Juliet: It's important to say that rural charter schools are not always a good idea.
They are not a universal solution to rural challenges.
Andy: Juliet Squire from Bellwether Education Partners, thanks so much for being with me.
Juliet: Oh, it's good to be back at AEI.
Andy: That's right.
Juliet is a long time friend colleague of the American Enterprise Institute.
So it was great to have you participate in the event we had today, but also writing a
chapter on rural charter schools for this volume we're doing.
So your chapter is on the intersection of this policy intervention chartering with this
broad area of public education rural schooling.
So what don't you just very briefly, what do we know about these two things when they
collide?
Rural schools and chartering.
Juliet: Yeah.
Well it's a pretty small sliver of the education policy landscape.
There are exactly 769 rural charter schools in the United States, as of the 2014-15 school
year.
Andy: Okay.
About how many schools are we talking nationwide, 100,000 or something like that?
Juliet: Something like that.
Andy: So we're talking fraction of a fraction.
Juliet: Really small.
And within the charter school sector, only about eight percent of charter school students
are in rural areas.
Andy: Okay.
So when people think of charter schools, generally they think of big cities and they are right
to think of it that way...
Juliet: Yeah, more than half of charter schools are urban.
Andy: That's right.
And some are now in suburban areas and it's expanding there, but still to this point you're
unlikely to find very many charter schools in rural America.
Juliet: Yeah.
Andy: So why is that the case?
Why did this happen?
Juliet: Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of potential explanations for this.
So one is there are state policies that explicitly prohibit rural charter schools, that charter
schools are only allowed in areas with certain thresholds that meet certain thresholds of
a student population.
So that's one reason.
Andy: Okay.
Juliet: But the other reason is that it's just really hard to do rural charter schools
and to do them well.
So there are a lot of barriers to opening a good rural charter school.
One is just low economies of scale.
So we know in rural areas that there are lower economies of scale because whether you have
5 first graders or 25 first grader, you need a first grade teacher.
And that is even harder for rural charter schools, which usually got about 75 cents
on the dollar in funding.
Andy: Okay.
Juliet: So the economies of scale are even harder.
There are also big challenges with recruiting and retaining teachers in rural charter schools.
There are problems in recruiting and retaining teachers in rural schools generally, and then
doing it for charter schools is even tougher.
And a lot of the reason for that is if you're thinking about opening a school, especially
if it's in competition with a district school, you're looking to recruit teachers from a
limited talent pool.
So you're either going to surrounding towns and recruiting teachers in, which suggests
that they won't stay as long because the commute is tough.
Or you're looking at attracting them away from the district school, which in a rural
community where the school is such an integral part of that community, that creates some
really interesting and and troubling divisions.
And so the human capital piece of it is also really big.
And then the final thing is that rural charter schools in general really rely on philanthropic
funding and grants from the federal government to fund the start up of schools.
And that is just less available in rural areas.
The philanthropic community is largely focused on urban areas and there isn't as much to
support the opening of a rural charter school.
Andy: Okay, so all of that makes sense.
But let's take a step back.
Actually looking at this from the other side, because some people who don't know much about
charter schools are skeptical of them may very well say, "Okay, I understand things
have been really bad for a lot of low income kids in big cities.
The school systems have had a hard time turning around.
I don't really like school choice, but maybe charter schools in cities make sense."
But why are you trying to start charter schools in rural areas.
What is the rationale?
Why do we even care about this subject?
Juliet: Yeah.
So it's really interesting, because there are a lot of policies that I think people
try to translate from the urban context to the rural context that don't work that well.
Andy: Okay.
Juliet: So for instance, teacher evaluation.
Largely created as a way to help urban superintendents sort of get past the due process for an ineffective
teacher and remove them from the classroom.
And that's sort of been... we've sort of tried to implement that across the entire education
policy space in a rural community where there's a limited talent pool.
Again, the challenge of teacher quality isn't always the ability to evaluate and dismiss
a teacher, it's the ability to replace them.
So the one example of a policy that doesn't translate very well.
