Despite charter schools being pervasive in the United States, I still run across people who don't know what they are.  Common misconceptions seem to place it in the same category as private schools.  One of the first things I get asked when I say my children go to the Environmental Charter School is how high the tuition is.  That's usually followed by a shocked look when I mention that it's a free public school. So, I thought I would put up this post to bring up some information on Charters and what they are generally.  Each state has its own flavor of Charter regulations, so I can't speak for the detailed rules in each city, but I can at least describe a common thread in Charters.

A Little History

Charter Schools originated in the late 1980s as a way to bring school reform into the forefront by giving teachers 'charters' that would allow them to explore innovations in how school was managed and organized, as well as in approaches to teaching, learning and curriculum that the local school board would not implement.   The charter idea caught on after some experiments relating to the concept inside of Philadelphia schools, and Minnesota became the first state to pass a Charter Law in 1991.  Over the next decade many states followed suit, and the Charter movement spread.

Ok...nice, but what are they really?

Charter schools are schools that have been granted a charter based on whatever law is on the books regarding the authorization of them.  Typically charter schools have to follow only some of the bureaucratic rules of the local public school system and typically only those related to the civil rights and health and safety of students. The charter schools founding groups have the latitude to prepare applications that request charters for creative and innovative school designs.  The charter application, if approved by the authorizing entity, becomes the basis for a charter that the school must strictly adhere to. These charters include academic and non-academic goals the school must meet.  Charters also tend to be reviewed annually, and their charters periodically renewed for a specified period of years (typically every five years),  to make sure that the school is living up to its obligations.   

A charter school is generally not unionized, but it can have a union if a specified percent of the faculty desire to have one.  In cases when a charter school is unionized, the union contract cannot be in conflict with the school’s charter.  In a lot of cases, charter schools cannot afford to pay teachers the same amount as they would be paid in the regular education system because charters only get a percentage of the per student money that the school boards do.  For instance, in Pennsylvania, only 70% of the funds the school district allocates per-pupil for instruction is forwarded to the charter school: http://www.heinz.org/grants_spotlight_entry.aspx?entry=702.  Interestingly, charters still manage to find a pool of good teachers to hire from.  This is because while teachers lose somewhat  in terms of salary, they gain in terms of the ability to teach more creatively and influence the school.  In a good charter, a teacher will help set the direction of the curriculum for their grade if not the school.  Also, charters generally spell out professional development and advancement requirements for the teachers, so they know what to expect from their career advancement if they peruse it.  Finally, charters are not required to have all teachers be certified.  This rule is in conflict with the Federal “No Child Left Behind” law,  which mandates that all teachers must be “highly qualified, in other words certified; it gives charter schools the leeway to hire professional experts in particular fields as adjunct staff to help with the school without forcing them to go through the certification process.  Granted, this could be good and bad depending on how well the professionals are screened, but it is added flexibility the Charters have.

A charter school's curriculum is generally required to be significantly different from the one the public schools use.  The process of getting a charter granted can be onerous, and this particular point is the hardest.  Proof that a charter school has an innovative curriculum, but also that the curriculum is mature enough to be acceptable tends to be a very fine line to walk.  Many charters are rejected several times before being accepted, even when their applications are well developed.

A Board of Trustees runs the charter schools.  This board is separate from the school board, and at least originally, is usually made up of the people who envisioned and created the school.  They have a personal stake in the school's success, with some members even being parents of children at the school.

The Pros and Cons

The pros of a charter school are easy to imagine.  Children can get a richer learning experience with innovative curriculums.  Teachers can help create the scaffolding that those children will use to grow.  The parental involvement tends to be higher at charter schools.  The Board of Trustees watches the performance of the school closely and has public meetings that allow community members to be aware of what's occuring. A good charter school has business and educational partners who all have a vested interest in seeing the students succeed.  The students that go to one of these schools are not required to live in the neighborhood, which gives children near worse public schools the possibility of getting a much better education than they would otherwise be slated for in their assigned schools.  

