Perhaps no modern American education reform has enjoyed the success and staying power of charter schools. Three-plus decades after Minnesota passed the first charter law, 3.7 million students now attend charters, the majority of whom are children of color and come from low-income families.
Unlike other education reforms, charters have improved their performance over time even as they’ve scaled. Students attending them make significantly more academic progress than their peers attending other school types, and this is specifically true for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. Urban charter schools, in particular, have revolutionized the education landscapes in many of our country’s largest cities, providing pathways to opportunity that for far too long were only available to a select few.
Public support for charter schools remains strong, especially among Black and Hispanic families. And charters have historically enjoyed broad bipartisan political support, ranging from the White House, to Congress, to governors’ mansions, to state legislatures.
Yet today the charter movement faces significant headwinds. The national education reform consensus that spanned the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations has eroded. Amid increasing national polarization, Democrats have largely walked away from choice in all its forms, including the public kind, while Republicans have gravitated toward private school choice.
These political shifts have slowed charter growth in many blue states while universal private school voucher and education savings account (ESA) programs sweep across red states at an unprecedented pace. For the first time in the movement’s three decades, charter enrollment slightly declined nationally in 2021–22, partly spurred by the declining school-age population in many parts of the country.
Charter school leaders and advocates are a largely politically progressive group of folks who understandably long to make the case that charters should be a plank in the progressive agenda because they offer clear evidence of leveling playing fields for historically marginalized students. But attempts to win over more Democrats are often unsuccessful today and potentially come with the opportunity cost of ignoring Republicans, who have done much of the heavy lifting for charters in state capitols across the country.
The complicated politics create quite a conundrum for a sector that is largely concentrated in big, progressive cities. As a result, the charter movement finds itself at a crossroads. If it fails to adapt to this rapidly shifting landscape, it risks trading its longstanding bipartisan support for a generation in the political wilderness.
The answer to whether charters can still be a bipartisan project depends as much on geography as it does on anything else. In Indianapolis, for example, Democratic mayors and local elected officials have led the charge for high-quality charters for over two decades, as Republicans in the statehouse strove to make Indiana’s charter law one of the best in the country. But the playbook in Indiana likely can’t work in bluer states, which is why the national charter movement must remain nimble and able to appeal to a broad political cross-section.
To do this effectively, charter advocates should avoid the trap of starting with their partisan leanings and then working to get their preferred “side” to support their priorities. Advocates must instead start with the premise that charters provide life-changing opportunities and should be expanded, identify who holds power where, and then construct a political coalition that accomplishes their policy goals.
This political reality raises a key question: How can a three-decades-old movement continue to innovate and resist being left behind?
For the charter movement to strengthen its influence and serve even more students, it must prove that it is on the vanguard of education innovation. Luckily, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently made a great hire in choosing Starlee Coleman as the organization’s next CEO. So here are five unsolicited ideas for Starlee and her team to consider as they develop the next chapter of the charter movement.
- The national charter movement comprises many diverse local and statewide movements, but it’s currently missing the connective tissue that can spur collective, intentional action. It would benefit from an audacious and inspiring national goal that energizes people from across the movement. Imagine what aligned action could be spurred if it set a big goal of, say, serving 5 million students by 2030 and 8 million by 2040.
- Too often, the desire to be seen as public schools makes charter advocates too willing to accept endless regulations and one-size-fits-all accountability systems that hamper the sector’s ability to innovate. As a result, charters too often resemble the very schools that proponents used to claim weren’t working. Leaders should implement a policy agenda that works to strip away needless regulations that promote conformity, while challenging authorizers to improve their increasingly bureaucratic practices that value inputs over outcomes.
- The National Alliance should consider launching a national R & D initiative that researches, pilots, and scales break-the-mold innovations that place charters back at the forefront of innovation. This should include investing in the growth of microschools, adult high schools, and other innovative school models. It should also mean exploring what it could look like for charters to take advantage of universal ESA laws in red states so the sector can expand its reach and become more relevant in this new reform era.
- Charter advocates should be unafraid to fiercely defend the sector’s record. Is the movement perfect? Of course not. Has it accomplished more than any other structural reform of the last thirty years? I’d argue yes! If advocates are unwilling to boldly advocate for charters, they should find a different profession. While proponents engage in struggle sessions about the movement’s own faults, opponents never miss an opportunity to attack charters with their set of false talking points. Charter advocates have the facts on their side and should never shy away from trumpeting the life-changing outcomes of charter schools.
- Leaders should spur the next wave of charter school growth. Local school incubators, such as what The Mind Trust, of which I’m CEO, has implemented in Indianapolis and is planning in Connecticut, must be a key part of the solution. Charter proponents should support the next generation of education entrepreneurs to launch a new wave of schools that are steeped in a community’s context and provide life-changing outcomes for more students. Given America’s fraught politics, these schools won’t magically appear if leaders aren’t more intentional in supporting their development.
These are just a few ideas to start a conversation about what the next decade of charter growth and success could look like, and how advocates can reignite a movement that will transform the lives of the next generation of students. As Andy Rotherham has cautioned, leaders should do everything they can to avoid the possibility of charter schools not having a chair when the music stops.
