The first charter school opened in 1991. Since then, charters have expanded exponentially. There are now more than 7,000 of them. Originally, charters had bipartisan support.
Bill Clinton loved the charter idea and created the federal Charter Schools Program to fund new charter schools, a modest expenditure of $6 million a year (that has since ballooned into $440 million a year, most of which has gone to grow big, wealthy charter chains).
President Barack Obama also loved charter schools , as did his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. When Congress pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy to stave off an economic collapse in 2009, it allocated $100 for schools. $95 billion went to public schools. $5 billion was set aside for the U.S. Department of Education to use as it wished for “education reform.”
Secretary Duncan, aided by helpers from the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, launched a competition among the states to win a share of $4.35 billion. But the states’ eligibility to participate in Race to the Top depended on their complying with certain demands: the states had to agree to open more charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students, to restructure or close schools with low test scores, to adopt national standards (I.e., the Common Core, not yet finished, never tested).
Race to the Top gave a huge boost to charter schools.
But reality intruded. Large numbers of new charters opened. Large numbers of charters closed, replaced soon by others. Charter scandals proliferated. Get-rich-quick entrepreneurs opened charter schools; grifters opened charter schools. Some charter leaders paid themselves more than big-city superintendents. Highly successful (I.e. high test scores) charters carefully curated their students, rejecting or removing those who had low scores, excluding students with disabilities.
The charter sector began to act like an industry, with its own lobbyists in D.C. and in state capitols. Sometimes the charter lobbyists wrote state legislation to assure that there was little or no accountability or oversight or transparency Fort the public funds they received.
Of course, the charter lobby maintained a strong public relations presence, booking appearances for their paid spokespeople on national TV and in the press. When state legislatures met to vote in the budget, the charters hired buses to bring thousands of students and parents to demand more money and more charters. They were coached to use the right words about the success of charters.
Since charters have been around for more than 30 years, the research on them is consistent. Their test scores, on average, are about the same as regular schools, even though they have much more flexibility. Some get high scores (typically the ones with high attrition rates who got rid of the students they didn’t want), some got very low scores. Most were in the middle. The Cybercharters were the worst by every measure: low graduation rates, poor academics, high teacher turnover, expensive for the low quality but very profitable.
Were they innovative? No. Those considered “successful” operated with 19th century modes of strict discipline. Some substituted computers for teachers.
Charters fell under a cloud when Donald Trump became President and sooointed choice zealot Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. She plugged vouchers and charters and choice. Most Democrats in Congress began to open their eyes and understand that charters were a prelude to vouchers. DeVos’s strident advocacy for charters made most Democrats remember their party’s historic legacy as a champion of public schools, real public schools , not privately managed schools that were Public in Name Only.
So, where stands the charter idea now? Charters are admired and thriving (at least financially, if not academically) in red states. Most Democrats understand that the preservation and improvement of public schools is central to the party’s identity.
A reader of the blog came up with a sensible redefinition of the mission of charter schools. Since they have the freedom to try out new ideas, they should serve the neediest children. They should do whatever it takes—not to raise their test scores—but to educate the children who have struggled in regular schools. Let the charters innovate—their original mission—free of the burden of being labeled “failing” or “low performing.” Let them work their magic for the children who need it most, not for the high achievers who would succeed in any school.
Greg R. Flick, a reader of the blog and himself a blogger (“What’s Gneiss for Education”)) sent this perceptive comment about what charters should do to be truly useful to American education and to provide an exemplary service:
It seems that if we believe the narrative the charters push, we should flip the system on its ear. Let the charters be the default schools for the kids who can’t function in the public schools. Let’s have the public schools be able to cream their student populations, select only the students they want to have…the “easier” students, and have the charters be required to take those kids kicked out of the public schools.
Charters with their smaller classes and “freedom” to innovate will finally be able to help those kinds of kids. And since they are public schools (as they keep on telling us repeatedly) they can’t gripe about taking in the hard nuts, the Special ed kids, the ones with behavioral issues, etc.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Love the information in this article
Diane is one of the best history professors in the land, and her course is tuition free. All you have to (should) pay for is books. https://dianeravitch.com/book/slaying-goliath/ I’ve spent over a thousand dollars on professional literature I discovered here in Diane’s living room/classroom. Best grand I ever spent.
