Charter school models
Links to research and articles about charter school models including free schools and academies.
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 Charter schools on Wikipedia Charter schools are primary or secondary schools that receive public money (and like other schools, may also receive private donations) but are not subject to some of the rules regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school's charter. While charter schools provide an alternative to other public schools, they are part of the public education system and are not allowed to charge tuition. Where enrollment in a charter school is oversubscribed, admission is frequently allocated by lottery-based admissions systems. However, the lottery is open to all students. |
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Charter schools for New Zealand An investigation designed to further the debate in New Zealand on education policy in general and on charter schooling in particular. Education Policy Response ,Massey University College of Education, April 2012. (via Scoop website) ...Unless the government proceeds with care, it is quite likely that the charter school experiment, far from improving our education system, will be another costly mistake which will lead to further inequality in educational achievement and leave our most vulnerable children at the mercy of the market. If this is so, history will judge the National led Government (2011-2014) harshly as being so ideologically driven that it left our education system much worse than when it inherited it. |
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Decentralization in New Zealand By Ben Levin, Phi Delta Kappan (1 November 2011). In 1989, New Zealand embarked on a dramatic decentralization of its education system, part of a much larger set of changes across all public services in the country. Each school was given a large degree of independence, including having its own charter, governing board, budget, and control over staffing and facilities. This was one of the most radical decentralizations in the world; it drew a great deal of international attention in its early years as other systems considered such a move. |
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NZ near top in OECD education figures Dominion Post 6 December 2011 New Zealand's education system has won major praise with it nearing the top in literacy, mathematics and science according to a highly recognised international assessment system. But the data points to some alarming gaps in New Zealand - especially socio-economic. |
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Freeschools - UK Dept for Education Free Schools are all-ability state-funded schools set up in response to what local people say they want and need in order to improve education for children in their community. |
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About Academies - UK Dept for Education Some academies, generally those set-up to replace underperforming schools, will have a sponsor. Sponsors come from a wide range of backgrounds including successful schools, businesses, universities, charities and faith bodies. Sponsors are held accountable for the improving the performance of their schools. |
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Sharples opposes charter school trial Waatea News: Monday, 19th December, 2011 Maori Party co-leader and Associate Education Minister Pita Sharples says that South Auckland is the worst place in the country to experiment with charter schools. The coalition deal between ACT and National includes piloting state funded schools in South Auckland and Wellington to be run by business or faith-based groups. Dr Sharples says charter schools are likely to draw off the best students from neighbouring schools. |
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The toughest of the tough (13 January 2012) Times Education Supplement (TES) hosted on Future Leaders website ES journalist William Stewart visited exemplary schools in Philadelphia last October, accompanying Future Leaders and headteachers as part of the annual study tour. |
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Q&A: Academies and free schools (BBC) BBC (July 2010) Academies are publicly funded schools which operate outside of local authority control. The government describes them as independent state-funded schools. Essentially, academies have more freedom than other state schools over their finances, the curriculum, and teachers' pay and conditions. Free schools are schools which will be set up by groups of parents, teachers, charities, trusts, religious and voluntary groups. They will be set up as academies and will be funded in the same way - directly from central government |
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Chatter about the charter - Stuart Middleton Stuart Middleton, EdTalkNZ (2 February 2012) I really thought that the whole Charter School thing would simply die away but no, the Government is keen to pursue the idea. Well let’s get a few things straight. The development of Charter Schools in other countries was intended to produce a new kind of school that could challenge the conventional schools. So what are the key characteristics of a Charter School? |
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World education rankings: which country does best at reading, maths and science? Guardian (7 December 20100 The OECD's comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA, is out. Find out how each country compares. |
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Quality Control In Charter School Research Posted by Matthew Di Carlo on May 18, 2012 There’s a fairly large body of research showing that charter schools vary widely in test-based performance relative to regular public schools, both by location as well as subgroup. Yet, you’ll often hear people point out that the highest-quality evidence suggests otherwise – i.e., that there are a handful of studies using experimental methods (randomized controlled trials, or RCTs) and these analyses generally find stronger, more uniform positive charter impacts. |
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We must now have an open debate about privatisation Guardian, Fiona Millar (13 Feb 2012) A close look at the latest league tables shows academies are no better, and often worse, than maintained schools, says Fiona Millar. Finally, the academy myth is well and truly busted by this data. In spite of all the political capital, funding, new buildings, glossy websites and fancy blazers, on close inspection their results overall appear no better, and in most cases are worse, than their maintained school counterparts. |
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Tomorrow’s schools: Yesterday’s mistake? PPTA (2008) This paper looks at the case made for Tomorrow’s Schools in 1989 and examines where we are now. It asks whether the policy has delivered improvements in respect of educational achievement, self-management, fairness, democracy and value for the taxpayer’s dollar. It notes there is no evidence of educational gains attributable to the Tomorrow’s Schools revolution and that there are signs that self-management in a competitive environment has had the effect of boosting mistrust, parochialism, duplication and waste. |
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The Transformation of a School System (RAND) Principal, Teacher, and Parent Perceptions of Charter and Traditional Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans by J. Steele, G. Vernez, M. Gottfried, M.Schwam-Baird (2011). Hurricane Katrina set the stage for a transformation of public education in New Orleans, replacing the city's existing school system with a decentralized choice-based system of both charter and district-run schools. Using principal, teacher, and parent surveys administered three years after Katrina, this study examined schools' governance and operations, educational contexts, educator quality and mobility, and parental choice and involvement. The authors note that questions still remain about the variation in schools' policies and practices in the wake of the reform and about parents' experiences in an environment of school choice |
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Six public high schools, six years after the storm: 450 Student Voices from Inside New Orleans’ Educational Experiment (2011) From the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans (VAYLA). After Hurricane Katrina, education officials and lawmakers promised to build a New Orleans public school system capable of delivering a “world-class” education to all students. For six years, students in New Orleans public schools have waited patiently for the delivery of this promise. |
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Multiple choice: Charter school performance in 16 states CREDO report Stanford University (2009) The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools. These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the future. |
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Policy Brief: The Evidence On Charter Schools And Test Scores Shanker Institute (December 2011) Overall, after more than 20 years of proliferation, charter schools face the same challenges as regular public schools in boosting student achievement, and future research should continue to focus on identifying the policies, practices and other characteristics that help explain the wide variation in their results. |
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The Evidence On Charter Schools Shanker Institute (14 Nov 2011) In our fruitless, deadlocked debate over whether charter schools “work,” charter opponents frequently cite the so-called CREDO study , a 2009 analysis of charter school performance in 16 states. The results indicated that overall charter effects on student achievement were negative and statistically significant in both math and reading, but both effects sizes were tiny. Given the scope of the study, it’s perhaps more appropriate to say that it found wide variation in charter performance within and between states – some charters did better, others did worse and most were no different. On the whole, the size of the aggregate effects, both positive and negative, tended to be rather small. |
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The Relatively Unexplored Frontier Of Charter School Finance Matt Di Carlo (3 May 2012) Do charter schools do more – get better results – with less? If you ask this question, you’ll probably get very strong answers, ranging from the affirmative to the negative, often depending on the person’s overall view of charter schools. The reality, however, is that we really don’t know. |
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