School Choice & Charters

In Staffing Policies, Charter Schools Seen as ‘Innovative’

By Bess Keller — September 26, 2001 3 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

When it comes to hiring, paying, and firing teachers, charter schools are more like private schools than traditional public ones, a report suggests.

The study, by economists Michael Podgursky and Dale Ballou, looks at results from a recent survey of 132 charter schools in seven states with relatively large numbers of the independent public schools. The study was sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank that supports the idea of charter schools.

Read ” Personnel Policy in Charter Schools,” from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

If charter schools are allowed to depart from the personnel practices of regular public schools, they tend to do exactly that, conclude the researchers, who have studied teacher labor-market issues. For instance, administrators often hire uncertified teachers, many schools offer pay for performance and bonuses in hard-to-staff subjects, and teacher dismissals are common.

The surveyed schools were drawn from a random sample of 200 charter schools open for at least three years in the seven states that account for the bulk of such schools. Those same states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Texas—also provide a relatively large degree of freedom to charter schools, the authors say.

“Where you have fairly strong charter school laws that are supposed to allow flexibility, the schools are taking advantage of it,” said Mr. Ballou, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

In the study, the authors compare charter schools to both private and traditional public schools within the seven states, drawing mostly on federal data but also on survey responses from 32 private schools.

Trade-Offs Cited

Mr. Ballou and Mr. Podgursky, a professor at the University of Missouri- Columbia, caution that their conclusions may not apply in states that grant charter schools less freedom. Moreover, they acknowledge, administrators who are more venturesome in handling personnel decisions may have been the most motivated to respond to the survey.

Compared with other public schools, the authors say, charter schools tend to have fewer students per teacher and higher staff turnover—patterns seen in private schools. Charter schools also have more part-time and inexperienced teachers—twice the ratio of those with less than three years’ experience than regular public schools have.

“In effect, both charter and private schools ‘trade off’ experience for smaller average class size, with charters doing even more of this than private schools,” the report says.

In addition, compared with conventional public schools, charter schools are “much more likely” to employ teachers who lack regular state certification, the researchers found.

Teachers in charter schools also enjoy fewer job protections than their counterparts in traditional public schools. Most of the teachers in those charter schools surveyed had one-year contracts, few were represented by unions, and most worked in schools where firings were fairly common. Four out of five charter schools indicated they had terminated at least one teacher for poor performance over a year’s time.

In contrast to most traditional public schools, about a third of the charter schools surveyed did not base salary growth on experience, and nearly 40 percent did not reward teachers on the basis of coursework and degrees. Nearly half the surveyed schools used performance pay, either on an individual basis, or for their staffs as a whole. Those findings resemble those for the sample of private schools, the authors say.

While the report is primarily descriptive, Mr. Podgursky and Mr. Ballou call the personnel practices of the surveyed charter schools “innovative” and say they contribute to a better mix of “viable options” for educators to get and keep good teachers.

Deanna Duby, a policy analyst for the largest U.S. teachers’ union, the National Education Association, said the differences between charter schools and other public schools are not necessarily positive, as the report tends to portray them. “You have to investigate further, and you have to decide whether these are good things or bad things,” she said.

Related Tags:

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School Choice & Charters Q&A How the Charter School Movement Is Changing: A Top Charter Advocate Looks Back and Ahead
Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, plans to step down as leader of the group at the end of the year.
6 min read
Nina Rees, CEO of the National Public Charter School Association.
Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, emphasizes that she has "always thought of [charter schools] as laboratories of innovation with the hopes of replicating those innovations in district-run schools."
Courtesy of McLendon Photography
School Choice & Charters Lead NAEP Official Faces Scrutiny Over Improper Spending Alleged at N.C. Charter School
Peggy Carr, the National Center for Education Statistics' head, is vice chair of the school's board and part-owner of school properties.
7 min read
Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press about the National Assessment of Education Process on Oct. 21, 2022, in Washington.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press about the National Assessment of Education Process on Oct. 21, 2022, in Washington. Carr is facing scrutiny over allegations of improper spending by a North Carolina charter for which she serves as vice chair and landlord.
Alex Brandon/AP
School Choice & Charters 3 Decades In, Charter Schools Continue to Face Legal Challenges
Debates are raging in Kentucky and Montana over whether charter schools violate state constitutions.
6 min read
Illustration of a school building with a Venn diagram superimposed
iStock/Getty
School Choice & Charters More Young Kids Opted for Private School After COVID Hit
Newly released federal data shed light on where some students who left public schools during the pandemic ended up.
3 min read
A teacher with group of students standing in private school campus courtyard and talking
E+