Recently I posted an article by pro-choice advocate Paul Peterson about the origins of charter schools. He wrote, “No, Albert Shanker Did Not Invent Charter Schools.” Shanker wanted teacher-led schools, schools-within-schools. He believed that their teachers would be union members and that the charters would be approved by the other staff in the school and by the local school board.

But, wrote Peterson, Minnesota rejected Shanker’s views and instead wrote a law in 1991 that allowed other authorizers besides the district, that cleared the way for entrepreneurs and other non-educators to open charters, and that were not bound to accept teachers unions. Shanker wanted charters to be Research and Development programs for public schools. Led by Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan, the Minnesota reformers wanted charters to compete with public schools.

A few states made school districts the sole authorizers of charters, and those states have few charters. Most, however, followed Minnesota’s lead, encouraging many authorizers, many kinds of charter management organizations, and the emergence of an aggressive entrepreneurial sector. The latter states have h7 drew of charters of varying quality.

So what happened to charters in Minnesota, the first state to launch them in 1992?

Rob Levine, native Minnesotan, writer, photographer, blogger, assays the failed promises of charters in Minnesota in this post.

Levine shows that the push for charters came not from teachers or parents, but from “a who’s who of the state’s business, civic, foundation, non-profit and political elite.”

“Key to that sales pitch: the idea that education is, at its heart, a business and should operate by the business principles that govern virtually every other sector of the economy, with a spoken goal of “breaking the government monopoly” on public primary and secondary education. The unspoken goals were many and varied but the budgetary results of those efforts are quantifiable: the conversion of nearly $1 trillion spent annually nationally on public primary and secondary education to private profit, and the breaking of the nation’s teachers’ unions.

“To make this palatable, charter boosters focused on a righteous idea: the creation of better and more educational opportunities for poor children of color. In the end, the change model they embraced was what’s sometimes called the Shock Doctrine. First you create and/or declare an emergency in a cash-rich public sector, then you propose the solution that inevitably results in the privatization of as much of the sector as possible.

“In a wide-ranging proposal to reform government called the Minnesota Policy Blueprint, Mitch Pearlstein, a leader in Minnesota’s “School Choice Movement,” admitted as much in his chapter on education policy. In Pearlstein’s view, the answer to the challenges of public education is obvious: all public schools should be converted to charter schools.
Today only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

“It’s not hard to see why that conclusion appealed to Pearlstein. For decades, the teachers unions have been the bête noire to GOP lawmakers in state houses across the nation. As the founder and leader of a Republican “think tank”, the Center of the American Experiment, Pearlstein understood that unions would not be able to get a foothold in charter schools. He was right. Today, 22 years later, only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

Charter promoters, he says, worked out a deal that the state would ignore segregation in return for higher test scores.

“Twenty five years later the results of those “deals” are clear. After adjusting for external factors charter school students do no better, and probably marginally worse, on standardized test scores than students at regular public schools. And charter schools are decidedly more segregated than their regular public school counterparts. By 2016 there were 93 “hypersegregated” schools in the Twin Cities – more than 95% children of color. Almost two-thirds of those schools are charters. Children of color in the state who attend charter schools are twice as likely as their regular public school counterparts to attend a highly segregated school…Today, according to a report from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, “Of the 50 most racially concentrated Twin Cities schools, 45 are charters.”

The Big Daddy of charters in Minnesota is the Walton Family Foundation. Levine points out that “the Walton Family Foundation…has started or helped to start 30 percent of all charter schools ever opened in the state. In effect we’ve partially outsourced the starting up of new schools to the heirs of the Walmart fortune.”

Levine writes that there are 48,000 students in the Minneapolis schools, public and charter. 36,000 are in public schools. Reformers plan to add 30,000 new “relevant and rigorous seats.” He assumes they mean seats in charters. He foresees the withering away of public schools in Minneapolis.

Given the charters’ failure to fulfill any of their promises, he thinks the public might get tired of paying for them. But he worries that time grows short.

“A journalist once seeking to report on the Gates Foundation’s education activity lamented how difficult the job was because nearly everyone in the education community was taking his money. That’s how it is in Minnesota education policy discourse. The only voices making it through our media din are the ones with a steady stash of tax-exempt income. The reformers’ money guarantees a seat at every table.

“When they’re not dredging up or paying for bogus studies or polls, the foundations and organizations are sponsoring events to push their agenda. These events are then broadcast by local public media, presented as a “public service.” This is especially true for non-profit media the foundations contribute to, especially MinnPost, but also including Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television (TPT).

“Education reformers will need all that firepower because evidence and reason are always just around the corner. They can only make excuses for low test scores, all kinds of impropriety, incompetence and segregation for so long. Providing marginally better test scores at a few segregated schools won’t cut it. And it remains to be seen how long the voting public will take paying taxes to support schools while having little to no control over them. If we wait much longer to take action to end the failed experiment of charter schools it could very well result in the end of the Minneapolis public schools, and that’s just a start.”