The Benefits and Deficits of Charter Schools

Charter Schools are nonsectarian public schools that are not permitted to employ admissions tests as part of entrance criteria. They are accountable for improving students' achievement as specified in a three- to five-year contract between themselves and the organization that charters or authorizes them. In exchange for this explicit accountability, they are waived from most state and local rules, regulations and contracts regarding school operation (Nathan, 1999). Generally, charter schools (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) are positioned within the context of alternative "educational choice" options that are increasingly being touted as having the capacity to resolve many of the problems that are common in the nation's public schools. While there are many in the educational and political sectors and among the general public who strongly support charter schools and are calling for increasing their number and funding levels, others are highly critical (or at least very skeptical) about such schools. This report will examine both sides of this issue, which Nathan (1999) has characterized as a controversy that speaks to the very core of the concept of American public education, its future, and its failures.

Charter schools first began to receive attention in the United States in the late 1980s when a professor of school administration, R. Budde, brought the concept into the public discourse (Vergari, 1999). The late Albe