By all accounts, urban charter schools are an uncontested victory of the bipartisan education reform movement. They run laps around traditional public schools academically. They’re popular with the public. Even as public school enrollment declines across the country and districts consolidate buildings, the charter sector is growing—slowly but surely.
But the charter school sector has always struggled in suburban areas. Charter school students are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, urban, and impoverished. Part of the appeal of urban charter schools is that they outperform the local public schools academically. But in the suburbs, where students tend to be White and middle class, charter schools rarely do better than the neighborhood school and often do worse.
The entire school choice sector has struggled to break into the suburban market. Private schools and the home-school movement find success there, but these are a fraction of the market. Micro schools have purchase, but it’s hard to see how they will scale.
This failure to expand into the suburbs carries real political risks. In a 2017 article calling for a “suburban strategy,” Derrell Bradford noted that “politics is a numbers game” with electeds ever asking not “Is this right?” but instead “Does this get me more friends or make me more enemies?” What does this mean in practice? President Obama used the bully pulpit to hammer standardized testing and states rolled back accountability reforms because the “opt-out” movement (disgruntled suburban moms) gained a modicum of success but a ballot measure to increase the charter cap in Massachusetts lost two-to-one. With a small constituency relegated to urban households, all school choice wins could, in Bradford’s opinion, could “easily be undone.”
Classical charter schools shift this landscape. Great Hearts Academies is the KIPP of the classical world—a commanding network enrolling many, many students. Exact numbers are hard to come by for the entire system, but individual schools report demographics, and the majority of students are suburban and White. In Atlanta, for example, where only 17 percent of public school students are White, the Hillsdale-sponsored Atlanta Classical Academy has a 71 percent White student body with 16 percent of students on free or reduced-price lunch meals.
I’m not here to offer moral judgments on the demographic mix of schools. I only want to point out that classical charter schools offer a model that appeals to suburban families and has the potential to scale, bringing a much-needed new constituency into the school choice movement.
This development in itself is good. More choice is good. Charter schools foster competition that causes traditional public schools to improve. And despite being something of an interloper in classical land, I celebrate the spread of classical charter schools specifically.
But speaking in purely Machiavellian terms, the spread of suburban charter schools will be a tremendous boon to the school choice movement. It builds out a whole new political constituency that has a direct, personal commitment to pro-school-choice policies, and has the political and financial capital to effectively lobby legislators.
In the previous decades, the school choice movement has proven savvy in leveraging its constituencies for political wins. Eva Moskowitz marshals parents of her Success Academy schools to rallies and campaigns. By all accounts, Ron DeSantis won the governor’s mansion because Black parents broke in favor of him for his support of school choice.
That being said, the political capital of poor families is inherently limited. Their connections to power brokers are few. Their wealth is, by definition, minimal. Even their leisure time in which they could undertake advocacy is constrained.
Enter suburban families attending classical charter schools. School choice has always received public support from affluent voters, but this support has often been in the abstract. Many like the idea of charter schools or support school choice on principle. But an idea alone is unlikely to get someone off of the couch to call their representative or attend a rally.
Conversely, when affluent families have kids in a charter school, the calculation changes. Suddenly, a whole new constituency with leisure, affluence, and political clout cares on a personal level about charter school caps, funding parity, zoning laws, and other policy minutia.
A think tank fellow or lobbyist can argue in favor of a bill that compels districts to sell property to schools of choice, but that’s unlikely to move the needle politically. In Bradford’s words, “the right things are rarely done for the right reasons.” Once a new constituency has students in a school, however, there’s now a large voting bloc that could unseat a local politician if they don’t go along. A Massachusetts ballot initiative might stand a fighting chance.
And while classical schools are expressly apolitical, the mediating institutions that bolster and support them are not. Hillsdale College and the University of Dallas, two of the power centers in the classical movement, are conservative, Christian institutions, for example. This will help classical schools withstand the political pressure urban charter schools have faced from the left. In 2020, the KIPP system dropped their slogan “work hard, be nice” because it was too based in meritocracy, a remnant of “white supremacy culture.” As it cares little for progressive shibboleths, the classical sector will hopefully better weather headwinds from progressive pressure campaigns.
But this different political mix brings its own liabilities. Without spilling family conflicts into the open, I’ll say simply that, in my time working in classical schools, much of the pressure came from parents and outside interest groups accusing us of not being conservative enough.
While all developments have trade-offs, a bigger tent and broader constituency will be a significant net positive for the school choice sector. And its proponents, academics, advocates, funders, and political leaders would be wise to leverage the support of these newcomers.
