How do you keep your revolutionary edge if you become part of the establishment? That's one of the challenges facing charter schools and their advocates today.
Charters began as a frank challenge to traditional public-school districts: independent start-ups, catalyzed by outside groups of concerned citizens or educators, meant to upset and thus prod the system (while offering options to kids who need them). That vision guided most chartering in its first decade. But as the "charter movement" has widened and matured, more and more districts have decided they want in on the act. Sometimes they do this for honorable reasons, seeing in chartering a path to options or innovations that they cannot readily create under the hidebound constraints of ordinary rules and union contracts. Sometimes they do it to thwart real competition, preserve jobs (and funding) and cling to the prerogatives of their monopoly. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. In any case, when districts take to chartering, one ought to expect their approach to forfeit most of the gadfly qualities that made the original version of charter schools an exciting alternative to district hegemony.
That doesn't make district chartering a bad thing. In fact, charter partisans should welcome districts into the movement and be relieved that some have quit stonewalling. But they also need to be wary, lest "establishment" chartering take center stage, perhaps marginalizing the messy but innovative independent kind.
For example, New York City and Chicago have announced plans to create 50-100 new schools each in the next few years (a mix of charter, outsourced and unconventional district schools). Well and good. (We discuss Chicago's plan in more detail below.) This signals widening acceptance of innovation and choice as reform strategies within two vast and troubled urban systems. But what the bureaucracy giveth, the bureaucracy can taketh away. And what happens when there's a new superintendent or chancellor (or mayor), who thinks otherwise? A new school board elected by the union? Charter advocates would make a huge blunder to place all their eggs in the district basket and neglect truly independent charter schools.
What's the real risk? Putting most of the available energy, political capital, brain power and money into "helping" districts engage in chartering rather than devoting those (limited) assets to advancing the frontier of independent charter schools: removing caps on their numbers and enrollments, creating multiple authorizers, strengthening school autonomy, securing adequate funding and facilities, etc.
Note, for example, that both New York and Illinois have severely capped non-district charter school growth, thus funneling energy and advocacy (and philanthropy and imagination) into district-approved venues. In both locales, we can see some charter supporters easing the push for stronger charter laws. Consider this: if Chicago were to end up with 30 or more district-spawned charter schools serving a few percent of that city's children, with no commensurate increase in the cap, funding, or facilities for chartering independent schools statewide or elsewhere within Chicago, would that represent success for the charter movement? Nope. The same holds for New York City.
For example, instead of Mayor Daley or Superintendent Duncan (or Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Klein) lobbying in Springfield (or Albany) for more charters for the children of their cities, they're consumed by their own new schools effort. So are the advocacy organizations. In both cities, foundation and think-tank support is also being sucked into district-generated efforts and away from independent chartering. Some observers fear that a similar "romance" with district chartering can be glimpsed in several prominent national foundations and worry that it is even creeping into the new, national Charter School Leadership Council (CSLC).
To repeat: district chartering is welcome. Almost every sort of charter schooling is to be encouraged. But for all its political tidiness and economies of scale, the in-house kind should not be encouraged at the expense of independent chartering that serves as check and goad and conscience for the system as a whole. CSLC chairman Howard Fuller recently remarked, "Independent charters are for me still the preferred option. It is certainly the most powerful. I would also argue that it is only the existence of the possibility of independent charters that will keep district chartering alive." The success of this movement, as part of a choice-based education reform strategy, demands a strong and growing market of independent charters that push on the system from outside. If the independent element of the charter movement falters or diminishes, we will in time see a return to the bad old days when the system quashed every promising reform by enfolding it in a strangling embrace.
Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.