After freedom, what?

AS THE new school year approaches, most pupils in Detroit and New Orleans are preparing to return to desks in charter schools. First permitted by Minnesota in 1991, charter schools are found in 43 states; in a few cities they have become mainstream. Their equivalents in England, academies, were set up later but have grown faster. Just 14 years after the first one opened in London, a quarter of all English state schools, and two-thirds of secondaries, are now academies (see chart).

These schools remain the great hope of education reformers in both countries—and beyond. Though charters and academies differ in many ways, they were both conceived as an alternative to schools run directly by local government. They are publicly funded but operated by charities or, in some American states, by companies. This model of public-private partnership has inspired several other countries including India, Kenya, Liberia, South Africa and Uganda.

International evidence suggests that schools do best when freed from government control. Competition from newly founded schools tends to raise others’ standards. But in both America and England, researchers have recently produced some troubling numbers. Although some charters and academies have achieved spectacular results, on average they appear to be little better than other schools when pupil characteristics are taken into account.

As a result, reformers are thinking afresh about autonomous schools. They are seeking ways to ensure that they are held to account, that they are well-led and that the exceptional teaching found in the best becomes the norm.

Class acts

The American cities that embraced charters in the 1990s saw them as a way of injecting entrepreneurial zeal into moribund school districts. John King, the federal education secretary, co-founded a charter school in Boston in 1999. He recalls that they were set up to showcase new ways of running schools and teaching pupils in otherwise “one size fits all” districts. Since charters usually did their own hiring and firing, they were less beholden to—and ferociously resisted by—America’s mighty teaching unions. They were concentrated in poor parts of big cities, where results had long been dire.

Before he was elected president, Barack Obama pledged to increase funding for charter schools. (There are still about 1m children on charter waiting lists nationwide, and 23 of the 43 states that allow charter schools limit their growth.) Race to the Top, a programme passed as part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package, offered cash to areas that encouraged charters, introduced common standards and put in place measures to evaluate teachers.

The main motivation for creating the first group of academies in England was to raise standards for poor children, recalls Conor Ryan, an adviser to Tony Blair, the prime minister of the day. Many attended awful schools run by local authorities. So, in 2002, the Labour government said that failing schools would become academies, with more control over recruitment, timetabling and finances. When Labour left office in 2010 there were 200 such schools in England. (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have distinct education systems, and no academies.)

Under the coalition government that followed, academies spread rapidly. Ordinary schools received cash to convert. The expansion continued after the general election in 2015. Earlier this year Nicky Morgan, then the education secretary, said that she wanted all schools, including primaries, to become academies.

Yet political enthusiasm seems to be waning on both sides of the Atlantic. Hillary Clinton is less keen on charters than Mr Obama. In England teachers, and even many Conservative MPs, fiercely opposed Ms Morgan’s policies. Theresa May, the new prime minister, has yet to comment on her plans for education.

The scepticism is partly a result of research suggesting that the impact of school autonomy is less impressive than advocates had hoped. A study in 2013 by the Centre for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University compared the results of pupils at charters with those of similar children at ordinary state schools. CREDO concluded that pupils at charters on average progressed by the equivalent of just eight additional days of learning per year (admittedly, many American charter schools get by on less money than other schools).

In England, academies are found at the top and bottom of the league tables that rank school success. As Lucy Heller, the chief executive of Ark, a charity that runs a successful group of academies, notes: “Autonomy provides a licence to do well, but also the freedom to do badly.” A study published in July by the Education Policy Institute (EPI), a British think-tank, found that converting from being council-run to an academy had little effect on mid-ranking schools. But the EPI also found that conversion led to improvements among both the best and worst schools.

Where charters and academies have done particularly well is in teaching poor children in cities. A follow-up study by CREDO in 2015 found that across 41 urban areas, children in charters were learning the equivalent of 40 more days of maths and 28 days of English every year than pupils in traditional schools. Black and Hispanic children performed especially well. And although charters have not thrived in every city (see map), where they have worked, as in Washington, DC and New York, pupils can make gains worth almost 100 days of extra learning in a year.

Reformers are now trying to work out why such huge variation exists. One lesson that has been learned in both America and England is that autonomy needs to be coupled with a way of ensuring schools are still accountable for their performance. CREDO found that in states where charters expanded with little oversight, such as Arizona, there were many failures and results were worse than in ordinary schools. The biggest successes in England were in the early years of academies, when they were few and ministers could keep track of them, says Mr Ryan.

