Teacher Empowerment and Charter Schools

Abstract

This study investigates an assumption used to legitimate charter school legislation, namely that such schools will reduce regulatory constraint burdening schools and school personnel. Reformers and policymakers have argued that charter schools will increase teacher empowerment and enable teachers to better carry out their education functions. Testing this assumption by comparing empowerment levels of charter school teachers with noncharter school teachers, the study casts doubt on the assumption. Post hoc analyses are used to examine teacher characteristics and school contextual information in pursuit of possible explanations for the hypothesis’ failure. Two findings are suggestive. There appears to be an interaction between the length of teacher experience and the school type. Low experience teachers in charter schools are not empowered, whereas in noncharter schools, experience is unrelated to teacher empowerment. Additionally, analysis by school shows teacher empowerment to be much more variable both within and among charter schools, when compared to noncharters.