The Manager Matters: Charter School Governance and Segregation

• In Event: Accountability, Inequality in the Administration of Education Policy

Abstract

Marketization has grown in recent decades as a means to leverage competition and private sector characteristics to improve the quality and efficiency of public services (Donahue 2011; Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Scholars have increasingly begun to examine these reforms’ civic and social effects, considering in particular the risks of service stratification and community disengagement (Amirkhanyan and Lambright n.d.; Dorsey and Plucker 2016).

In education, there is a growing consensus that market reforms that promote “school choice” are associated with modestly increased segregation (Chingos 2013; Rotberg and Glazer 2018). Even so, outlier studies remain (Ritter et al. 2012). Moreover few have examined whether and how governance arrangements exacerbate or mitigate against segregation. This gap is particularly acute given that reforms are enacted at the state level and implemented at the local level, with consequential differences in how school providers are selected and overseen.

Prior research has established that governance arrangements can have a significant impact on organizational practice and social outcomes (Bulkley, Henig, and Levin 2010; Carlson, Lavery, and Witte 2012; Eckes and Plucker 2013; Torfing, Sørensen, and Brogaard 2017). This paper thus examines charter school oversight and its relationship to school segregation. Of particular interest are charter school authorizers-- government agencies and other non-profit agencies empowered by the state with the responsibility of selecting and overseeing new schools of choice (Bulkley 1999; Conley 2003). In some states (e.g. Massachusetts) a single entity (e.g. the state department of education) is authorized to oversee charter schools; in others (e.g. Ohio), this authority is distributed to multiple governmental and non-profit agencies.

This paper asks:

• To what extent do schools overseen by charter authorizers of different sectors (e.g. governmental agency, non-profit organization) or geographical jurisdiction (e.g. municipal or state focus) exhibit levels of racial and economic isolation?
• To what extent does the mix of authorizers in a given jurisdiction (local or state) predict market-wide changes in racial or economic segregation associated with school choice?

It answers these questions by analyzing predictors of schools’ racial and economic composition in original panel data from 1995 to the present at every traditional public and charter school in the United States.

The common term “school choice” belies the fact that market governance varies considerably across jurisdictions. Understanding the impact of these arrangements can inform theory about the conditions under which market reforms reinforce or undermine social cohesion and the provision of equitable services across race and class lines.

Author

• Katharine Elizabeth Neem Destler, Western Washington University