It being National Charter Schools Week, I thought I would look at the progress that we have made since last year’s celebration.
It turns out today marks an important anniversary.
On May 11, 2022, parents from across the country showed up in Washington to let the Biden administration know that we weren’t going to sit idly by and let it eviscerate the national Charter Schools Program, a lifeline that has helped thousands of new charter schools open. By the end of the week, awareness was spreading that a shift in the charter school movement’s national narrative was setting in.
And now, if we look at the progress that charter schools have made over the past twelve months from a growth and advocacy standpoint, an even deeper conviction clicks in that May 11 was in fact a pivotal day. Since then, while there have certainly been policy fights where we haven’t won to the degree we would have wanted (case and point being the third-of-a-loaf win on lifting the cap in New York City that happened last week), the fact is that the charter school movement has had very few if any outright policy setbacks since last spring. And in terms of significant policy and growth wins, we’ve actually seen many foundational breakthroughs that look likely to put more octane into our shared efforts for many years to come.
It leads me to conclude that, though we still face many challenges, and though many in our movement are still putting up with ridiculous levels of blowback, it is also true that CharterFolk showing up at the White House door propelled our entire movement into new territory. And so, I think it fitting that we would consider a top-ten list of the positive changes that we have seen since that fateful day, May 11, 2022.
10. The improved regulations themselves
We start with the new regs themselves. Obviously, from a substance point of view, they are still a nuisance. But in comparison to what was originally proposed, they were essentially defanged. The administration released them in the hours before the July 4 weekend, hoping to draw as little attention as possible to what was clearly a major retreat.
The Biden administration came to office publicly positioning itself to do harm to charter schools.
What do we see now?
When was the last time you remember hearing something anti-charter school coming out from the administration?
The turning point was May 11.
9. National enrollment growth
A few months after the final regs came out, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released new analysis showing that the growth in national charter school enrollment that occurred during Covid had been maintained, while traditional public schools had continued to hemorrhage students.
Growth numbers bounce around from year to year, so it’s often best to take a longer-term view. When we do, we see that over the prior four years, the charter school movement had grown its percentage of nationwide public school enrollment by 1.5 percent.
Just like it had grown by 1.5 percent in four-year increments going back a dozen years.
So despite all the chatter we heard in 2019 and 2020 about the impending demise of the charter school movement, we simply forged on.
8. Public polling shows rebounding support
Much was made of eroding public support for charter schools in ’19 and ’20. Then the pandemic hit, leading to a sharp rebound in support for charter schools. The Education Next poll released last fall gave us specific confirmation of trends along these lines.
Almost concurrently, polling from California also showed a striking increase in public support.
Over the past year, many other state-specific polls have been released showing similar strong support for charter schools.
Meanwhile, polling released this spring by EdChoice showed that very large majorities of Black parents support charter schools and other forms of school choice.
7. New states and de facto new states
The past twelve months have seen several states become charter school states. That has included bringing non-charter-school states into the fold, as well as de facto non charter school states.
For many years, Iowa was a charter school state in name only, having just 130 students in total. But then policy changes in 2021 put new energy into state authorizing, in the fall of 2022, two new charter schools opened.
And now the first new charter school to open in Des Moines in more than a decade is slated to open this fall, with many other new charter schools also in the works.
Just a couple years ago, Alabama had less than a thousand kids in charter schools, but with eight new schools having opened in 2021 and 2022 and with many more in the chute for 2023 and beyond, the state is now emphatically on the charter school map.
We’ve also seen a major breakthrough in Montana this year.
We’ve gone from a decades-long circumstance of not being able to get any charter school law through the legislature to one where two made it to the governor’s desk in the same year.
6. Funding equity breakthroughs
The past year has seen as much progress on charter school funding equity as any in recent memory, if not ever. A recurring scourge in states across the country has been charter schools being denied access to local tax increments, often equating to charter schools receiving thousands of dollars less per pupil than other public schools. Last summer in Missouri, after years of setback, we finally saw a breakthrough, with the state stepping forward to provide additional funding to bring charter schools to parity.
In Indiana, the state has now required school districts to share local tax proceeds with charter schools.
The same idea is near the finish line in Florida.
