Comment: Independent Public Schools are not charter schools

Independent Public Schools are suffering from an identity problem. Ever since the first Western Australian public schools converted to Independent Public Schools in 2009, there has been a tendency to mistakenly characterise them as charter schools. 

There is one essential difference—Independent Public Schools are government schools and charter schools are not. Charter schools are managed by private organisations, either not-for-profit or for-profit. Indeed private management is the whole point of charter schools, and what makes them successful.

Independent Public Schools are simply public schools with a pinch of freedom. Independent Public Schools are owned, operated, funded, and regulated by government. Their teachers are employed by the state or territory government and have to teach the state or territory curriculum.  Their autonomy is in the form of budgetary and programming flexibility and the ability to choose their staff how to deploy them within the bounds of state industrial legislation.  Critically, this does not extend to getting rid of the staff they don’t want.

Public schools around Australia have varying levels of autonomy. Although Western Australia came up with the name Independent Public Schools, public schools in Victoria have had a similar level of autonomy since the late 1990s and the ACT was not far behind. The approaches to implementation in Victoria and WA have been very different, however. Where Victoria went for all-in, WA went for opt-in. The Victorian experiment has been largely successful but the merit of the WA approach is that the schools most likely to benefit from greater autonomy were the first to take up the challenge, while the schools that need more government support continue to receive it.

An evaluation of WA Independent Schools by a research team at the University of Melbourne concluded that it is too soon to expect any measurable impact on academic outcomes, but ‘the story of the IPS initiative so far is a positive one’, based on principal and teacher reports.

One of the least understood aspects of school autonomy is that it does not, of itself, improve schools. Increased autonomy for schools only creates the conditions under which improvement can occur, by allowing principals and teachers to work with their communities to provide better outcomes; it does not guarantee this will happen. If schools do not change their practices and programs for the better, there will be no benefits for students.

There is some international evidence that the systems allowing schools greater autonomy have better academic performance, but it is not a straightforward relationship. Autonomy has more benefits for schools in developed countries than for schools in developing countries. Likewise, within systems of schools, autonomy has more positive effects on schools that are already relatively successful. Struggling schools will struggle even more without central support or, failing that, a complete overhaul.

This is where charter schools come in. Charter schools are established when a private organisation either takes over the management of an existing public school or sets up an entirely new school. The school is funded and operated under contract with the government, the terms of which can vary with regard to teacher employment and curriculum, but two things are generally non-negotiable—open enrolment and no fees. In this respect, charter schools are like public schools but they have a much greater capacity to innovate to achieve their goals.

The most well-known charter school studies are by the Centre for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) in the US, where there are more than 6000 charter schools with more than 2.3 million students (four per cent of the school population). Overall, charter school students achieve at similar levels in reading and maths to students in traditional public schools. For black, Hispanic and low income students, however, the results are strikingly different. In charter schools, these students’ reading and maths scores were significantly higher—the equivalent of anywhere between 14 days and 50 days of school, depending on the sub-group of students in question. When the results are broken down by geographical area, the findings are even more remarkable. In New York City and Washington, D.C., students in charter schools had superior reading and maths test scores equivalent to 92 days and 99 days of education, respectively.

This is not because charter schools poach the best students from public schools. Other studies suggest that, if anything, charter schools tend to take the most challenging students, which makes these results even more impressive.

Independent Public School initiatives are on the right track. All states and territories except NSW have accepted federal funds to help public schools operate more autonomously, hopefully to the benefit of students. What we need now, though, is a visionary state government that sees the value charter schools can offer, especially to students who have the most to gain.

 Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies