Charter schools appearing worldwide

Charter-style schools -- publicly funded, privately run -- are starting up around the world.

That’s the finding from two University of Southern California researchers who have studied the growth of these new schools in more than a dozen countries.

Their findings were published this month in the Handbook of Research on School Choice.

The first charter school opened in 1992, in the United States, and since then in 14 other countries, across three continents: Argentina, Australia, parts of Canada, Chile, parts of China, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Qatar, Singapore, Tanzania and the United Kingdom, where the government actively promotes its ‘academy’ schools.

Researcher Guilbert C.Hentschke, reported in Education Week, said he was struck by the similarities among the schools across nations.

Across the board, for instance, countries or regional education authorities used testing systems to maintain some measure of control over what gets taught in such schools. In most cases, independent schools also had more control over teacher hiring and firing than their traditional counterparts.

Education Week reports that in Qatar, the goal was to convert all the country’s public schools to charter-like entities within a decade. The country’s 87 publicly funded, independent schools already enrolled 60 percent of its schoolchildren.

The Handbook of Research on School Choice is available at this web page.

The Education Week article is at this web page.