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Overall support for public charter schools has dropped significantly since last year, according to recently released polling data. Though their enrollment numbers continue to grow, the rate of new charter school openings has slowed while the sector has also come under more fire from some powerful special interests.

Charter schools are a specific kind of public school. Originally an experiment, first pioneered in Minnesota, charters allow educators or an educational organization to open a new public school that is government funded based on how many students the school enrolls. Charter schools are therefore generally subject to far less regulation than traditional locally-run public schools, though each state writes its own charter laws, and those laws vary significantly from state to state. In some states, charters are tightly regulated, their enrollment numbers are capped, and they can only be administered by nonprofits. In other states, it is relatively easy to open new charter schools, oversight is lax, and for-profit companies are permitted to operate the schools. Currently, about 3 million American K-12 students, or about 6 percent of the total, attend public charters.

Newly released polling data from Education Next, a right-leaning publication that conducts a well-regarded survey on education policy debates every year, has found that support for the charter school arrangements has dropped across partisan lines in the past year. Education Next surveyed 4,214 adults, finding that among the general public, support for charters is down to 39 percent from 51 percent last year, according to the poll. Only 34 percent of Democrats now support charters (down from 45 percent last year) and only 47 percent of Republicans support the schools (down from 60 percent a year ago).

Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump are nominal supporters of charter schools, though in practice, the Trump administration has had a broader focus on school choice in general. It is possible, therefore, that the shifting debate from charter schools, to private school choice (including vouchers and education savings accounts) has drawn attention away from the unique public schools.

On the left, the headwinds for charter schools are easier to identify. Last year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made the controversial decision to call for a halt to the expansion of the charter school sector. The NAACP doubled down on that position recently, drawing encouragement from the teachers’ unions, which have also staked out a harder line on charters in past weeks. The NAACP position is noteworthy because many charter schools operate in inner cities, and African American students are overrepresented in charter schools.

The percentage of minority survey respondents who support charters has also dropped, according to Education Next. The percentage of blacks who support charters has gone down from 46 percent to 37 percent, and the percentage of Hispanics who support the unorthodox public schools declined from 44 percent to 39 percent in the past year.

Other bad news for charter schools in recent months included a major investigative report published by Education Week, which found that online charter schools, or “Cyber Charters” operating in a number of states were failing to properly educate students. In some of the most egregious examples, students who were “logging in” to class as little as once a week for minutes at a time were being marked present. Other media reports, including a lampooning from John Oliver on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, have also shed light on certain bad actors within the charter sector that are milking the system for profit while leaving their students behind.

Though overall enrollment rates for charter schools continue to climb, another trend to watch is the dip in the rate at which new charter schools are opening. Furthermore, some expect the enrollment growth in charters to slack off in future years, as they attribute the current enrollment growth rate to the way new schools expand. (Typically when a charter opens, for example a high school, it will start with only 9th grade students, then add another class of freshman the following year and so on every year until the first cohort has graduated—in other words, some think that enrollment rates lag behind new school openings by a few years).

If the slowdown in new charter school openings is real, therefore, the sector’s robust enrollment growth could also be in trouble. That trend, combined with sluggish popularity numbers for public charters, coupled with more bad headlines, could suggest more difficult days ahead for the innovative education sector.   

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The public’s response to nearly identical survey questions about education policy varied widely based on whether the term “Common Core” was included, according to results from a newly released poll.

At their heart, the Common Core State Standards are a framework of achievement benchmarks that students are expected to hit every year as they progress through the K-12 school system and into college. While states have long had their own standards, the widespread adoption of the Common Core in 2010 was significant because it made the expectations for students more rigorous (in most cases) while also standardizing those expectations across state lines.

When asked whether they supported using a national set of reading and math standards to hold schools accountable, 61 percent of the public said they supported the idea, 19 percent neither supported nor opposed, and 20 percent were opposed. When the group leading the survey, Education Next, asked the same question but also used the “Common Core” label to describe the national standards, only 41 percent of the public supported their use. Meanwhile, the percentage that opposed the standards jumped to 38 percent on the second question.

Education Next is a right-leaning education policy journal published in partnership between Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School. The group’s survey is conducted every year, allowing researchers to measure changes in education attitudes over time. The poll also breaks down results according to the respondent’s various ideological or demographic characteristics. Education Next surveyed 4,214 adults, oversampling teachers, Hispanics, and parents with school-aged children. 

According to an accompanying essay to the survey, the researchers agree that “opposition to the Common Core partly reflects a tainted brand name rather than antagonism to the concept of national standards.”

It is unsurprising therefore, that a number of states, including New York and Kentucky, have opted for nominal “repeals” of the Common Core. A closer look in both instances, as well as in other states, shows that the substance of the Common Core is remaining in place, despite the rhetoric accompanying the moves. To date, the only state that has done a true comprehensive repeal of the Common Core standards is Oklahoma.

