ABSTRACT
The educational reform policy sweeping the nation for the past 25 years based on a free-market theory of choice, that is, charter schools, is failing the very students it touts as championing. Many charter schools advertise themselves to be the solution to racial achievement gaps as the charter schools intend to serve minority students who are not succeeding in traditional schools (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, n.d.). In reality, this policy has produced selective success at best. There is research indicating charter schools are successful. There is research to indicate the charters are doing, at best, the same as traditional schools. And there is research that charter schools perform worse than traditional public schools. Much of this discrepancy is based on the variance among state policies-measures that examine success as performance on state standardized testing and sometimes graduation rates. While researchers debate both of these measures as evidence of charter school policy failure, there is one aspect of this policy that is severely underresearched and not advertised. In line with the free-market theory, evidence of charter school failure can be identified in both the rate of charter school closures and the litigation surrounding some of the charter school management companies. Using Florida as a case study, an examination into 313 charter school closures provided evidence of the students whom this policy has failed. Additionally, the examination uncovered financial mismanagement as the greatest reason for the school closure. This chapter discusses the actual “success” of charter school policy compared to the number of students served in failing charters versus those that were in successful schools.
