Office Hours: Macke Raymond on Charter Schools

Published: March 21, 2018

Hoover Institution Distinguished Research Fellow Macke Raymond responds to your questions related to charter schools. Margaret "Macke" Raymond has served as founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University since its inception in 1999.

Watch the original videos, "Flexibility For Accountability: Why Charter Schools Succeed" and "Charter Schools: Helping Those Who Need It Most."

Charter schools are thriving in areas underserved by traditional public schools due to their framework of flexibility for accountability. They are granted flexibility to design and run schools in order maximize student achievement in exchange for being held accountable for their students' performance. Charter schools have to improve in order to survive. Those that do not perform well need to be removed in order to expand high-performing schools.

1) 0:21 - Can you quickly explain how charter schools operate? What makes them different from traditional public schools?
2) 1:25 - How do charter schools perform compared to traditional public schools?
3) 3:05 - What is the difference between public and private charter schools? Are charter schools for profit?
4) 4:25 - If charter schools do better than traditional public schools, isn't it because they pick and choose their students? Are charter schools required to accept mentally or physically disabled students? Are they under the same regulations are traditional public schools?
5) 5:51 - How should we regulate authorizers of charter schools?
6) 7:49 - Isn't it a problem that charter schools divert money away from traditional public schools? Why support them if they take away money from existing schools?