But this isn’t just a red state phenomenon. Colorado’s charter schools authorized by the state have now received two major bumps in funding since May of 2022 to compensate for being denied access to local tax dollars, and now charter schools have received a commitment to close the remaining $22 million shortfall next year.
And don’t rule out the charter schools of D.C. making significant progress on funding equity soon given the increased collective action we saw on this matter just yesterday.
5. The west opens
The momentum that the charter school movement has across Mountain States is something I’ve been writing a lot about, but it’s now a phenomenon that is generating broader awareness.
Whether it’s Arizona and Colorado leading the nation in the largest percentages of public school students being served in charter schools, or surprising policy breakthroughs happening in New Mexico, or Bluum stewarding a movement toward rapid expansion in Idaho, or charter schools finally getting off the ground in Wyoming, the fact is that we have as much blue sky opening up in western states as any place in the nation right now. And conditions look set to stay favorable for many years to come.
4. Impending red state enrollment explosion
It’s not an overstatement to say that we’re on the cusp of an explosion in charter school enrollment in many red states right now. After years of virtually no growth in Arkansas, recent policy changes poise the state to open nearly twenty new schools in 2024.
Meanwhile, the South Carolina Charter School District has authorized the opening of eleven new charter schools by fall of 2024.
But that’s just one of the authorizers in the state. The Charter School Institute at Erksine is set to authorize six more.
All told, thirty new charter schools are set to open in South Carolina in the next fifteen months.
And don’t even get me started on North Carolina.
3. Irrepressible growth in blue states
Amid all the talk of blue sky in red states, we can lose sight of the fact that, amid partly cloudy conditions, charter schools are finding patches of blue sky in blue states, too.
New Jersey saw its previously opposed governor do a complete about-face to support a big increase in the number of charter school expansions in 2023.
Meanwhile, charter school enrollment in California is holding steady while school districts are experiencing a mass exodus of students, and in parts of the state we’ve seen 60 percent charter school growth in the last five years.
Even amid the menace of a charter school cap in New York City, charter school enrollment continues to grow.
And don’t even get me started on what’s going on in blue, blue Connecticut.
2. Emerging new advocacy strength
Across literally every one of the locations presented above where we have seen a policy or growth breakthrough, we have seen the presence of strengthened advocacy enable it. Whether it’s, to name a few:
- A strengthened New York association with over twice as many members as just a couple years ago.
- A DC Alliance with 100 percent of schools as members taking on the funding equity fight in Washington.
- IQE and other advocacy partners coming together to achieve breakthroughs in Indiana.
- The strong coalition of advocacy orgs upping their games in New Mexico.
- Bluum stewarding a movement through its early years in Idaho.
- The League achieving new levels of influence in Colorado.
- The New Jersey association showing the rest of the country how a new tandem can be built.
- The Connecticut association using a new CSP grant to catalyze new energy behind growth of the sector.
- The National Alliance itself, which is making significant strides toward becoming an even more effective national advocacy organization.
We have seen a period of advocacy strengthening for our movement in the past five years unlike any we have seen before.
1. The re-discovered transformative potential of the Charter Schools Program
Which leads me back to the top.
There was a reason that charter school opponents concentrated so much effort on attempting to throttle the national Charter Schools Program (CSP).
It’s because they know how transformational it is turning out to be.
And now a greatly underappreciated change is happening to the CSP, which is poising it to be all the more catalytic: Following up a change to the CSP statute in the last years of the Obama Administration, charter school associations and other support organizations are now becoming the distributors of CSP funds.
It means that, rather than state bureaucrats looking for every excuse to not give out the funds, or actively-opposed policymakers consciously working to staunch the flow of funds under their purview, now for the first time CSP funds are coming into the hands of CharterFolk ourselves.
And we will be the ones who ensure that CSP investments going forward achieve even faster growth and even greater levels of overall impact.
It sets up our entire movement for a period between now and the end of the decade that will be at least as transformational as any that have come before.
And it explains why it’s fitting we pay special attention to the first anniversary of May 11.
It was the day when we generated a breakthrough likely to reverberate across the charter school movement, and indeed across all of public education, for decades to come.
Editor’s note: This was first published in the CharterFolk newsletter.