The cons may be more difficult to imagine.   Charter Schools are, like any other school, the sum of its parts.  If the school doesn't hire a strong principal who upholds the vision and mission of the school, is an expert manager, and an experienced educator, the best teachers may not be selected.  The teachers that are selected may not have the freedom they were looking for.  The Board of Trustees is like any other Board in the sense that eventually the founding members may leave and the board is left with a more political slant which may cause the school to drift away from a focus on its mission and performance.  The charter school may not be meeting the charter's requirements, or it just may not advance students any better or even worse than the public schools do. And even though the entity that originally authorized the charter can, by charter school law, close a school for poor performance, this usually does not happen because of the complex set of politics that ensues when a school is slated to close.  This adds to the hesitancy on the part of the authorizers to approve a charter school. 

Another common argument used by the local school boards against charter schools is that they take money away from the public school boards that might otherwise be used to innovate and better the local school system.  Of course, the return argument is that if they were innovating and working on the schools then there would be no need for charter schools.

Most often the state charter laws do not provide a vehicle for successful charter schools to expand or replicate their schools.  The causes popular charters to have lotteries.  These lotteries tend to be heartbreaking for many families and vindicating for the chosen few who make it in.  With so few charters to choose from, not enough underprivileged students manage to escape going to their local elementary schools, which in many cases means that they're set up to do poorly in schools for most of their lives.  A very poignant account of this very real situation can be seen in the film 'Waiting for Superman': http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/dvd.  

Charter Schools are a Vehicle for Innovation

School boards view charter schools as competition: competition for money, for students, and for teachers.  What they forget is that charter schools are their schools as well.  Charter schools are an expansion of educational programs available in the district and give choice to parents in public schools. Charter schools should be expected to be the living laboratories that bring innovation back into the public school system.  A successful charter school's curriculum should be considered by a public school board as their success.  They can take that curriculum and consider the public school system through the lens of its accomplishments and determine how to effectively merge components of it to make all the local schools better. 

We have all heard of pedagogical education.  In fact, for most of us pedagogy is synonymous with education.  This is not the case.  Pedagogy is a very specific style of teaching that places the teacher at the head of the classroom as the expert and the learners are considered to be blank slates ready to soak up that information.  Rumored to come from the monastic style of education from the middle ages, pedagogy has grown into the most pervasive type of education in the world.

Pedagogical learning completely ignores the fact that human beings, even children, come into a classroom with their own interests and expertise.  They walk in with expectations of finding interesting, or relevant, information.  When they don't find the relevance, those children stop paying attention in the classroom.  This becomes more and more true as we head into the high school years.

Here are some statistics that I found interesting about high school students:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 1 in 5 students of high school age either hold down or are looking for a job: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm

According to the March of Dimes, 3 in 10 girls become pregnant at least once before the age of 20 and about 10% of all live births are from this group: http://www.marchofdimes.com/medicalresources_teenpregnancy.html

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Marijuana use is now ahead of cigarette smoking on some measures (due to decreases in smoking and recent increases in marijuana use). In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. http://drugabuse.gov/infofacts/hsyouthtrends.html

And of course, there are tons more statistics on how hard it is to be a teenager, how many pitfalls high school students have to navigate.  Many students have to work through them without the support of caring parents.  Some have to work through them with parents who care but are working two or three jobs to keep food on the table.  The reality of their lives is one of constantly having to make corrective decisions.  In poverty stricken areas, the reality is one of survival where calculus doesn't factor into their daily struggle and becoming a computer scientist, or perhaps business major, is about as difficult to picture as being the President.

This is where Andragogy is most useful.  Andragogy was originally introduced by Malcolm Knowles as a theory on adult learning.  Note the wording because it makes a huge difference.  Whereas pedagogy is about teaching, Andragogy focuses on learning.  The term has expanded to include other age groups since its inception, but its core tenets stay the same.

The Tenets of Andragogy

The need to know — adult learners need to know why they need to learn something before undertaking to learn it.

Learner self-concept —adults need to be responsible for their own decisions and to be treated as capable of self-direction

Role of learners' experience —adult learners have a variety of experiences of life which represent the richest resource for learning. These experiences are however imbued with bias and presupposition.

Readiness to learn —adults are ready to learn those things they need to know in order to cope effectively with life situations.

Orientation to learning —adults are motivated to learn to the extent that they perceive that it will help them perform tasks they confront in their life situations.

