As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools. Charter enrollment has increased by almost 14 percent since 2019, the last full school year before pandemic school closures. Meanwhile, district public schools have lost around 1.2 million students since the pandemic, with thirty-seven states and two-thirds of districts suffering declines. Families are choosing charters because of their educational successes and because they are sources of community renewal.
Charter school facts
As regular Flypaper readers are aware, charter schools are taxpayer-funded, independent public schools of choice for both families and educators that are accountable for the results of student learning. The movement to create them began in 1991 when Minnesota passed the first charter law. Today, forty-six such laws have enabled the creation of 8,000 schools and campuses enrolling 3.7 million students, around 7.5 percent of all public school students, according to the Data Dashboard of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. They employ around 251,000 teachers. Almost three-fifths of charters are urban, with a quarter in the suburbs and 17 percent in rural and small-town America.
According to the Data Dashboard, charter schools have consistently enrolled proportionately more students of color and children from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven of ten (70.7 percent) charter pupils are children of color compared to slightly more than half (53.8 percent) of district students, with six of ten charter students receiving free and reduced-price lunch compared to half (50.3 percent) in district schools. Hispanic students are the fastest-growing charter student group.
As educational institutions, the focus is on teaching and learning and accountability for results. Much ink has been spilled on their academic successes and failures. A report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that spans the school years from 2014–15 to 2018–19 provides a useful summary of these findings:
- Charter school students have an average of sixteen more days of learning in reading and six more days in math in a school year compared to their matched peers in traditional public schools.
- Charter schools enroll and educate more diverse and academically challenged students than local traditional public schools.
- Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in poverty, have stronger growth than their traditional public school peers.
Building communities and social capital
Along with being educational institutions, charter schools function as mediating institutions in their communities that build social capital.
Charter schools are wellsprings of civic renewal and community rebirth. If Alexis de Tocqueville were to revisit America today, he would surely say that charter schools are vibrant illustrations of Americans’ enduring appetite to create new voluntary organizations to meet human needs and build communities. They serve as mediating institutions, a middle path between the impersonal agencies of government and the private affairs of individuals and families. They reinvigorate the local civic community since they interact with the people, places, and institutions where they operate.
Charter schools are also opportunities for educators to create voluntary professional communities based on shared values, goals, and instructional approaches. Teachers and principals who choose to work in the charter sector have the autonomy to choose who else works in their school, rather than having a school district bureaucracy assign an educator to the school.
Charter schools also build what sociologist James Coleman called social capital, which he saw “…as a resource for action [that includes] obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms.” A charter school’s social capital arises out of the relationships that exist among people: the children who attend it and the adults involved with it, including parents, the educators who staff it, and the community members who support it. A school lacking social capital is not likely to be a productive learning environment nor much of a community asset.
Charters create new forms of association. While some charters are neighborhood schools in the old-fashioned sense, others transcend particular neighborhoods or geographic places. They may be organized by curricular philosophies like Montessori or classical education or by place-based geographic approaches like charters located in parent workplaces. There are also networks of charter schools or charter management organizations that cross district and state boundaries and are organized around a common mission and instructional design, like Achievement First Charter Schools, Basis Charter Schools, or High Tech High Charter Schools.
Charter schools display elements that sociologist Robert Nisbet thought essential to community association, including a high degree of personal intimacy, social cohesion, and moral commitment. As he wrote in The Quest for Community, “Community is the product of people working together on problems, of autonomous and collective fulfillment or internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in large degrees by the persons involved.” That’s what happens in charter schools.
Stubborn particulars that unite
Charter schools are sometimes faulted for dividing communities rather than uniting them. And lately there’s been more political division around charters, though for years their support was a bipartisan political effort. Still, that hasn’t entirely disappeared. Witness the recent effort in Colorado by a bipartisan political coalition that included Democratic Governor Jared Polis to defeat a measure to make major changes that would restrict some of the freedoms that that state’s charter schools possess.
The charter model presents a vision of public education that sees K–12 schools differently than the centralized, bureaucratic view inherent in the district arrangement. The charter model emphasizes a decentralized array of self-governing, results-oriented schools run by all sorts of different providers, like educators, parents, and nonprofit community organizations.
Charter schools are “not the collectivism of organized government action from above…[but] the collectivism of voluntary groups action from below,” to borrow from the well-known management consultant Peter Drucker in his book The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition. They are at the intersection of civil society and public education.
“Charter schooling has been arguably the most influential school reform efforts of the past several decades,” conclude the authors of a 2023 report published in the Journal of Public Economics. While this is true, it’s also true that not every charter has lived up to its promise or been a source of civic renewal in communities. Many have been closed for not serving their students, families, or communities. As we observe National Charter School Week, all this is worth recalling and recommitting ourselves to creating more high-quality independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.
