industrial or business complexes. And some have no walls, relying on computer modems.

• Enhanced opportunities for teachers. In many charter schools, teachers drive policy, shaping curriculum, networking for continuity, and controlling working conditions.

• Increased focus on low-achieving students. Large urban charter schools and many independent study charter schools focus on low-achieving students, bringing them programs designed to meet their needs.

• Avoidance of discrimination. Despite fears that charter schools would be formed mostly in white, affluent areas, charter schools have demonstrated an ethnic balance that reflects that found in statewide schools. Some of the largest cater to students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.

• Consequences for performance. A performance-based system that did not follow through with consequences would soon be too weak to stop abuses and poor results. In California's charter system, the price of failure is revocation — and in one instance, when a charter did not live up to its commitments, it was shut down by the sponsoring district. If charter school founders are indeed the educational pioneers of the 21st century, their journey is barely out of the staging area. But there's a hint of newness in the air and a glimpse of something hopeful on the horizon. Most observers believe this is one school reform that will stay the course. But caution is the watchword.

"High hopes must be tempered with sound evaluation and unrelenting attention to evidence," writes Fuller. "The skeletal remains of earlier generations of 'reform' already litter the dusty plains of public education."

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