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/knowlesa.htm

How This Applies

As mentioned before, many high school students make daily choices that other parts of the population tend to think of as adult decisions.  They are out on the streets trying to navigate around some rather powerful temptations.  They have jobs because their parents can't make enough to feed them or clothe them. Their experience makes them look at the world in certain ways and gives them certain notions of what's important and what's not.  So, we start to see the relevance of Andragogy.

Rather than presenting information just because it must be presented (pedagogy), the student is shown the relevance of the classroom to his or her life.  With Andragogical curriculums, the children are shown why the material in the class matters on the very first day of class; it is of utmost importance or the class will fail to capture students' attention.

The student's experience is taken into account.  Learning activities are shaped around tasks and ideas that the students can truly contribute to, rather than completely based on a written example that may or may not have any association to their experiences.  Students truly help shape the direction of the examples and see how they apply to their daily lives.  Students are engaged because they can clearly see how their situations are bettered by the information they are learning.

I'll leave you with this wonderful TED video by Charles Leadbeater about how children teach themselves in countries where education is poor if given the right tools and motivation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html

Speaking of radical High School reform, thanks to a friend of mine I was recently introduced to Expeditionary Learning.  Of course, I thought 'Wow, that's neat.  Must be really really new.'  See, I've been hearing about integrated learning and skills-based learning for years, but Expeditionary Learning had somehow not made it onto my radar.  

Boy, was I wrong.

It turns out that Expeditionary learning grew out of the ingenious minds at Harvard.  The base for it was the Outward Bound program, which is an outdoor education program like nothing else out there.  In our high school we had a seven day canoeing Outward Bound adventure near Florida City; it was probably one of the most valuable experiences I had at the time.  Children and adults leave these expeditions feeling more self-assured, aware suddenly that they are capable physically and mentally of things they had never thought they could do.  I highly encourage you to look it up:

http://www.outwardbound.org/

As I was saying before I became sidetracked, Expeditionary Learning came out of this great program.  The first proposal for this different way of running schools was written in 1991!  So it is in no way new.  I felt truly shocked that I hadn't heard of it before. 

Almost twenty years from the date of that first proposal, it sounds like this particular method of learning is having impressive results.  On their website, they list 10 High Schools that had 100% graduation rates last year out of the 47 in their system.  And they have any number of data with outstanding results for their schools against national averages and local district averages.  They also work with schools at every level, though we are only focusing on high school in this blog.  

It seems that they are involved in helping to create Charter Schools, turning around failing schools with the school board's permission, and helping to create new public schools in chool districts.  I'm sure they've had their share of failures with some schools and they probably had a few skinned knees along the way, but after twenty years and endorsements from both the President and the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, as well as winning lots of awards, I'd say they probably have it together.

So...what is it?  Sounds great right?  But what does it mean?  This was a much harder question to answer.  Expeditionary Learning seems a combination of integrated learning curriculums and project-based learning, but including a real world component in the mix.  They go out and create art that is hosted in local galleries.  They learn about prejudice and immigration by meeting real immigrants and speaking with them.  They do fieldwork.  

I still feel like I haven't grasped the whole of their endeavor, but I'm piecing together more.  In terms of the school support, it sounds great.  They perform yearly teacher professional development, really help with the creation of the school and its curriculum, and seem to be very hands-on in general, which is impressive.  They also have teacher resources on their website with best-practices and professional development course catalogs, and information about a fund for teachers to take summer sabbaticals.  

Overall, I am extremely impressed with the information I've found so far.  If you want to do your own digging, the website is:

http://elschools.org

Before reading this, watch the TED Talk below.  It really makes the concept hit home.  Our education system is failing our boys:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

There are some really amazing statistics that she quotes from the 100 girls project:

For every 100 girls that are suspended from school, 250 boys are.

For every 100 girls that are expelled from school, 335 boys are.

For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys.

The numbers go on and on.  We can choose to draw one of two conclusions from this: either the male gender is completely flawed or our education system is not meeting the needs of boys.  Since I, like the speaker, really have a hard time making  the assumption that half of our population is majorly flawed, I opt for the second option.  Clearly, our education system needs an overhaul with regard to helping boys succeed.

