When I graduated from high school, the first charter schools in America were just opening their doors. But I have advocated for, worked with, and supported their right to serve families for more than twenty years now. I remember nearly crying during one of my early visits to North Star Academy in Newark, NJ (where I worked), after seeing its morning college ritual with dozens of little kids dressed as the mascots of some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities. Learning education policy was like drinking from a fire hose, and it was still exhilarating. And meeting many of the Northeast’s leaders on charters (and sometimes choice more broadly) was always like running into a celebrity. I was dumbstruck the first time I met Eva Moskowitz, having read about her exploits on the New York City Council as its education chair before striking off to start a single charter school called Success Academy. There was Geoffrey Canada, Floyd Flake, of course Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein, Cory Booker, Governors Pataki and Christie, and others in the NYC/New Jersey area who believed deeply in the role charter schools played in providing choice and opportunities to families who had been poorly served by sclerotic district bureaucracies. And there were thousands of teachers who were proud to be a part of a results driven movement to right a historic wrong in how we distribute educational opportunity in this country.
Most importantly, there was a ferocity to it all. A spirit of confrontation; a will to, if not topple the old order of the K–12 establishment, embarrass it so deeply that it would be forced to change or, at the very least, acquiesce. While many right-of-center advocates had always believed in the principles of education choice and supported charter schools as a worthy mechanism on the way to broader forms of educational opportunity, this was principally a center-left fight in New Jersey where I was cutting my teeth. Republican support (particularly at the executive level) was crucial, but most of the time I was talking to democrats about charter schools, as were the school leaders and advocates around me. While it was a slog, it seemed to be one we were winning. I remember vividly Barack Obama telling the NEA’s members, at their convention, that he was a supporter of charter schools. Many states removed charter caps as a condition of Race to the Top, as well. That seemed like a high point for it all.
While I was learning about education policy, I was also learning about something else: politics. More specifically, I was learning about how politics changes the way we talk about what we do in the world, and how that has a profound effect on how we do it and what we believe. While many of us continued to push the edges of the charter debate publicly, privately the discussion had changed. There was broad acknowledgement that charter schools were doing something good from all but the most hardened teacher union supporters (and even some of them were honest about that being the sole reason for their opposition). But there was also a quid pro quo presented; nothing sinister per se, but its effect has been profound over time. In return for greater political support, we took the temperature down on our rhetoric in all but the most extreme instances, and in some cases, we even softened our policy demands. The sharp rallying cries of “freedom, flexibility, funding,” and “autonomy for results” were ablated by district charter compacts, centralized and weighted enrollment systems so charters served “the same kids,” demands to reboot chronically underperforming district schools in return for the right to expand charters, local impact studies before being allowed to open, and a dozen other “requests” to show charters were, ultimately, good actors. Talking about underperformance (or comparative performance), at all became déclassé. Being a pace setter got harder, and falling in line with the broader public schooling ethos became easier.
While each of these things may have seemed a small, tolerable, and necessary concession in the moment, their cumulative effect has been disastrous for charter growth and diversity, miring the sector in much of the same compliance-related regulation charters were meant to avoid. Most perniciously, their acceptance ushered in both an erosion of moral clarity and a crippling doubt that affects many charter staff and leaders, who now whisper what they do at family dinners where once they shouted it from the mountaintops.
A movement that lacks belief is a movement that will stagnate. And indeed, we have stagnated. But now is not the time to retreat. In fact, there has not been a better time to revisit who we are, who we have been, and what is possible than now. But a movement needs principles to do this, as well. Here are four for the movement’s consideration.
“Free, public, and open to all.”
While how we talk about ourselves matters, a simple marketing reboot or rebrand does not address the movement’s current uncertainty or meet its current opportunity. While this isn’t a lost political campaign where one party blames the defeat on bad marketing or messaging and just vows to evince the same principles with more pith next time, how we describe ourselves is important because it shows what we believe is most important. And, at current, the way to do this is to describe charters as “free, public, and open to all.”
