Stephanie M Hall

The aim of this paper is to shed light on aspects of the charter school debate that arguably receive less attention—teacher management and resource acquisition (beyond the funding and inputs provided by the government). To do so, it presents results of a case study of the  “Concession Schools” charter school program in Bogotá, Colombia. For teacher management, findings indicate that charter school teachers in Bogotá feel that many aspects of their work environment are positive (e.g., they participate more in group planning with other teachers, they  participate more frequently in professional development, and they engage more regularly with their principals for the purpose of teaching observation, feedback, and discussion of goals and problem solving), though they also report tradeoffs in terms of job security and financial compensation. Charter schools, using the flexibility afforded them around employment, spend half as much on teachers by hiring non-unionized teachers, contracting them for periods of a year or less, imposing more stringent hiring requirements, and offering significantly lower salaries, even though charter school teachers work over 12 hours more each week than their public school counterparts. Charter schools were also found to ignore teacher pay scale regulations—based on teacher qualifications and years of experience—instead assigning hired teachers to lower compensation categories. Findings with regard to resource acquisition address  differences between public and charter schools, perceptions of school leaders, and the routes to resource acquisition used by charter schools, namely: budget prioritization, donations, volunteers, partnerships, and alumni networks. Through these avenues, charter schools are able to offer
supplemental health and medical services, after-school clubs, weekend engagement, university scholarships, and teacher support (e.g., no-interest loans for post-bachelor’s study), among others. Implications for future research are discussed, including the need for studies to distinguish among types of charter schools. The paper concludes that, when addressing the costs and benefits of charter schools in Colombia, we need to ask: Costs in what sense? Benefits for whom? And at whose expense?

This meta-analysis seeks to critically examine the qualitative research being published in influential journals in the field of international and comparative education in order to determine whether qualitative research has remained true to the constructivist paradigm and its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings. Decades after the heated paradigmatic debates within the field of education in the 1980's, we seek to examine whether predictions that the constructivist paradigm would be pushed out by the call for post-positivist, quantifiable, data-driven research have come to fruition. Based on a review of all qualitative research published in the past three volumes of five influential journals in the field, we conclude that while qualitative articles are represented in approximately equal numbers as quantitative articles, there are key elements of the constructivist paradigm are largely absent from these qualitative articles. In particular, our conclusion attempts to address the concern that qualitative researchers are failing to address the issue of researcher positionality in their qualitative work.