Numerous books and articles try to find reasons and solutions for the current crisis:

Richard Whitmire: Why Boys Fail

Michael Gurian, Kathy Stevens: The Minds of Boys: Saving our Sons From Falling behind in School and Life

http://www.newsweek.com/2006/01/29/the-trouble-with-boys.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lori-day/why-boys-are-failing-in-a_b_884262.html

Almost invariably, I see several possible reasons brought up.  Whitmire introduces the concept in his book that schools teach literacy at very young ages and then just assume literacy as children get older.  This is a major disadvantage for boys who tend to be less fluent than girls at younger ages.  Also, boys are clearly more physical by nature, more impulsive, and have less fine motor skills at a young age than girls.  What does this mean?  In a traditional classroom, boys begin to fall behind early and find themselves unable to catch up.  The article in the Huffington Post states the following:

Gurian's book presents statistics that boys get the majority of D's and F's in most schools, create 90 percent of the discipline problems, are four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD and be medicated, account for three out of four children diagnosed learning disabilities, become 80 percent of the high school dropouts, and now make up less than 45 percent of the college population.

So, what can be done?  

The Newsweek article tells of how a middle school decided to experiment with separating boys and girls into single-gender clasrooms.  The teaching then changed to accomodate the different genders.  The results of their experiment:

This fall, the all-girl class did best in math, English and science, followed by the all-boy class and then coed classes.

But, boys do not have to be separated out to have their needs met.  Most of them just require more hands on and physical time.  Frequent recess breaks, being allowed to act out reports and understanding rather than having to sit at a desk and write to show they understood a book. They need to be able to write about topics that they want to write.  

One thing that really hit me from the TED Talk, seeing as I am the mother of two boys, was her comment on writing.  She says that most boys come home and tell their parents they hate writing.   When asked what they had to write about, they talk about writing about poems, what they did over the summer, and journalling nature.  But, she says, boys don't enjoy writing about that.  They want to write about video games, comic book monsters that terrorize cities, and superheroes that come in and beat the bad guys. The issue is that these topics tend to be banned in schools.

I relate to this really well.  My two young boys are very literate, but for the longest time I could not get them to read books.  I couldn't understand why.  I love books, and I had hoped my children would too.  Then, my older son discovered Captain Underpants.  Captain Underpants is a chapter book by Dav Pilkey that has all the sorts of humor that I, as a girl, cringed at.  But, let me tell you, they devoured them.  The books became a gateway for my children to read other things and now both my children crossed into third grade reading Percy Jackson and other books of that level of difficulty.  

When they read those books I was terrified that the school would have an issue with them.  I worried that they would be scolded for the kind of humor included.  Luckily, the charter school they go to had them in the library and seemed to be fine with the children reading the series.  In the school the children were in earlier, this might not have been the case.  

The point is, just from my own life and dealing with my own two children, I can see that she makes a very valid point in regards to writing and the point extends to reading. Neither of my boys wanted to read Beverly Clearly books when forced to at school.  Many of the girls in the classroom loved the assignment.

What does this have to do with High School?

Most of the information addresses the failure in elementary schools to address boys' needs, and that by the age of 13 we've pretty much lost these boys.  So, what does this mean for High School reform?

The research means that, until the issue is resolved, we need to work extra hard to re-integrate the boys into the learning environment.  This presents an incredibly difficult challenge, especially for the ninth grade curriculums.  Not only do the children have to be shown the relevancy of their education and kept engaged, with boys we need to completely re-engage them.  Because literacy tends to only being taught at younger grades, boys who become fluent later than that point may actually need some remediation in the earlier part of High School to be brought back to a level of literacy that most High Schools just assume they have.  

Unfortunately, it is hard to find true information on re-engagement of boys at high school. I assume that much of the work that has been done on re-engaging foster children, economically disadvantaged children, and minorities would be relevant, but I can't be sure.  I do know that any good high school needs to think long and hard about how to accomplish this feat.

Traditional High Schools follow a mentality from the industrial age.  They group students by age and then try to advance all of them in the same exact way.  In doing so, they replicate the assembly line process so popular from that era; however, students are not like the parts of the car, all created the same with similar strengths and weaknesses.  Each individual student is very different.  When we try to group them into broad categories we ignore those differences, and sell almost all students short in one way or another.  Sir Kenneth Robinson has a great TED Talk about just this subject:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Competency-based education is one answer to this issue.  Competency-based education is the idea that education should be taught at the child's level of competency, not their grade level.  When you think about it, it seems like common sense.  Sure, a child who learned a certain level of math should go on to the next level, and if s/he hasn't, then the child should take more time to learn it.  Easy concept, difficult to implement in our current system.  

