When charter schools first emerged twenty years ago, they represented a revolution, ushering in a new era that put educational choice, innovation, and autonomy front and center in the effort to improve our schools. While charters have always been very diverse in characteristics and outcomes, it wasn’t long before a particular kind of gap-closing, “No Excuses” charter grabbed the lion’s share of public attention. But in this rush to crown and invest in a few “winners,” have we turned our back on the push for innovation that was meant to be at the core of the charter experiment?

Of course, the top charter management organizations got this level of attention the old fashioned way: they earned it… But, while charters have made important strides, it’s become increasingly obvious that they’ve also hit a wall in their quest to put their students on the path to college. While the best among them have been able to get more and more students to hit proficiency targets, there are no charter schools—to my knowledge—that have figured out how, at scale, to prepare all students for the rigors of college and careers. Yet, over the next few years, as statewide assessment and accountability systems align to the Common Core, charters are going to be held accountable not for catching kids up, but for adequately preparing them for what comes next.

To its great credit, this is something that KIPP readily admits, citing college completion as one of their biggest challenges. Perhaps less publicly, nearly everyone I know who works at the top CMOs would acknowledge that… It’s a shame, though perhaps not a surprise, that these raw, honest conversations—which get to the heart of what is driving the entire education reform movement—mostly take place in hushed tones behind closed doors, outside the spotlight. After all, charter schools and their leaders are under siege almost daily, their motives questioned and their flaws viewed under harsh public scrutiny. The challenge is that charters may have reached a point where, in order to break through the wall they’ve hit and take their performance to the next level, they need to enlist the help of a greater number of outsiders. They need to earnestly listen to more critics (friendly and unfriendly) who can do for charters what charters did for traditional districts over the past two decades—highlight what’s not working and propose new, often very different solutions to common problems.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter-Magee, explaining why reformers cannot behave like traditionalists — and must be willing to work publicly on challenges.

Letting better teachers teach larger classes would signal a shift in thinking, even for the reform-minded District of Columbia.  After all, for decades lowering class sizes has been one of the few education policies to produce anything like a political consensus… Despite its popularity, the research on lowering class sizes is mixed.  In the late 80s, the famous Project STAR experiments in Tennessee found that lowering class sizes by a third (from 23 to 15 students) modestly increased student achievement among lower grades, yet some researchers have since questioned those results.  Similarly, while most subsequent studies have found small, but significantincreases in achievement as a result of smaller class sizes, a recent Florida study found no increases whatsoever.  In general, evidence for the impact of smaller classes is strongest for grades 3 and below, but relatively weaker for higher grades, and there is also some evidence that class size matters more for minority students.

Last year, McKinsey and Company caused a stir when it released a report suggesting that lowering class sizes was not a cost-effective strategy for increasing student achievement, yet this is hardly a novel idea. Most districts cannot afford to increase their teaching workforce by 50% (as lowering class sizes by a third would likely require) and decades of research suggest that the effects of more marginal reductions in class size are dwarfed by the effects of having a better teacher especially when that teacher can use technology and other non-traditional teaching methods to better manage his or her classroom.  While there is doubtless a point beyond which further increases in class sizes become harmful therefore, the assumption that the marginal education dollar should always be ploughed into reducing class sizes deserves to be questioned.

Education Sector’s David Dickey-Griffith, offering more reasons why class-size reduction is not effective in helping all kids succeed.