And a lot of people say that charter schools are one of those policies.
Andy: That's right.
Juliet: And I think that there is some truth to that.
There really are limits to choice and competition in communities that are small, that have a
low number of students and therefore a limited ability to support more than one option.
But there are some rural communities that are big enough to sustain multiple options,
and there are rural charter schools that exist in those contacts.
Andy: Can you pause there, because let's make sure people understand this.
If you are in New York City, or even like a smaller community within New York City,
Queens, the Bronx, lots of population in one area.
So if you start a charter school, it might pull two percent, three percent of kids from
neighborhood schools.
But in a rural area, if in a 50 square mile radius area there's one school and you start
a charter school.
Juliet: That's exactly right.
Andy: It's going to pool...
Juliet: Fifty percent.
Andy: ...of those kids and that could have a huge financial influence on that district,
on that school.
Juliet: Yeah exactly.
And so I think the choice and competition argument for charter schools in rural areas
is a little bit limited because of that.
Andy: Right.
Because couldn't someone reasonably say, "Yeah, chartering might be great for some number
of kids.
But essentially what you're doing is undermining every other public school and the District
and you're doing way more harm than good."
Juliet: Yeah.
Andy: Okay, so if that's the case, then why even bother?
What's the virtue in trying to do charter schooling?
Juliet: So first of all, I mean I think that rural charter schools have mixed outcomes.
Right?
So we have to be really honest.
Andy: So we have data on this?
Juliet: We have data on this.
They have really mixed outcomes.
So in no way are rural charter schools always a good idea, and in many cases they are probably
a very bad idea.
Andy: So the data that we have comparing reading and math scores of rural charter schools to
rural schools, comparable rural schools, doesn't always show a gigantic or even any rural charter
school advantage.
Juliet: Yeah, and sometimes a disadvantage.
Andy: And this is different than in urban areas, right?
Where we actually have some data that some of these urban charters are doing much better?
So this is another yellow flag probably?
Juliet: Yes, exactly.
And so, you know, I think it's important to say that rural charter schools are not always
a good idea.
They are not a universal solution to rural challenges.
Andy: And this is coming from two people who like school choice, are open to the idea of
chartering, we're saying in rural areas it might not always be...
Juliet: Yeah, it's a little touch and go.
And I think that there are circumstances where they have been really successful.
Andy: Okay, what are the circumstances?
Juliet: So one would be this...
So there are a couple of reasons that people found rural charter schools.
One is choice and competition.
We've talked about that.
But a second one is in order to maintain local control over a school.
So this is an example from Crestone, Colorado.
Andy: Okay.
Juliet: So the the local community school was being closed by the district and they
wanted to maintain a local school.
Andy: It was being closed presumably because of low enrollment, it just wasn't efficient
to keep it open.
Juliet: It wasn't financially efficient to keep it open.
Andy: Okay.
Juliet: And so the school was being closed and the students were going to have to ride
a bus not that far, 12 miles.
But the mountains in wintertime in Colorado, sounds treacherous, like it could be treacherous,
to a nearby school that wasn't that great.
And so the community said, "We don't want to do that.
We're going to start charter school."
Andy: To replace the district school that you're closing.
Juliet: To replace the district...
Exactly.
And so it was a way for them to take ownership over their own school and they've developed
a curriculum that draws on the local community.
That's actually been able to attract more families into that community because it's
become a hub.
Andy: So this is fascinating because charter laws often in people's minds are associated
with, "Okay, we're going to empower communities and families to start schools because the
district school to which our kids are assigned isn't doing so well."
What you're saying is the exact same mechanism, a charter law, can allow a set of families
in a community to save public education in their geographic area.
Juliet: Yeah.
And I think a lot of what we see in school turnaround is like the number one thing that
really matters is buy in from the community and from the staff.
So if you're thinking about a rural school that's struggling, either academically or
financially, the chartering mechanism, that ability to take ownership over the school
and its design and its success is really powerful.
Andy: No doubt.