Because the High School education model is based on large groupings of children with nothing more in common than their age, it does a poor job of meeting any one's needs.  The outliers, children who are far ahead and far behind academically, both suffer, but so do the ones closest to the average for which the system was created. Why?  Because teachers, especially with NCLB are forced to make sure that the ones that are behind meet some minimum standard at the expense, many times, of others who are on grade-level or above.  

Now, I'm not saying that the students that are below grade-level shouldn't have extra help.  They should.  They deserve to succeed as much as any other child; it's just their success should not be at the expense of other children's success.  The competency-based model groups children according to the skills that they have learned which allows all of them to advance in a manner that matches their current ability.

Education Week has the three key pieces of the definition of proficiency-based education as the following:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2010/11/elearning_update_competency-ba.html

While the theory makes sense, and a good strong curriculum based on this model should actually benefit students highly, implementation can be difficult. In many cases, schools that try to follow this system find themselves either unable to truly formulate an appropriate curriculum, or find opposition from parents and students, who are much more comfortable with traditional school roles.  For instance, in Portland the schools decided to experiment with the idea of proficiency-based education with mixed results.  The following article details the challenges and positives that were encountered:

http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2010/02/portland-area_schools_debate_p.html

Because the experiment began with high-school freshmen, the results on State exams are still pending.  They do see students passing classes with proficiency-based curriculums more than prior to the adoption of the system.  They also find that in this implementation the teachers are more exhausted, because continuous feedback and afterschool meetings with students take up more time and energy than traditional schooling.  As with any new system, work must be done to find the correct solutions to these issues.

Several foundations, including the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, have shown interest in giving funding for proficiency-based curriculums.  This is a positive for a couple of reasons.  Clearly, the idea is considered to have enough merit to invest in and explore, allowing schools to get grant money to test this new educational avenue.  Also, this type of interest from large prestigious foundations will spur some consideration of the approach by school boards and in charter grants that might otherwise have ignored it as too controversial.

This is a question that I have asked myself often.  There seem to be so many schools of thought out there on the reform of high school education.  Like anything else, it has wide ranges from conservative reforms that takes change in small bites to wide sweeping liberal reforms that hopes to create greater change all at once.  I'm sure that, like anything else, the truth of what can be accomplished lies somewhere in the middle.  I'm also sure that whether conservative or liberal, we all agree some change needs to be made.  

When we look at reform, we see a lot of debates and a lot of attempts to gather data at very high levels about the way that the school is performing.  This top down approach allows for analysis from outside of the school, but doesn't help the school itself determine how it can use that data to alter its approach proactively rather than waiting to get judgement from the upper levels of the school education system.  So, an easy type of conservative reform is just teaching principals and teachers how to use the data to determine what changes actually make sense for their school rather than going on instinct alone.  

The theory of data-driven High School reform is depicted in the Breaking Ranks document written by Brown University:

 http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/hischlrfm/datdrv_hsrfm.pdf 

The document contains some very interesting case studies on the use of data to guide reform in schools. 

In one school, the team spent a lot of time analyzing the information provided by SOCRATES and discovered some misconceptions they had about student performance at the school. The team had noticed that about 30% of the students were absent more than 40 days and about 30% of students were failing at least one core course. The team’s initial assumption was that the students with low attendance were the ones that were failing. However, when the data were further disaggregated to correlate school attendance with course grades, the team learned that roughly half the students who were failing were attending school regularly and about half the students who were absent more than 40 days were passing, some of them with B’s and C’s. As expressed by the principal, “This created a philosophical and moral dilemma” for the staff. Previously, poor performance was thought to be positively related to poor attendance, but after looking at the data, the team concluded that “half of the students who were in school every day did very poorly.” The data made the staff face the fact that there must be other causes for students’ poor performance.

Just some simple guidance on correlation and the school learned how erroneous their assumptions were.  The data helped staff look in a different direction.  Once again, this is simple reform to implement that causes quite an impact. This is not to say that there isn't better reform out there, but the beauty of this one is that it can be school-driven rather than having to depend on the School Board or Department of Education to allocate funds.