Desert Bloom?: Lessons from Two Decades of Arizona Charter Schooling

Abstract

For decades, scholars and politicians have debated the likely impacts of school choice. Yet few have studied the nation's largest state-level charter school market, Arizona, whose 20-year-old charter sector accounts for about 17% of Arizona public school enrollment. This article summarizes the extant literature on this market, some 23 studies, supplemented with original fieldwork to derive tentative lessons for social scientists and policymakers. While the charter sector seems to have promoted innovation, teacher and parent empowerment, and modest improvement in traditional public schools, findings regarding student learning and segregation are less clear.

Leaders’ experiences in Arizona’s mature education market

“…Adding further to the difficulty of understanding school choice systems on the ground (Maranto et al, 2015) is the increasing competitive pressures faced by schools, their leaders, parents and communities. In practice, stakeholders, through their individual choices, must navigate nuanced contexts and levels of capital as they engage with, imagine, and, perhaps, re-imagine notions of public schooling, charter schools, neighbourhood schools, communities and public spaces.…”

“…The state also ranks high in the USA, behind Texas and California, for the total number of nonprofit EMOs, of which there are 31 operating within the state's borders (Miron and Gulosino, 2013). Yet, in Arizona's mature, market-based schooling environment, we still know very little about how stakeholders make sense of school choice on the ground (Maranto et al, 2015). This study includes secondary analyses of data from a larger ethnographic project, and I ask: How do school leaders in one Arizona district public school and in its surrounding community, which includes a growing number of high-profile and "high-performing" EMO charter schools, make meaning of school choice policies and programs?…”

“…Researchers have analysed academic achievement data in Arizona's charter sector, highlighting uneven results (see Chingos and West, 2015;Garcia et al, 2009). Whilst these studies importantly increase our knowledge about Arizona's charter school achievement effects, Maranto et al (2015) observed that, " […] Arizona charter schools offer the closest American equivalent to a long term, state-wide public education market. Yet, few academics have studied Arizona charter schools, perhaps since the reality of school choice on the ground confounds those seeking easy answers" (p. 2).…”