So your paper also talks about autonomy though.
The right of a school to own itself to do what it wants, so it can best serve its kids
in the way that its community decides.
Juliet: Yeah, and that's actually happened in a slew of rural districts in Oregon that
have converted their schools into charter schools in order to take advantage of that
increased autonomy.
Andy: Wow, so what does that actually include?
The right to, for example not have a collective bargaining agreement, to hire differently,
to longer school day?
Juliet: It depends a lot on the state law.
And I'm not an expert on Oregon state law, but I think, yes, the collective bargaining
thing is probably a big piece of it.
Curriculum design, school hours, the school calendar.
I know in Oregon, one of the charter schools has really built an entire curriculum around
the natural resources that they have in their community.
It's very STEM focused, because they're at a very bio-diverse area, it happens to be.
And so they have been able to build a curriculum around that that maybe they wouldn't have
been able to do if they'd been accountable to the same sort of stringent requirements
that district schools have to follow.
Andy: Okay, so pulling back just chartering generally, you know, New Orleans virtually
all public school kids are now in charter schools.
In Washington D.C., it's about 50 percent, so it's really expanding and it continues
to expand in a bunch of cities.
What you're saying is there has been a break in rural areas, and actually that break is
legitimate, it makes sense.
But maybe the break has been pressed a little too hard.
There could be reasons why more communities need to expand or consider this.
So at the very beginning, you talked about maybe philanthropy could do things differently,
maybe state policy could do things differently.
What would you recommend to do this prudently, as opposed to go too far too fast?
Juliet: Yeah, I mean so I think one, eliminating these prohibitions in state law is really
important.
In order for there to be rural charter schools, you actually have to allow rural charter schools
at the highest level.
But I think that that also that requires on the flip side investing in the capacity of
authorizers and oversight agencies to effectively determine when a rural charter school makes
sense.
Andy: What's an authorizer?
Juliet: The entities that are vested by the charter school law with the power to give
an organization a 501c3, the power to operate a charter school.
Andy: Okay, so if I and my friends wanted to school, we have to go to you, the authorizer,
you give us permission to start the school and then you keep track of what we're doing
to make sure we're actually doing good things for kids.
Juliet: Exactly.
And so authorizers here in D.C. is probably one of the best in the country.
The Public Charter School Board, right?
And they have amazing processes to evaluate the viability of a charter school down to
the human capital, to the community engagement efforts that they're going through, the financial
viability of the school.
All of these things and all of that will look different for a rural charter school.
Andy: In what ways, what should they need to do differently?
Juliet: So if you take the challenge of economies of scale in rural communities, right?
The financial viability of a rural charter school is going to be very different than
the financial viability of an urban charter school.
I don't know the specifics because I'm not a financial expert, but you can imagine that
like you're going to need a longer leash of finances to be able to start the school, get
a facility, and then the economies of scale are going to require you to have maybe more
of a reserve or maybe less of a reserve.
I don't know, but it seems like it's reasonable to think it would be different.
Andy: That's right.
Because if you're in New York City and you potentially have access to 1.1 million kids,
that's one thing.
But if you are in a small rural community and your breakeven point is you need at least
250 kids to keep up and running and you have to worry every year can you get up to 250,
you're going need some financial flexibility presumably.
Juliet: Yeah, exactly.
Andy: Okay, so what about philanthropy?
What should donors know when it comes to rural charter schools?
Juliet: Yeah, I mean I think that it's important for them to understand where rural charter
schools have been successful and understand the conditions for that success so they can
look for it.
And to the extent that they can prioritize that in their grant making if they feel like
that that's something that they want to do, to complement the urban strategy with a more
rural strategy.
Just understand what the conditions are for success and then put the money where those
conditions are met.
Andy: That's great.
Well, thanks so much for coming in to talk about this really interesting subject.
Juliet: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Andy: Hi everyone.
That's the end of our discussion with Juliet Squire.
Thanks so much for watching.
As always, let us know what other topics you'd like AEI scholars to cover here on Viewpoint
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