To be clear, this language is sticky, and most importantly, it is factually accurate and true in a landscape where charter schools are often derided as not being public enough or outright private. It is worth supporting and saying. It’s also worth noting that charters may be the most “open to all” of public schools given their lack of aptitude testing for entrance like magnet schools and their prohibition against using attendance zones, a proxy for real estate wealth, to determine entrance like most traditional public schools. But this language also reveals something vital—something essential—we have lost since I first visited North Star all those years ago. This is to say that we have let ourselves be defined by the things we have in common with other public schools, not the things that set charter schools, the movement, and the process of chartering distinctly apart from them. And in doing so, it makes the floor the ceiling. Charter schools are different by design and this is working as intended. This truth must be embraced. Moreover, it should be shouted by everyone who believes in charter schooling.
It’s worth noting that many of the attacks on charters center on what is dissimilar about them from traditional public schools. That charter schools don’t “look” like their home districts is one common canard. But consider why charter schools are different by design and what their creation has responded to in the first place. A long history of first race-based and then income-based discrimination in school assignment birthed from the New Deal and locked in with twentieth century redlining. Schools with historic track records of single-digit student performance where dreams and futures went to die. Graduation rates that set no one up for anything. A country where 20 percent of Black fourth graders know how to read, and barely half of all kids do. Teachers throttled by district bureaucracies. A one-size-fits-all approach to learning that prioritizes a child’s address over their aspirations. The list goes on. Authorizers, non-profit governance, parent choice, and freedom to create, hire, and fire were bundled together in “the chartering process” to combat all of these things, not make common cause with them. There is no shame in opposing this and wanting something different for the nation’s families.
Different by design
It’s important to remember that when Ember Reichgott Junge led the effort to pass the first charter school law in Minnesota, she and her allies had an idea of what they thought might happen, but no crystal ball to see the future. This is as it is with all policy and almost four million students, and 200,000 teachers, attend and work in more than 7,000 charter schools now because of her courage.
But every educational innovation suffers friction from a status quo that wants to arrest its progress before it can gain momentum. And charter school supporters of the time, though hopeful that creating excellent schools would build political support, also knew the situation was fragile. Knowing no elected official would want to be seen supporting a “bad school,” (unless it was a traditional public school in need of more money, of course), charter leaders, authorizers, and philanthropists focused on accelerating the growth of those charter schools that routinely helped kids demonstrate their learning on state assessments. Thus, what many now refer to as the “no excuses” CMOs were scaled, and they continue to have an outsized footprint and impact on how charter schools are perceived and, more importantly, whether they are deemed successful.
I remain a staunch supporter of these schools. Many are the best of any type created in this nation. I neither flinch nor blanche when discussing them, and the perpetual long wait lists, college acceptance ceremonies, and grateful parents at graduation are all I need to see to know they continue to deserve our defense and support. But (and as NACSA has examined) the no excuses CMOs have had a pronounced effect on the diversity of the sector, biasing advocates, authorizers, and policymakers to their expansion when considering how to grow charters and how to minimize overall political risk. In retrospect, one could say that we went from authorizing new things to authorizing things we knew. No one is to blame for this.
The CMOs we know will remain key to how the movement continues to grow, but the future cannot lie exclusively with them. More specifically, for a different-by-design movement to grow, in terms of where charter schools are, who attends them, and who supports them, it must not lie exclusively with them. While many states have looked to charter schools to help them close achievement gaps, the power to charter is also one that allows, quite simply, for the creation of different things for different people with different purposes than simply this. Whether a family favors the basics or the classics, college or a career, music or mathematics, diversity or exploring one’s history, there must be a charter school for them. In the city, in the suburbs, and elsewhere. For low-income families and rich ones. For families starved of options and for those with plenty of them. It is the sector’s ability to meet this unique challenge, through difference, that must push it forward now.
