Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, nearly twenty-five years ago. And it’s been fifteen years since we published Charter Schools in Action, which described this educational innovation as a promising path to stronger student achievement and an engine “to recreate the democratic underpinnings of public education and rejoin schools to a vigorous civil society.”
Since 1991, forty-three states and the District of Columbia have allowed for the existence and operation of these independent public schools of choice. Today, some 6,700 of them serve nearly three million students, almost 6 percent of U.S. public school enrollment. They are the fastest-growing school choice option in the country and already educate more than half as many children as attend private schools, which have been around for ages. They are, in fact, as close to a “disruptive innovation” as American K–12 education has ever seen. They have created a new market and an alternative delivery system that affords long-neglected families access to potentially higher-quality schools than they find within the traditional district structure.
Yet for all its promise, impressive growth, and visibility in the public square, the charter movement has ample room to improve. The first quarter-century of chartering has taught us much about what should happen in the second. It’s slightly embarrassing to acknowledge, with the benefit of hindsight, that putting a charter sign on a school building actually reveals surprisingly little—mostly just that it’s a “school of choice” with some freedom to be different.
Early advocates, ourselves included, were naïve about a few things. Here are five of them, a list that can easily be expanded.
First, not enough attention was paid to authorizing, governance, and quality control. We’ve focused on quantity rather than quality, assuming that a barely regulated marketplace would provide more assurance of school quality than it has in reality.
Second, we did not demand sufficient funding (or facilities). And while we welcomed the infusions of capital and entrepreneurialism that have accompanied private sector participation in the charter venture, we didn’t take seriously enough the risk of profiteering.
Third, we didn’t insist on sufficient school autonomy—nailed into place, not just vaguely promised. The result has been a large number of charter schools still fighting for operational, financial, and governance freedoms.
Fourth, the laudable impulse to concentrate first on poor minority kids trapped in abysmal inner-city schools contributed to an unfortunate perception of charters as merely schools for impoverished urban dwellers. There’s a certain uniformity across much of today’s charter world, and (save perhaps for virtual schools) not enough real innovating.
Fifth, the R&D quality of charters has eroded, along with the vision of the late Albert Shanker that charters would emerge as teacher-created, teacher-run schools.
And those are just observations in retrospect. Looking ahead, we can glimpse at least as many fresh challenges and unresolved questions. With the charter sector’s emergence as a durable—and in some places sizable—element of American public education, all sorts of new issues have come into focus. For example:
- As charters come to instruct large numbers of a given city’s children, who is responsible for the “education safety net” by which every kid has access to some school that can satisfactorily address her educational needs?
- What about the challenges of pupil discipline and the related question of whether charters must retain every youngster they admit, regardless of behavior or academic performance?
- Must every charter school be expected to accommodate the singular challenges of every child, no matter how difficult or esoteric?
- What about encouraging more charters to serve populations other than disadvantaged city dwellers: middle class kids, gifted children, just girls or just boys, children of military personnel, etc.?
- Why not select students—rather than conduct random lotteries—for some schools (perhaps gifted kids, Mandarin learners, or future violinists)?
- What about charters that want to deviate from state academic standards in order to focus on particular specialties, including some that opt to concentrate on high-quality career and technical education rather than academic preparation for college?
None of this is easy, and it isn’t helped by the continuing pushback against charters from many quarters. Yet charter promoters have sometimes also been naïve—and occasionally self-interested. And as we have noted, many of today’s challenges could not have been anticipated. In such circumstances, there’s no shame in acknowledging imperfection and incompleteness. Indeed, it would be shameful not to encourage recalibration and further experimentation.
Can the charter movement retain sufficient nimbleness and audacity, or will it ossify into a conventional interest group like so many other reforms?
Here are some reasons for hope:
- This movement is still basically bipartisan, a rarity in today’s polarized policy world.
- Most charters are free of unions and, in some cases, free from state licensure of principals and teachers, creating the necessary space for experimentation in staffing.
- There’s huge unmet demand for charters, both from kids and families wanting to choose and from people and organizations wanting to start schools.
- We already have some fantastic proof points about the ability of great schools to alter the life prospects of poor kids.
- Some “chains” of charters have managed to demonstrate sustained and widespread quality while also illustrating the concept of virtual school systems.
This is not the first time—and it won’t be the last—that a grand policy initiative has encountered bumps and yielded mixed results. When so many thousands of complex institutions are spread across so many thousands of jurisdictions, the challenges of politics, resources, talent, and implementation are profound. When what’s being changed contains as many ingrained practices, hidebound regulatory regimes, and vested interests as American public schooling, these trials are even greater.
Where it has worked well, the charter school movement has worked so well that it amply deserves to be sustained and perfected. Where it hasn’t, wise policymakers have and should push back against its tendency to turn into a self-interested protector of mediocrity. Millions of children’s futures—and billions of tax dollars—are at stake.
