Do Charter Schools Pass The Test?

Out here on the frontier, only the hardiest survive. And Paramount Academy is both figuratively and literally on the frontier. The school operates out of a handful of trailers at the edge of a cookie-cutter housing complex in Mesa, Ariz., a rugged desert city that sprouted into a Phoenix suburb two decades ago. But the academy sits on an ideological edge as well: Paramount is a charter school, a publicly funded enterprise that's privately run--in this case, primarily by a former shoe-repair-shop owner who never graduated from college--and free of the bureaucracy that bogs down so much of public education.

To survive, schools like Paramount must compete for market share by advertising in newspapers, putting up lawn signs and showering parents with pamphlets. Paramount likes to boast about its tiny student-teacher ratios, school uniforms and musical-theater program. A flyer for the school asked, "Are you ready for a change in public schools?"

Carrie Roan, a medical transcriptionist, was more than ready when she heard a radio ad for Paramount two summers ago. With 30-plus kids per class and unbending teachers, the public schools had failed her daughter Staci in most of the familiar ways. But after a year at Paramount, Staci was thriving. With the help of the school's performing-arts program, the once shy fourth-grader had found her voice and performed a Beach Boys medley in a charity concert at the Phoenix airport.

But not everything was ideal, and trouble was coming. Though Staci was more confident, she seldom brought home much schoolwork. Instead, she complained of unruly classes and bus rides. Then the school business got in the way of education. Paramount had to cut staff and stop ordering new school supplies. In February the school lost its music teacher in a salary dispute and suddenly switched to a much cheaper, 4-H agriculture curriculum. Staci would have to drop her singing ambitions and cultivate seedlings. "Paramount was attractive to me because of the choice," says Roan, who is enrolling her daughter in another school for the fall. "But now I'm finding that charters are full of dysfunction." Kathy Leih's two daughters didn't last even a year at Paramount. One spring morning three years ago, they piled into the school van with their classmates for a field trip--to distribute flyers for the school. "They're supposed to be in school learning, not advertising," says Leih, who promptly moved her children elsewhere. "I mean, really, who's benefiting from this?"

Since the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, the movement has multiplied at a dizzying pace. Today half a million students attend more than 2,000 such schools in 35 states. And that number is sure to swell. With his voucher proposal all but dead on Capitol Hill, President George W. Bush is calling for $175 million to help launch new charter schools. The education bill approved by the House last week gives students in low-performing schools the option--and the bus fare--to transfer to charters; schools that fail three years in a row could be shut down and reopened as charters.

The pet project of free-market devotees, charter schools were built on a simple premise: Give parents the choice, and they will vote with their feet. Innovative charters will flourish, the rest will close up shop and lousy public schools will get with the program. And as in any market, there will be both winners and losers. But the power will fall to parents to do the research and pick wisely. Looking for smaller, safer havens for their children, poor parents have signed on in droves.

Yet it remains unclear if charters have lived up to their promise. Two recent studies have found that students in charter schools outgained their public school peers on standardized exams. But studies of charter students in Michigan and Texas found that their test scores severely lagged. The Texas House has since passed a two-year moratorium on the creation of new charter schools. Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania legislators are pushing for more oversight. "Despite the rhetoric that charter schools were going to be hothouses of reform, the results are mixed," says Bruce Fuller, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "We have to ask if charters are beset by the same problems as garden-variety public schools."

No state better illustrates the promise and the perils of this experiment than Arizona, the state with the largest number of charters in the nation--some good, some bad, some in between. The question is whether parents have the tools to tell them apart. In Mesa, the state's largest school district, 5,000 youngsters--about 7% of the district's students--have flocked to Mesa's 26 charter schools, which come in all shapes, sizes and creeds--Montessori schools, patriotic history schools, schools for troubled youth. One school, sandwiched in a strip mall between a Taco Bell and a Dairy Queen, offers its students credit for working at Pizza Hut.