Charter School Teachers Set An Example For How To Improve Learning After The Pandemic

Innovative charter schools have been on the education scene since the early 1990’s when the first charter school opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. City Academy, the first charter school, set forth a movement that would essentially create the modern day debate regarding education reform and school choice. 

City Academy opened its doors in 1992, after the Minnesota legislature passed the nation’s first charter school law. Initially designed as a school to support students who had “dropped out of school and whose homes were wracked by poverty or substance abuse”, students were recruited throughout the St. Paul area. In its first year alone, 25%  of the charter’s school’s students were homeless. Now, City Academy maintains a low dropout rate on a yearly basis and serves just under 200 students. 

Although City Academy has run into some issues with their model, they set an example for other charter schools and charter networks to follow and charters themselves have become an integral part of the education landscape – with successful results. 

Currently, there are 7,427 active charter schools in the United States. Many charters are located in urban centers, where there is more of a  lack of opportunity for low-income students to thrive in a school setting. . Charters often provide a window of opportunity for these students, and parents tend to value them as an alternative to traditional public school education. 

Charters tend to vary in size and focus, but  as time has passed, many charters have formed charter school networks that have a widespread curriculum. The nation’s largest and oldest charter school network, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), serves over 100,000 students annually, in 22 different states. KIPP’s model has proven to be quite successful, and their scale is impressive. KIPP’s size gives teachers the support they need to teach their students successfully, without the bureaucratic and political influence of unions that traditional public schools face. In turn, this makes charter school teachers often more effective than those in traditional settings. 

In a recent study done at George Mason University by Associate Professor Matthew Steinberg and University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Haisheng Yang, they  found that teachers in Charter Management Organization (CMO) schools are more effective in both math and English Language Arts (ELA) than traditional public school teachers. The study also found that teachers at CMO-run schools improve their teaching skills much faster. 

Fast teacher improvement and a higher level of effectiveness is a contributor to KIPP’s success and their student advancement, and their model should be an example for traditional public schools. KIPP connects new teachers with high-performing teachers throughout the network that can provide them with guidance and feedback and encourages teachers to move up the ranks into leadership roles throughout the organization as well. 

Especially following a global pandemic that hurt student outcomes and learning potential, traditional public schools should look for ways to improve their teacher outcomes, which in turn will produce higher student achievement overall. KIPP and other CMO-run schools are great examples of how to improve teacher outcomes quickly, and their model would be best implemented in traditional schools in the upcoming school year.