LCT, you are a star student!
Can’t be a great educator without studying — avidly — under a great educator.
Charters with all their flexibility should take the most difficult to educate. However, it is unlikely that it will happen unless they can turn a good profit from doing so. Anyone that intends to serve vulnerable students well would have to hire specialists to serve the needs of students including: special education teachers, reading, ESL/bilingual, speech language teachers, counselors, community liaisons, and social workers. Meeting the needs of these students adequately is an expensive proposition that most quality public schools have already figured out.
Prior to deform most quality public schools know how to consolidate and sometimes share specialized teachers with other districts. Public schools serve struggling students the best because there are laws that determine what districts must do to serve the needs of these students and keep them safe. Private schools cannot offer the same opportunities to these students on the same scale unless they are very expensive schools that only the wealthy can afford.
Privatization results in a tiered system of education in which the poorest students end up with the least. Unfortunately, public schools as well sometimes underfund schools with needy students; however, all public school must meet certain minimum legal and accountability requirements. Public education is the most effective democratic institution that can most efficiently and effectively serve the needs of diverse, vulnerable students. Public schools serve the nation, community and students, and the misguided politically driven fascination with privatization is impeding their important mission.
It is so much easier for charters to take the best kids.
They also can crow about their results while keeping costs down, and this strategy protects their brand while generating lots of profit.
I student taught French in my old selective public school. While we didn’t always have the best teachers, but we had the “best” students. I learned little about teaching all students from this experience. I learned about inclusive teaching from on the job experience and becoming an ESL teacher.
Charter schools in every iteration were and are a societal abdication of responsibility for the education of all children. In truth, many public schools struggle or fail to meet the needs of all children. They often replicate inequity. In some, innovations that could improve learning are constrained by restrictive bureaucracy. However, we will never solve those problems by funding an alternative school system, that drains resources and kids away from public schools. We won’t solve it with ever more segregated schools. We won’t reduce the effects of poverty in schools without eliminating poverty. We won’t mediate the effects of disfunctional school boards, by eliminating democracy. Individual Parental choice and competition is not democracy.
Well said! One problem in public education is the funding of public education through real estate taxes. It is by design inequitable. A second problem today is widespread privatization that drains funds from the schools that serve all students. Many public schools are cutting the services that provide a comprehensive education including the arts, foreign languages, elective subjects, counselors, social workers, even resource room teachers, and class size is too large for the many student needs. Some districts are also putting most students on ineffective canned cyber instruction that reduces costs and promotes test prep instead of thought provoking education. Many public schools are in a permanent state of austerity, and overwhelmed teachers are leaving in droves. This is particularly true in red states where politicians are deliberately conspiring to destroy public education.
Hi Diane,
When Al put the charter school idea, which emanated from Ray Budde, on the map, this is exactly what he proposed. But it doesn’t hurt to raise it again. Fat chance of it taking hold, however.
With best wishes for your health and voice,
Bella
Thank you, Bella. You were there and you know. Al Shanker did not imagine how his vision would be twisted to suck the best kids out of public schools and the dollars that funded them. It took a few years for him to recognize that the charter idea was seized by the anti-union types. Today, more than 90% of charters are non-union.
Still, if we did that, only allowed the Charters to take the neediest, most challenging children, and those Charters were still allowed to be opaque in almost everything they do and how they spend the public’s money, I think the greedy, fraudsters in the Charter Industry that are in it for the money and not the children, would bring back lobotomies and sterilization as a method of behavior control.
Funny!
Didn’t the LeBron James-funded school in Akron do just that — specifically took the most struggling students? And wasn’t it part of the public school system? THAT is what all charters should be doing.
The so called “successful” and expanding charter chains have almost universally prioritized the needs of their CEOs over the needs of the most vulnerable children. Their approach to teaching students is that they want to teach students as long as those children make the CEO and administrators look good. Period. The students who don’t make them look good are drummed out and what is most disgusting is that they demonize those students if their parents don’t quietly remove them.
Anyone who doesn’t understand exactly WHO it is whose well-being is most important to charters only has to watch John Merrow’s October 2015 PBS interview with Eva Moskowitz – and the growing RED HIVES that appear on her neck which seems to be her “tell” when she feels threatened by having to defend her false narratives.
