When President Obama says that charter schools are the fourth pillar of his education platform or “one of the places where much…innovation occurs,” as he did in March, are we all imagining the same school model?
According to the 2009 41st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on the public’s attitudes about education, the answer is no. In fact, PDK/Gallup found that more than half of us think that charters aren’t public schools, 46 percent think they can teach religion, 57 percent think they can charge tuition, and a whopping 71 percent believe charters can select students based on ability. That’s a lot of misinformed Americans.
As Obama goes on to explain in that March speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, charter schools are public schools run by non-governmental independent contractors; they’re also secular, free of tuition, and admit students by lottery. In return for the freedom to innovate in management and pedagogy, charters are held to a higher standard of accountability for their results—they can lose their charter, the agreement by which they operate, if they don’t pass muster. Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear that Obama’s audience knew all this. Or that the average American knows it either.
Yet PDK/Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans support charter schools, despite having little or no idea what they are. That’s up 15 percentage points from 2008. It seems, then, that the public believes in the charter school brand, loudly promoted by the president, rather than the actual charter model.
Many of us, in fact, seem to think charters are some combination of parochial, tuition-charging, private, and admissions-based—attributes that are anathema to most American voters when it comes to the spending of public funds. Religious schools receiving tax dollars? Tuition-charging private schools being subsidized by public money? (This latter is an actual reform, vouchers, and is hotly contested for these very reasons.) Is it possible that the public actually thinks we should be giving public money to religious schools? Not likely.
There is another explanation. Another recent poll, this one conducted for the education policy journal Education Next, tested the theory that public opinion, which typically stays stable in the aggregate over time, can be swayed by powerful political forces or convincing research evidence. They divided a representative sample of Americans into three groups and asked them about three education reform ideas: charter schools, merit pay, and school vouchers. The first group was given no qualifying information; the second group was told whether President Obama supported (charter schools and merit pay) or disapproved of the idea (vouchers); the third group was told whether evidence-based research supported (charter schools and merit pay) or refuted (vouchers) the reforms effectiveness on student achievement. They then broke down the responses by political party and race.
The results are startling. Across all three categories, respondents’ support tended to reflect the positive or negative views of President Obama and the positive or negative findings of the research evidence. In the case of charter schools, this poll found that most Americans remain undecided about charter schools (44 percent), while 39 percent support them and 17 are against them. But support for charters increased 11 percentage points, from 39 to 50 percent, when respondents were told that Obama supported charter schools. Similarly, 53 percent of respondents supported charters when they learned that research evidence found students “learn more in charter schools than in public schools,” a fourteen point gain.
Real live charter schools are a much superior model than that being imagined by the public when using the word “charter.” Yet, Americans tend to support charters, or in the very least, are open to them. The Education Next survey was conducted at the height of Obama’s popularity—March 2009—and the same month in which he gave that speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. It seems reasonable then, that the public’s open mind about charter schools could be related to Obama’s own preference for them.
But is that preference a blessing or a curse? The last six months have seen Obama’s popularity continue to erode; he is now, in September, nowhere near as popular as he was in March. Education policy is not the cause of this decline. We can thank a plethora of other troubles, like the continuing financial crisis and the healthcare debate, instead. But it seems likely that education policy will take a hit along with the rest of the president’s platform. (Just look at the furor that erupted over the president’s planned speech to school children on September 8. The message is innocuous: stay in school and study hard, and yet the right cried foul.)
Charters have been around since 1992, so why are we still so confused about them? The reality is that only a small fraction of students are served by charters—about 3 percent of all public schoolchildren. And despite their unprecedented growth this decade, they are still overwhelmingly clustered in urban areas. Compounding this lack of personal experience with charters, is a negative PR campaign waged by charter detractors, who claim that charters siphon dollars away from public schools (charters are public schools, making this impossible) and that charter cream the best students from neighborhood schools (charter admission is ruled by lottery). The good news is that the families whose children are served by charters tend to overwhelmingly support them. A 2008 study conducted by the National Alliance for Public Charter schools found that “familiarity breeds content”—or “the more the public knows about charters, the more they like them.”
It seems then that what we have is a dearth of information.
If Obama’s current popularity decline continues at its current clip (or even if it doesn’t), charter enrollment is not going to expand quickly enough to fill this information deficit. Obama’s support for charters has been a blessing thus far; he has brought this movement, and others of the reform-minded ilk, to the national conversation, something that other national leaders of lesser stature could not do. Though previous Democrats have also supported them, Obama’s bipartisan popularity is of a completely different league. But it’s unwise to leave those reform movements so firmly wedded to his backing, not because Obama is going to change his mind about them, but because it may prove a curse after all. The future of this viable reform movement should not rely on one man’s popularity.
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Stafford Palmieri is Associate Editor and Policy Analyst at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based education policy think tank.
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