I have come to think of the charter school movement as a failed experiment on our children.

In terms of their promises, charter schools have failed. They have no better academic outcomes than public schools, rather than sharing do anything to avoid scrutiny, and they don’t cost less.

But I’d like to talk about a more important, and damaging failure. Charter schools on the whole have failed in helping us accomplish the goal of public education.

I work in field of school funding and it amazes me that there is this whole other world where public education is really being examined, that education reformers choose to ignore: courts in school funding cases.

Courts in these cases start with state constitution- every state has an education article guaranteeing free public education- and from there they interpret what the goal of education is.

Every court that has ruled on this, from Kentucky to Wyoming to Vermont, New York, New Jersey and beyond, has reached the same conclusion. The goal of public education is to develop responsible citizens, who can discharge their civic duties, like voting and serving on a jury, in order to preserve our democracy.

These courts force litigants to prove, show real evidence of what helps children learn so we fulfill that goal.

Again, courts in very dissimilar states all essentially agree on what all schools need to serve all kids:

Pre-k, enough qualified teachers, small class size in early years, extra services for at-risk kids and kids with extraordinary needs (counselors, social workers, etc), rich curriculum, books, libraries, technology, and adequate facilities.

Courts have never found that choice is essential, nor have they found ‘innovation’ or charters are necessary. In fact, one court flat out said that unproven reforms embraced by reformers are “experimenting with our children [who] have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.”

So, the goal of education is democracy, and there are two essential components that public education must have to advance this goal:

1. Integration: As Supreme Court Justice Marshall said, “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.” And he was right, integration works. Graduates of integrated schools have fewer prejudices than their counterparts who were not educated in integrated schools.
2. Equity- As John Dewey maintained, “what the wisest parent wants for his child, that must the community want for all its children.” Or as a member of Kentucky’s constitutional convention put it, the public education exists so “[t]he boys of the humble mountain home stand equally high with those from the mansions of the city.”

How do charters help us with democracy, integration and equity?

Do charters prepare kids to be civic participants? A nationwide study of charters (the CREDO study) found that charters have no better academic outcomes. In fact, the vast majority of charters, 75%, are the same or worse as public schools. In Chicago, where they starve the public schools, public schools still outperform charters. The same is true in Ohio.

Even when they are supposedly better, are they? A recent study of Massachusetts charters (where they tout impressive test score gains), done by charter proponents, found that attendance at charter high schools does not increase the likelihood of graduating or of taking the SATs as compared with public schools.

Moreover, charters engage in practices that hurt achievement. Student mobility depresses student achievement. Yet charters are notorious for student “churn;” pushing children out, leaving them high and dry when a charter closes.

Research has shown that teacher attrition hurts school, hurts student achievement. Staff churn- of teachers and principals- is higher in charters than in public schools.

Are charters helping children to develop into independent thinkers?

Not all, but many – especially the bigger chains- have strict disciplinary policies and styles of teaching that breed compliance.

As NYU Professor Pedro Noguera observed, “leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don’t need surveillance and police officers in the bathroom.”

Depriving children of autonomy in every aspect of their school day works against independence.

And telling children not to make eye contact with children from a public school co-located in the same building is not modeling democratic values.

This kind of approach to discipline leads to appalling practices. In my state, Connecticut, Achievement First charter chain leads the state in suspension of five year olds.

At times, the discipline rises to the level of a civil rights violation. Again, Connecticut’s Achievement First was found to have discipline practices that violate the rights of children with disabilities.

Charters damage democracy in other ways. School districts are out most direct form of democracy. Parents can come to school board meetings to complain, they can vote school boards out of office. Replacing school boards with unelected charter boards usually made up of people from outside community takes away the community voice.

When the community does speak, what does it say?

Communities ask for their public schools to be given adequate resources- those same resources courts in school funding cases have ruled are essential, like —more counselors, books, teachers, smaller classes, etc. They do not want schools closed and replaced with charters.

The response of state officials has been to extort communities, saying you will get these resources you deserve only if you convert your school to a charter. Or, they outright impose charters over community objection.

There is a troubling lack of scrutiny of charter schools that leads to fraud.  In Philadelphia, New Orleans, Minnesota, Chicago, Ohio, Connecticut and elsewhere, outright theft, embezzlement, overstating or falsifying enrollment and other charter misdeeds have led to the loss of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Here are some examples:

• CEO and founder of the New Media Technology Charter School in Philadelphia sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer money to prop up a restaurant, a health food store, and a private school.
• Success Academy Charter School in Minnesota found that $608,000 was owed to taxpayers because they overstated their enrollment.
• Cato School of Reason Charter School   in California registered and collected millions of taxpayer dollars for students who were actually attending private schools.
• Former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota embezzled $1.38 million.
• Florida Life Skills Center charter school charged the state $101,000 for students it didn’t have
• Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans business manager stole $660,000- NOLA’s “all-charter” school system has been found to be rife with fiscal mismanagement and poor oversight.