Her red hives are particularly evident when John Merrow asked her about the high rate of suspensions of Kindergarten and first graders, who are primarily African American:
“I OFTEN have parents say to me ‘my child never PUNCHED the teacher’, I say ‘well, but you weren’t there”.
That happens OFTEN, Eva Moskowitz claims in the video, referring to those youngest elementary school students. OFTEN.
Only an implicitly racist education reporter would not be extremely suspicious that there must be something very wrong with an inexperienced teacher trained in the Success Academy way if parents OFTEN are having Moskowitz telling them their 5 or 6 year olds were PUNCHING their Success Academy teachers.
And that’s how she justified high suspension rates. I would like to ask Eliza Shapiro and Elizabeth Greene whether they believe that is true, and ask them why they don’t feel that lying to demonize vulnerable children is disqualifying, but instead is something that shouldn’t be mentioned when presenting this person as a worthy source of information. Moskowitz OFTEN had to tell parents their young children PUNCHED their teacher, Eva Moskowitz says, and these reporters’ implicit racism did not even lead them to question such an absurdity that they surely would have questioned if a principal said that they OFTEN had affluent white parents of 5 year olds in her office who didn’t realize how violent their own children were.
“A disciplinary code is written to give maximum freedom…” said Eva Moskowitz, before she invoked how OFTEN 5 and 6 year old Success Academy children PUNCHED their teachers.
Complicit journalists who didn’t even question this when they heard Moskowitz invoking her violent students. Why?
Charters aren’t popping up in affluent white suburban neighborhoods because there isn’t a magic formula to turn students into scholars, there is a magic formula to cherry pick the students who perform well and dump the others but blame someone else because charters will never admit they are the ones who have failed the students they were funded to teach. Presumably the complicit journalists would not be so complicit about ignoring the red flags in the “violent children who needed to be suspended” narrative if those very young students were middle class and white.
The implicit racism that infuses every story about “high performing” charters in the NYT and Chalkbeat is that it would be impossible to cherry pick because there are simply too few academically proficient Black or Latinx students in urban areas to cherry pick. A math-challenged education reporter can see a statistic like “only 30% of Black and Latinx students in NYC are proficient on state tests” and not bother to notice that in a large city like NYC that is over 70,000 3-8 grade public school students. So they fawn over a hugely popular, lavishly funded charter with a disproportionately high rate of attrition whose 3-8 grade enrollment is a tiny percentage of 70,000, and they “inform” us in every story that to cherry pick is virtually impossible. And it simply has never been true, as anyone with a better understanding of numbers could have explained to them if they didn’t depend on press releases instead of trying to understand the evaluate the criticism themselves. It’s so much easier just to write a phrase “critics from the teachers’ union” or “critics who hate charters” disagree and then write more fawning paragraphs about the charters’ unprecedented and miraculous results.
If there wasn’t such lousy reporting that legitimized false narratives – if the reporting had been focused on why charters weren’t being held to their promise to teach the most at-risk students instead of the most motivated and academically strong students – I suspect the charter movement might become something I could support. When I found out that they were not interested in doing what they were funded to do, I was shocked. But when I found out they were LYING about what they were doing, and supporting their lie by throwing very young kids under the bus, I was disgusted.
Charter schools are simply a way for the investor class to rob the working class. They are inherently and systematically racist and classist. Privatization is a shameful modern combination of colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
I also love the idea of flipping the script on charters.The NAACP has, however, a better idea than flipping the twisted relationship between charter and public schools, a moratorium on charters. I have another better idea too, but my idea involves a time machine and traveling back to 1965.
So true, LCT. Privatization is about transferring wealth out of the working class and to the wealthy class. It is shameful that the Democrats are not doing more to curtail it.
Diane, many thanks for highlighting my comment. I greatly admire you and your forum and am honored by this.
I’ve made similar comments elsewhere and even engaged with some pro-charter folk. They have often been taken aback by my suggestion and rejected it quickly except in one case where the pro-charter person conceded my point.
We just need to keep chipping away at this. I think eventually we will win this debate.
Many thanks!
GregR
Good post, Greg!
You captured the original charter idea.