Miron, Gary, and Nelson, Christopher. (2002). What's Public About Charter Schools?

	Miron, Gary, and Nelson, Christopher. (2002). What's Public About Charter Schools?: Lessons Learned About Accountability and Choice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Pp. xi +242 $65.95 (Cloth)         ISBN 0-7619-4537-7 $24.95 (Paper)         ISBN 0-7619-4538-5 Reviewed by Jeanne Ellsworth Plattsburgh State University October 24, 2002 What's Public About Charter Schools? Lessons Learned About Choice and Accountability by Gary Miron and Christopher Nelson deserves to be cited repeatedly as the debate about charter schools continues. The researchers' careful and balanced analysis of the situation in Michigan has much to say about the charter school movement across the country and leads to important cautions about whether and how the movement should proceed. As I was composing the first drafts of this review, during the back-to-school days of 2002, the media were reporting the latest charter schools news: in brief, students in them have posted disappointing test scores—not only have they not surpassed their peers in regular public schools, they are apparently doing worse. July saw the publication of an American Federation of Teachers extensive report on charter schools across the country, and the news was sobering, concluding that “charter schools do not educate the same students as other public schools; do not empower teachers in the way anticipated by charter school legislation; do not direct more money to the classroom; do not outperform other public schools; do not serve as laboratories of innovation …; and can have a negative impact on the education of students in other public schools” (American Federation of Teachers, 2002, p. 77). Like the AFT researchers, Miron and Nelson also conclude that charter school are not fulfilling their promises in many ways. But this book goes further by offering a framework for considering the question raised in the title; these authors ask not only whether such schools are an efficient use of public funds but also whether they constitute an appropriate use of public funds. I suspect that this second broader question and the authors' adept consideration of it will be referred to less often than will the book’s considerable detail and cogent analyses of such issues as teacher demographics, cost advantages, impacts on educational practice, and, of course, test scores. But both aspects of the book will help the casual and the more serious reader to better grasp ideas about charter schools and how those ideas are panning out in practice and to question some of the fundamental premises and purposes that underpin them. It is important to point out, as the authors do in their preface, that much of the information and empirical data on which the book is based come from Michigan, where the authors have been involved in research and evaluation of school reform, with an emphasis on charter schools, for some time. But, in the authors’ words, Michigan is “not a typical state” (p. ix). Since Michigan charter school law is more permissive than other states’, Michigan has many more charter schools than other states, and, importantly, some three-quarters of them are run by Education Management Organizations (EMOs)—for-profit corporations such as the well-known Edison. (A further consideration for scholars interested in the book: in the interest of accessibility, the authors do not include any more methodological detail than they deem necessary, instead referring interested readers to their two technical reports, each available online; the book is enhanced by this choice.) While providing appropriate cautions about generalizability, the authors also suggest, rightly in my view, that their findings will be nonetheless instructive; in fact, I would suggest that Michigan’s outlier features make it an excellent case to study, because the very features that make it so also exemplify what charter schools’ many supporters would most like to see: the blossoming of many schools, reasonably free from bureaucratic restraint and with significant involvement of the private, for-profit sector. So, if Michigan doesn’t present a perfect picture of the charter school situation as it presently exists nationwide, it might well be an excellent picture of what the future could become—and the picture is not encouraging. The opening three chapters provide an effective “crash course” in charter schools, nicely situated in political context, including both national and international perspectives, a historical context for the Michigan charter school laws, and an overview of the present regulations and situations in Michigan. As part of their "crash course," Miron, Nelson, and contributor Christopher Lubienski initiate their discussion of the question posed in the book's title: What's public about charter schools? Wisely, they stress that any answer to such a question must begins by asking, "How do you define 'public'?" They suggest that we consider two definitions: first, a formalist view of public-ness, by which we would judge the public-ness of any institution according to the degree to which it engenders participation and control by the public and whether the institution’s means of production are “either publicly owned or controlled by citizens or their duly constituted representatives” (p. 14). Hence, the traditional public school, however undemocratic its practices can sometimes seem, fits the formalist view of public-ness: policies and practices are developed by school boards and other elected officials, buildings and materials are owned by the public, and so on. Charter schools, on the other hand, can be almost completely devoid of such public ownership or control—as the authors detail, the courts in some cases have reasoned that “although government should support public education, there is no need for government to run it” (15), thus supporting what the authors term a functionalist definition of public-ness. This second view of public-ness does not concern itself with ownership or public participation but with functions and outcomes—institutions are public when they serve public functions. The rest of the introductory chapters survey the charter school movement with clarity and perspicacity, including an in-depth consideration of the Michigan experience in Chapter 3. Refreshingly, the authors do not ignore some of the thorny political, philosophical, and social issues that the movement exposes. For instance, the authors discuss our national fixation on “outcomes” when we have never really considered which outcomes are most desirable, and they note the disturbing conflict that can arise when customer satisfaction displaces student achievement as a primary aim. There were times when I felt the authors dropped a truly provocative point too quickly in these chapters; in the end, however, I was satisfied that the issues had been raised and was eager to move on to the empirical sections of the book. Chapter 4 offers a detailed analysis of Michigan charter school finance, via both a broad view at a high level of aggregation and also a case study of four schools. While some of the finer details may elude those like myself who are not school finance experts, the chapter is nonetheless very readable and convincingly makes several provocative and important points. In one of the most valuable sections, the authors provide a compelling explanation of why it can look as if charter schools are spending less per pupil than their regular public school counterparts. The answer, at least in part, lies in the fact that the two are not as close counterparts as we might suspect—the charter schools under investigation “provide a more limited range of services and cater to a less-costly-to-educate subset of students” (p.62), and therefore comparisons can be spurious. Most disturbing is that Michigan funding formulas are constructed in ways that offer distinct disincentives for enrolling