Surprisingly, despite President Trump’s fierce opposition to the Common Core, the year-over-year changes from the survey suggest that opposition to the standards is leveling off. When named, the percentage of the public opposed to the Common Core standards declined from 42 percent to 38 percent from 2016 to 2017. 

Part of the difficult politics of the Common Core State Standards has to do with the Obama administration’s support for them. Originally, the standards were developed by a coterie of education advocacy groups led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. In 2010, the Obama administration made adoption of the standards a requisite for eligibility for billions in educational grants through the Race To The Top program. The rush to the Common Core that followed was met with grassroots backlash from parents and teachers upset that their local school districts were being coerced into taking their education policy cues from Washington.

Though some on the left opposed, and still oppose, the Common Core, the objections were even stronger among Republicans. Even now, when the label Common Core is included in the survey question, 51 percent of Republicans oppose its use, according to the survey. However, when the term is dropped, Republicans are actually more supportive of a national set of rigorous standards being used to evaluate schools than Democrats are.

One group of respondents was notably not thrown off by the changes in wording between the Common Core questions. Teachers remained evenly split on whether reading and math standards should be nationalized and used to evaluate schools, regardless of whether the Common Core label is included.

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A controversial high stakes teacher evaluation system that included financial incentives for high performing teachers has been shown to be successful in improving teacher quality and boosting academic performance in Washington D.C.’s public schools, according to a newly released report. Teacher evaluation is a fraught topic for many education policy wonks. Educators have long complained that the instruments used to grade teachers are too blunt, too subjective, and often are unfair to those working with difficult-to-educate students. Nevertheless, the findings that teacher quality can be improved through a well-designed evaluation system could reinvigorate the efforts of education reformers who argue that they are essential for improving student performance.

The analysis of Washington D.C.’s teacher evaluation system was published in Education Next by Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford, and James Wyckoff, from University of Virginia. The researchers examined the effects of an evaluation system called IMPACT, which was first introduced by former education chancellor Michelle Rhee in 2009. Dee and Wyckoff studied the program to see how it affected which teachers were retained by the school system, who replaced the teachers that left, and how student achievement was impacted.

In the first few years after the evaluation system was implemented, “DCPS dismissed the majority of very low performing teachers and replaced them with teachers whose students did better, especially in math. Other low-performing teachers were 50 percent more likely to leave their jobs voluntarily, and those who opted to stay improved significantly, on average, the following year,” according to the report.

Though the program has changed since its implementation, the evaluation system is fundamentally based off of a series of in-class observations coupled with “value added” or student growth measurements for those teaching core subjects like reading and math. The teachers are then sorted into categories, ranging from “Ineffective,” “Minimally Effective,” “Effective,” and “Highly Effective.”

While only 2 percent of teachers were rated “Ineffective” during the first years of the program, 95 percent of those teachers were fired from the school system. According to the researchers, the educators who came in and replaced those ineffective teachers then went on to outperform their predecessors on subsequent evaluations. Furthermore, the 14 percent of teachers rated “Minimally Effective” were far more likely to be dismissed or to leave voluntarily than their higher-rated peers. Those with low ratings that stayed within the system, went on to improve on subsequent evaluations, according to the Education Next report.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, the researchers found that teachers on the cusp of being ranked “highly effective”—and therefore becoming eligible for cash bonuses—also improved their performance notably on subsequent evaluations. The analysis therefore appears to suggest that if financial incentives for teachers are big enough (in Washington some teachers earn bonuses as large as $27,000), they can be used to motivate self-improvement. In the past, some, particularly on the left, have argued that merit pay is an ineffective strategy for incentivizing educators.

Teacher evaluation systems can also morph into politically sticky issues as well. Rhee resigned her post after her close ally, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, lost re-election in 2010. Some attribute Rhee’s hard-charging education reforms to the collapse of Fenty’s administration. In Dana Goldstein’s book, “The Teacher Wars,” high stakes evaluation systems are linked to a spike in cheating on standardized tests, and to grumblings from principals and administrators about rising piles of paperwork. From a wider perspective, the Obama administration’s support for teacher evaluations evolved into a major bone of contention between the administration and the national teachers unions.

Nevertheless, the strong findings published in Education Next will provide fodder to education reformers who have argued that previous evaluation systems have failed because of poor design and execution, rather than a flawed underlying premise. They argue that despite the political and economic costs inherent in getting an evaluation system put in place, the recompense of a stronger teaching force could be worth the price.

The report concludes that “under a robust system of performance evaluation, the turnover of teachers can generate meaningful gains in student outcomes, particularly for the most disadvantaged students. The eight-year history of IMPACT shows that such efforts may incur political consequences, but are not politically impossible.”

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