Report: Keep charter school cap

The N.C. Center for Public Policy Research finds some troubling signs in the data

North Carolina's 100-school cap on charter schools should remain in place, at least until student performance improves and the schools are more racially integrated, a nonpartisan organization said Wednesday.

In examining data from the alternate public schools that first opened 10 years ago this fall, the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research also said that financial troubles at some schools remain worrisome and that their innovative curricula has failed to carry over to traditional schools.

"Charter schools are an important experiment, but just providing a choice is not enough. It's got to be a good choice for educating North Carolina's students," Ran Coble, the center's director, said in a news release. "Charter schools need to perform well before we expand the experiment."

The report likely will build confidence among education groups skeptical of charter schools, which are run by private boards and administrators don't have to follow all the regulations imposed on traditional public schools. They receive roughly $200 million in public money annually and don't charge tuition.

Two new charter schools are set to open in the Triangle this year, one each in Johnston County and Durham.

The Bush administration has proposed expanding the number of charter schools when Congress reauthorizes the No Child Left Behind Act. On a recent visit to Cary, Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling said more charter schools would offer more alternatives to students at chronically failing schools.

But state House and Senate bills this year to eliminate the cap have gone nowhere. The House budget would permit the Department of Public Instruction to study whether the schools have met goals set by initial legislation approved in 1996.

"We were hoping that this experiment would reap innovative trends that would be good for [traditional] schools," said Eddie Davis, president of the N.C. Association of Educators. "We just have not seen very much of that."

Charter school supporters have said the cap needs to be lifted because thousands of children are on waiting lists to attend. They also contend that many students who don't make the grade in traditional schools benefit from the intimate environment charters usually bring.

"Predictably, the report does not address the growing demand for charter schools," said Terry Stoops, an education policy analyst at the conservative-leaning John Locke Foundation in Raleigh. "Poll after poll shows that a majority of North Carolinians want more charter schools."

A similar 2002 study by the center also said the cap should remain, in part because there wasn't enough information on student test scores to make a judgment.

The new report, however, found that charter schools performed about the same or slightly worse than traditional schools on student test scores and high school graduation rates.

During the 2005-06 school year, for example, 53 percent of the charter schools were either labeled as failing to attain the academic progress expected of them or fell into the worst categories on end-of-year tests, compared with 48 percent for all public schools.

The report recommended that schools not meeting expected academic growth for five straight years be placed on probation and be closed if they don't reach it within two years. Charter school leaders have said many students who wind up in their schools perform poorly academically and can't excel on standardized scores overnight.

Charter schools also don't appear to "reasonably reflect the racial and ethnic composition" of the school districts where they reside, the report said.

While North Carolina's population is almost 22 percent black, 39 of the 99 charter schools during 2005-06 had a nonwhite population that exceeded 50 percent. The student population at 14 of the schools was more than 95 percent black, the report said.

Jack Moyer, director of the North Carolina Office of Charter Schools, said the law allows racial composition to reflect "the special population that the school seeks to serve." Some schools have focused their attention on helping black students, he said.

"I wish there was more diversity," Moyer said in an interview, but "I truly believe that they're working at it."

Moyer also said ethnic and racial makeup within the overall charter school student population is largely in line with the student population in the rest of North Carolina's public schools.

The report also urged the State Board of Education to grant future charters in counties that don't currently have any.