A seat for every kid, but not at every school
Spend any amount of time in the dark digital spaces where charter detractors dwell and you’ll see the all-caps axiom “PUBLIC SCHOOLS SERVE ALL KIDS” brandished as an article of faith. This is a lie. It is, however, a prevarication offered so often that people accept it as truth.
Assigning children to schools based on where they live, and by extension how much money their parents make, and prosecuting and jailing citizens when these lines are violated, is perhaps the clearest and most egregious way in which public schools fail to serve all kids. Perhaps less maliciously, the right to private placement for a student with an IEP under federal law acknowledges the same. And more simply, any family knows that even the best public school does not work for every child. Together these give us the proposition that traditional public schools not only do not, but perhaps cannot and should not, serve all kids. This is the reality.
How charter schools internalize this is important. Charter schools have waived the flag of being for all children, and they should be and have the ability to do so. The question that matters is this: Should every charter school be for every child? Here the answer may be unsettling, but it is straightforward: No. By this I don’t mean we should abdicate our responsibility to all children, particularly those with the least opportunity. But it is impossible for any one school to do this for all children. This, too, must be embraced. It is a feature of chartering not a defect.
Again, this is a criticism of sameness offered derisively by those that oppose charters. Because the myth of “serve all kids” exists in traditional public schools (while ignoring test-in magnets), charter schools must strive for it as if it is reality. This is wrong thinking and counter to why charter schools exist and how they enroll students. Only the lowest common denominator school—devoid of expectations and differentiation—could “serve” all kids, and it certainly would not do it well. What is also true is that no school is for every child, and no school of choice ever will be. This is the point. The matching of a family’s values, a child’s interests and aspirations, and a school’s mission and staff—without needing the right address or income to gain entrance—is a special thing under the umbrella of what we call “public education.” And charter schools are perhaps the best example of it. We cannot and should not pretend otherwise.
Charter schools take money from public schools
There is a saying in politics that when you’re explaining, you’re losing. And charter advocates, leaders, and others have spent decades explaining the nuances of how charter schools are funded to skeptics and the opposition—with mixed results. We have detailed hold harmless provisions, sunsets, phase-ins and -outs, facilities and fundraising, count days and payment lags in an effort to make it more understandable and, honestly, more palatable to the powers that be. It’s time to just own what’s real. Charter schools can, do, and should take money from traditional public schools.
In almost any state in America, bar a few that fund charters from a separate line item like Connecticut or Washington (which functions as a de facto cap), charter schools are funded when students choose them and some portion of the money appropriated to support their education follows them to a charter school. You cannot spend a dollar twice, and trying to do so never ends well. Money that follows a child to a charter school won’t be spent in the school they left. It doesn’t matter that there is money left over which will raise overall spending in that school. The money is gone. There is no way to sugarcoat this. In fact, sugarcoating it has been to the movement’s detriment.
To believe in charters is also to believe in funding them. And just as dollars follow children when they move between district-run schools—impacting their budgets and decisions—they move into and out of charter schools the same way. To support charter schools is to support this interaction, not be wary or ashamed of it.
More pointedly, not only should dollars follow the child, but all of them should. The early arguments that embraced the efficiency of charter schools had the unintended consequence of making every charter school student in America a second-class citizen of school finance. This was, and remains, unfair to them and did, and continues to, distract charter founders and leaders from the day-to-day work of creation and education. With some pioneering states changing their education finance laws, and more taking the bold step to write checks directly to families through the growing movement of education savings accounts, the time has never been better to revisit this early concession, along with other regulations that worked to make charter schools more like the schools they were explicitly founded to be different from.
I am a charter school supporter. I don’t want to dance around it, and I don’t want to be meek about it. I do, however, want to be clear about it and what it means to support a family’s right to choose charter schools and what it will take to help the movement continue to grow, diversify, serve students, and build support. Words matter, and we should say what we mean. More importantly, we should accept what it means when we say it.
Editor’s note. This was first published by CharterFolk.