more-costly-to-educate students, e.g. students with disabilities. These facts alone raise questions about just how public charter schools are, and the authors continue to explore such questions in the next set of chapters. Chapters 5 through 9 and the opening sections of chapter 10 examine to what extent charter schools are fulfilling certain public functions—this long section of the book is devoted to a largely quantitative analysis of the degree to which charter schools in Michigan meet the criteria set out by the functionalist definition of public-ness. These chapters consider a broad range of features of charter schools and their teachers, students, and communities, including racial/ethnic composition, special education provisions, characteristics of teachers and their levels of satisfaction, impacts of charter school innovations on local public school practices, customer satisfaction indices, and, of course, student achievement. Their findings with regard to the functionalist definition are that some public purposes are being fulfilled, but many more are not. Most of the purposes of public schooling, they say, are not being served, starting with some of the most fundamental purposes of the common school that inhere in the word "common"—access and equity. The authors find that Michigan's charter schools promote segregation of students (by race, class, and ability) and of teachers (by age and experience—charter school teachers are younger and less experienced), and that they are disproportionately used by students who were already attending private schools. Of course, given the current political climate, where access and equity can be jettisoned in the name of test scores, charter schools nonetheless might be touted because they are serving other public needs, for instance by raising achievement and serving as models for other schools and educators to do the same. The Michigan case, however, provides yet another helping of disappointment—the evidence suggests that charter schools are not producing higher achievement or spreading innovations to other schools. It is important to note, however, that Miron and Nelson do uncover some promises fulfilled. One is that charter schools in Michigan do, indeed, seem to be bringing together like-minded educators who tend to be reasonably satisfied with their schools. The authors cite this as one way in which charters are serving a public function; though I would not quibble with the validity of this finding, I'm not sure I see their argument for this being a public function. Hence we are left with one primary public function that the authors feel is be being fulfilled—customer satisfaction. But again, while most of us would not say that family and community contentment are unimportant, to what degree are they a central public function? The democratic mechanisms for achieving community satisfaction have been in place for generations, suggesting that the functionalist conception of public-ness cannot be easily disentangled from the formalist. The concluding sections of Chapter 10 turn to examining this formalist definition of public-ness: that institutions are public to the degree that they are owned and controlled by the public. This analysis is missing from the AFT report and from many other discussions of charter schools; such issues are typically of far less concern to policy-makers and practitioners than those connected with the functionalist perspective, given the instrumentalist bias of much educational rhetoric and public policy debate. Hence, this segment (along with the concluding chapter) is particularly important. It is also particularly interesting, focusing on EMO-run schools. Drawing deftly on their data and the conceptual framework they have laid out, the authors find that charter schools are not very public by the formalist definition either, particularly in the case of EMO-run schools. They report that the means of production are not owned by the public, decision-making is not a public function, and the public has limited access to information about such schools. Having highlighted the key conclusions, I must also say that the book is full of details, comparisons, and intriguing sub-findings. Different readers will have different questions and interests, so my point here is not to tell them whether they'll find the particular answer they want but to persuade them that the long empirical section is worth taking a look at, as I believe it is for at least two reasons. First, the authors take the time to recognize and deal with the murkiness of the waters in which they're working. They take the time to note, for example, with regard to innovation in charter schools, there's no clear consensus of what "innovation" means; hence, the chapter on innovation provides useful criteria and a typology of innovation to frame their discussion. Such attention to meanings and words makes it possible to nail down rhetoric and question taken-for-granted assumptions. Second, the authors try hard not to interpret their data or build their arguments as if all charter schools were created equal. According to the most fundamental premises about charter schools and choice, they should not be. And the authors take pains to avoid lumping them together in data analysis, disaggregating data when necessary and providing additional data from well-chosen comparison groups, as mentioned above in the descriptive statistics presented in Chapter 4. Rather than compare charter schools to all public schools, for instance, they compare Michigan charter schools, a comparison group of charter schools from other states, EMO charters, non-EMO charters, and Heritage Academies. Such analyses sometimes reveal interesting differences and strengthen the major conclusions of the book. The book concludes with a chapter titled "Lessons in Choice and Accountability," that includes a list of eight recommendations for policymakers from the Michigan experience. These recommendations are not vague or general; rather, they could provide concrete and practical solutions for improving charter schools by addressing some of the shortcomings that the authors have uncovered. For example, they recommend pegging funding to real educational costs for less- and more-expensive-to-educate students, and they offer specific suggestions in the form of policies from other states that are promising. I found myself questioning the wisdom of having abundant faith, as Miron and Nelson do, in the power of policy—at times, it is hard to share the authors' belief that the right policies can and will change some long entrenched problems in schools, charter or non-charter, or that strong policy can effectively counter the power of the profit motive. Similarly, their cautious optimism about the generally good intentions of the for-profit education sector may be misplaced. In fact, given Miron and Nelson’s conclusions, the best suggestion ultimately might be that of the AFT, which recommends that expansion of charter schools be halted until “more convincing evidence of their effectiveness and viability is presented" (American Federation of Teachers, 2002, p. 79). But in the present political climate, where the mantra of “choice” appears unassailable, one has to hope that policymakers will at least heed some of the cautions that the Michigan case suggests and that Miron and Nelson so effectively articulate. Reference American Federation of Teachers. (2002). Do charter schools measure up? The charter school experiment after 10 years: The AFT charter study. www.aft.org/edissues/downloads/charterreport02.pdf About the Reviewer Jeanne Ellsworth is Associate Professor of Education at Plattsburgh State University of New York. She teaches and advises students in a post-baccalaureate teacher certification and master's degree program at the university's extension site at Adirondack Community College. Her research interests have focused on schooling experiences of children and families in poverty.