Accountability requires clear standards, transparent ways of measuring whether schools are meeting those standards, and the ability to reward schools that succeed and sanction those that fail. One way to ensure it is with central-government oversight. Forty years ago a British prime minister would not have dreamed of keeping tabs on individual schools. Today the education department has a “delivery unit” monitoring around 100 performance indicators. America’s federal government has far less control over education, but it can influence schools through initiatives such as Race to the Top and Common Core, a nationally recognised set of school standards.

Many charter schools and academies are also accountable to the school chains they are part of. Harris Federation, a high-performing group of 41 academies, is one example. Forty specialist “subject consultants” sit at the centre of its operation, writing lesson plans, setting the curriculum, reviewing data and, most important, observing and training teachers. The process for getting new schools up to speed is quite rigid, says Sir Daniel Moynihan, the Harris Federation’s chief executive. Only when standards have improved are head teachers given more freedom.

The second lesson reformers have taken from the past 25 years of school autonomy is that leadership matters. The best charter organisations and academy groups are slick operations. A paper in 2014 by Nick Bloom of Stanford University and others found that schools using the sorts of practices common in excellent companies, such as clear targets, performance tracking and incentives for good employees, achieved better test scores. These practices were much more common in charter schools and academies than in either normal state or private schools.

For David Laws, Britain’s schools minister from 2012 to 2015, the leadership and firm governance brought by academies mattered more than their freedoms. This partly explains why the best ones were able to take advantage of greater autonomy whereas middling ones did not, he suggests. Indeed, a report in 2014 by the Department for Education found that few academies had taken much advantage of their freedoms. Some 55% had made changes to the curriculum, but only 8% had changed the length of the school day.

A successful charter organisation such as KIPP (Knowledge is Power Programme) opens a new school only when it spots a leader capable of running it. This has held back growth. England’s school chains are suffering from similar constraints. Some organisations, however, are trying to plug the gap. Future Leaders works with schools to spot, recruit and train potential head teachers. In March the government said that it would develop new voluntary qualifications to prepare those soon to be in charge of academy groups and their finances.

The third lesson being drawn by reformers is about how to spread the types of education provided by the best charters and academies. Initially, the main approach was to expand their reach. In the early years of the coalition some groups “took on any school the government gave them”, says Jonathan Simons of Policy Exchange, a British think-tank. Soon enough, standards slipped.

Many of the best English chains are wary of growing too fast. Taking on a failing school is expensive, says Sir Daniel. Turning it around will require a great deal of time and attention. He has therefore limited Harris to growing by between three and five schools a year.

The best schools increasingly resemble laboratories, where reformers try to distil the essence of success. In 2011 Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie, both then at Harvard, summarised the five qualities of the best charter schools. These were: frequent feedback for teachers, tutoring, longer school terms and days, the frequent use of data to track pupils’ progress and a “relentless focus on academic achievement”.

A follow-up paper published in 2014 found that these attributes could be developed in an average public-school system (in this case, Houston). What is required, though, is for more talented people to enter teaching and for them to be taught how to do their jobs well, rather than subjected to the abstract theorising common on many teacher-training courses.

Many charter-school pioneers now argue that reforming education across an entire school system is as much about improving the quality of teaching as about tinkering with structures. “The first generation of charter schooling was about proving that poverty wasn’t destiny,” says Orin Gutlerner of Match, a group of Boston charters. “The second was about trying to scale up those schools. But the third is about human capital.”

The most innovative schools are currently rethinking their focus on behaviour management and relentless test preparation. Partly, this reflects a private recognition among advocates that although charters have transformed education in some poor areas, they would think twice about sending their own children to them. They worry that although these schools can provide the discipline missing in their pupils’ lives, they can also stifle creativity.

The shift in emphasis also reflects a growing concern that even graduates of the best charter schools could be doing better. Like others, they often drop out of university—and, even more worrying, do not seem to be thriving at work.

Lessons for life

In a new paper, Mr Dobbie and Mr Fryer found that although the best charter schools in Houston did better than equivalent state schools in tests and college admissions, attending one had no discernible impact on wages. They suggest that charters need to work just as hard to develop children’s soft skills and character as to boost their test scores. Doing that will require the freedom to innovate. But politicians are increasingly impatient. If the schools do not move quickly, autonomy could prove short-lived.