Year: 2000
Type: report
Abstract: The Public Charter Schools Program (PCSP), established in 1994, represents the federal government's commitment to help charter schools meet planning, start-up, and early implementation costs.By helping charter schools overcome financial barriers, the PCSP is also designed to increase the number of charter schools nationwide.As of October 1999, 1,692 charter schools were in operation in 30 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.Researchers at SRI International are conducting the first national evaluation of the PCSP.In addition to gathering systematic information about the program at the local, state, and federal levels, the 52-month study will continue to document the evolution of the charter school movement (a process begun under another study funded by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by RPP International).Data collection and analysis for the SRI study are driven by a series of research questions on the operations and impacts of the PCSP, the characteristics of charter schools, charter school flexibility, and charter school accountability. The Public Charter Schools Program and the Charter School MovementFederal interest in supporting the development of the charter school movement began in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed the Public Charter Schools Program and several Senators and Representatives proposed the Public Schools Redefinition Act.No action was taken, however, until the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1994.At that time, the PCSP was enacted as Title X, Part C, of ESEA, with an initial appropriation of $6 million in FY 1995.The PCSP is a discretionary grant program, administered in the Office of School Improvement Programs in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.The PCSP is intended to support the planning, development, and/or initial implementation of charter schools, providing relatively unencumbered seed funding for states with charter school laws to distribute to charter school groups during the first 3 years of a charter school's existence.The statute also makes provision for individual charter schools to apply directly to the Secretary of Education for a grant if their states choose not to participate or have been denied a grant.Congress reauthorized the PCSP in 1998 by passing the Charter School Expansion Act of 1998 (P.L. 105-378).Eligibility for subgrants was expanded to include mature charter schools, which could apply for funds to disseminate promising school practices.The appropriation for FY 2000 was $145 million.Even though charter schools in the United States predate the PCSP, the movement is still less than 10 years old.Since the first charter school opened in 1992 in Minnesota, the number of these schools has increased steadily, and President Clinton has repeatedly challenged educators to increase the number to 3,000 by 2002.As the movement has grown, it has also struggled.Stories began to emerge early about the difficulties that charter schools-particularly those that were being created from scratch-faced in their first months and years (RPP International and the University of Minnesota, 1997).Depending on the specifications about state and local funding streams in a state's charter school legislation, groups seeking to open charter schools were often obliged to capitalize the planning and early development of their schools out of their own pockets or by incurring debt.Finding, renting or buying, and renovating space were particular barriers, according to early surveys of the charter school field. SRI International's Evaluation of the PCSPThe PCSP legislation authorized an evaluation of the program, along with other national activities.Researchers at SRI International began this first evaluation of the PCSP in October 1998.The 52-month study has two purposes: (1) evaluation of the rapidly growing Public Charter Schools Program and (2) continued documentation of the evolution of the charter school movement begun under the National Study of Charter Schools, conducted by RPP International.The findings reported in this document are from the first year of the SRI evaluation, which included telephone surveys of (1) state charter school coordinators (N=38), (2) representatives of a purposive sample of agencies that are authorized to award charters to charter schools under state charter school laws (charter school authorizers) (n=48), and (3) directors of a subset of charter schools that received PCSP grants directly from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) (n=14).Year 1 data collection also included the extraction of information from federal files maintained on PCSP grantees, analysis of state charter laws, interviews with federal staff, and focus groups with charter school planners and operators and with charter school authorizers.Two additional reports are planned under this contract.They will include charter schoollevel data from multiple sources: (1) the National Study of Charter Schools conducted by RPP International; (2) the National Center for Education Statistics' Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which included a charter school supplement in its 1999-2000 data collection effort; and(3) the SRI survey of charter schools in 2000-2001 and 2001-2002.In addition, the SRI evaluation team will conduct a substudy of student performance in charter schools compared with student performance in regular public schools in a limited number of states where such comparisons can be made under rigorous design considerations. Broad Research QuestionsThe dual purposes of this evaluation are evident in the broad research question clusters that guide the data collection, analysis, and reporting requirements.Some questions are concerned specifically with the Public Charter Schools Program, and others are about the evolution of the charter school movement in a more general sense.• How does the PCSP encourage the development of charter schools?• How do state PCSP grantees and charter school authorizers encourage the development of charter schools?• How do federally funded charter schools/school planners use their PCSP subgrants?• What are the characteristics of charter schools and the students and families who are involved with them?• What flexibility provisions are charter schools granted?• How do charter schools measure student performance, and are charter school students making progress on these and other measures?Additional details about the research questions, study design, data collection, and data analysis are presented in Chapter 1 of the report.iii The Growth of the Charter MovementThe number of charter schools is increasing steadily (see Exhibit 1).The National Study of Charter Schools (Nelson et al., 2000) reports several interesting statistics about this growth, which the SRI data supplement in this report.SRI will continue documenting this growth in later reports.Please note that charter schools are not yet in operation in all states that have enacted charter school laws.
Authors: Lee Anderson, Nancy Adelman, Kyo Yamashiro, Mary Beth Donnelly, Kara S. Finnigan, José Blackorby, Lynyonne Cotton, Eric Hirsch
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: U.S. Department of Education
OpenAlex ID: W2606507983