Even when it is not outright fraud, charters engage in questionable practices. Basis charter school in Arizona gets millions in public funds which it then pays to the charter’s founder- millions in management fees, and for “leasing” employees.

In fact, charters actively avoid public scrutiny. They go to court to fight audits, to fight complying with labor laws, to fight disclosure. They even sue charter parents who dare to speak out against practices.

Those charged by law in our democracy with oversight do not do their jobs. Connecticut state officials handed over 50 million dollars to Michael Sharpe of the Jumoke charter chain, never bothering to check that he served time in federal prison for embezzling public funds and that he falsified his academic credentials. They allowed him to take over a Hartford public school, promising increased scrutiny, never once checking as for two years he drove the school into the ground, admitting he was “winging it”, hiring ex-felons, engaging in nepotism, questionable practices now being investigated by FBI. Instead of stopping damage Sharpe was doing to this public school, our state Board of Education handed him another public school in Brideport and a new charter school in New Haven.

Connecticut’s state board of education routinely ignores its own rules. For example, there is a rule against over-concentration of too many charters in same city. In Connecticut, charter schools are already concentrated in four cities.  When the State Board of Education approved four new charters in three of those over-concentrated cities, the State Department of Education simply redefined concentration- to mean the percent of children in the city who attend charters—and the State Board accepted that.

Our State Board of Education also ignores any requirements for integration and discounts community input—all in violation of own its own rules.

How do charters impact integration? Schools in the United States  are more segregated today than over 40 years ago. Charters make that segregation worse. Charters often fail to serve neediest students in a community. They underserve English Language Learners, students with disabilities, poorest (free vs. Reduced price lunch). They are more segregated than public schools and they end up increasing segregation in their host districts.

For example, Jumoke and Achievement First serve significantly fewer ELL students, students with disabilities and even poor students than the Hartford public schools.

Rather than address segregation in charters, our state officials allow charters to, once again, redefine integration. In the state report in which it was supposed to detail how it reduces racial isolation, Achievement First declared: “African-American, Hispanic and low-income students will outperform African-American, Hispanic and low-income students in their host district and state-wide, reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation among these historically underserved subgroups.”

So, to them integration was integrating test scores, rather than children.

Do charters advance equity? In my view, choice is almost always about favoring the few over the many, thus is the opposite of equity. With charters, it is choice at its worst. We already know that they exclude or push out some of the neediest kids in a community. Often when a charter takes over, the demographics of a school change (e.g., Desert Trail school in Adelanto California)

Charters do even broader damage to our goal of achieving equity. School finance experts who have been able to gain access to information on charter spending (which is not always easy to come by) have found that charters often outspend public schools. (Bruce Baker found that KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools outspend public schools by 20%-30%).

Yet across the country, our political leaders fund privately-run charters while at the same time starving public schools that do serve everyone.

In Connecticut, the state owes roughly 2 billion dollars to Connecticut public schools. Yet the state per-pupil increases to charters far outpace those to our public schools:

State Allocation Increases from 2012-13 through 2014-15

In Connecticut Bridgeport’s and Stamford’s charters outspend the host districts. And while New Haven and Hartford spend amounts comparable to the host district, they serve a less needy (and less expensive) population. And they do not have to pay for special education, transportation or, if they serve fewer than 20 ELL students, ELL services.

Yet the per pupil allocations to charters in Connecticut are higher than they are to our neediest districts. Below are the amounts allocated for 2014-15, together with the per pupil amounts the plaintiffs in Connecticut’s school funding case calculate are owed to some of our struggling districts (these amounts do not include the unfunded mandates imposed on our districts over the past ten years, like the Common Core and teacher evaluations).

The state shortchanges public schools while routinely increasing funding for charters that in our state serve 1% of students. That is not equity.

State officials often treat charters differently than public schools. Connecticut reauthorizes charter schools that fail to meet academic targets while punishing poor school districts that actually do a better job.

So, what can we do? We can push for laws on equity and transparency in enrollment, attrition, governance, contracts and more.   The Annenberg Institute for School Reform recently published a report called Public Accountability for Charter Schools. That report has some very helpful suggestions. The National Education Policy Center has model legislation on its website (nepc.colorado.edu) for chartering equity. And the Education Law Center has proposed legislation on its website (edlawcenter.org).

I would suggest some guidelines. First, the measures have to be prescriptive. For example, it is not enough to have charters try to integrate “to the best of their ability.” We must require a controlled choice policy that actually results in charters reflecting the demographics of a host district. There should also be a moratorium on any new charters until existing charters are brought under control. I also believe we must limit the authority of charter authorizers. Judging from my experience in Connecticut, where our State Board of Education consistently ignores its own rules, I say these authorizers are the ones who need a scripted curriculum.

We also have to be ready to fight charter school attempts at usurping more public funding- as they aim to do in several school funding suits now pending and planned. In addition, I suspect charters will jump to bring complaints under US DOE’s Office of Civil Rights’ new guidance regarding resource equity.

Charters were sold as a way to improve public education. However, in practice, they have brought us further from achieving the fundamental democratic goals of public schools. It is time to show charters how to do democracy.