In the late 1980s, the charter idea was brand new. AFT President Albert Shanker thought that charter schools would develop innovative ways to help the students who struggled the most in schools. He envisioned charter schools as “research and development schools” that would learn new ways of reaching the most disaffected and turned off students. He saw them as laboratories created by teachers that would first get the permission of the entire school staff at a regular public school, then get the endorsement of the local school board. In his vision, charter schools would be part of the public school system, cooperating with public schools to share whatever they learned. He also saw them as unionized schools. He imagined them getting a charter for 3-5 years, showing what they learned, then being reabsorbed into the regular public schools if they had finished their mission.
His vision did not include for-profit charter schools. He imagined collaboration between public schools and charter schools, not competition. He did not imagine charter schools run by private corporations. He did not imagine charter schools as privately managed schools run by corporations, chains, or non-educators.
When he realized that the charter idea had been corrupted by privatizers and that they had become a means of breaking teachers’ unions, he turned against charters and concluded that they were no different from vouchers. To Al Shanker, they had turned into a first step on the road to privatizing public education.
Back before the disillusionment set in, the Clinton administration authorized a federal Charter Schools Program to fund the opening of new charter schools; federal dollars were needed to jumpstart more charter schools. At its inception in 1994, the new program had a few million dollars. At the time, there were only a few hundred charter schools in the nation.
Since 1994, the federal Charter Schools Program has grown to a yearly expenditure of $440 million under the astute encouragement of the charter lobby, but between one-third and 40% of the charters funded by the federal government either never open at all or close within a couple of years. The number of failed federally funded charters has grown even larger in the past few years, as Carol Burris’s letter below documents (also see here and here.)
According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, there are now nearly 8,000 charter schools in the nation, enrolling 7.5% of all public school students. (Of course, opinions are sharply divided about whether charter schools are “public” schools, since they are not overseen by elected school boards and court decisions usually rule that charters, unlike public schools, are “not state actors.”)
The time has come to ask, why is the federal government still paying to launch new charter schools? The charter sector seems to be multiplying quite well without federal aid. It is now typical for charter schools to accept not the neediest students, but the most promising ones. They drain students and resources from the public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of students. With so many deep-pocketed backers in the philanthropic sector and on Wall Stree (Walton, Gates, Bloomberg, and a never of hedge funders)t, why do new charters need federal aid?
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, recently wrote a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten, and Deputy Assistant Adam Schott, calling on the US. Department of Education to stop funding the federal Charter Schools Program.
I ask you, dear readers, to send a similar letter to urge the end to funding a failed federal program that is no longer necessary, if it ever was.
Here is Carol Burris’s letter:
Secretary Miguel Cardona (miguel.cardona@ed.gov)
Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten (cindy.marten@ed.gov)
Deputy Assistant Adam Schott (adam.schott@ed.gov)
Dear Secretary Cardona, Deputy Secretary Marten, and Deputy Assistant Schott:
On behalf of the 350,000 Network for Public Education members, I am writing to ask that you do not fund the Federal Charter School Programs in the FY 2024 budget. Here are the reasons why.
First, enrollment in charter schools between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 declined by 5,323 students. That decline was identified using NCES data. The “surge” in charter enrollment was predominantly in low-quality online schools during the prior year. The need for more charter schools is not there.
Second, a recent program audit by the Department’s Office of the Inspector General report found that of the grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51% of the schools promised by CSP recipients opened or expanded.
Third, there has not been an opportunity to find out whether or not the new regulations are, in fact, being properly implemented by the State Entities and the CMOs.
The nearly half-billion dollars saved can be used to reduce the budget deficit or, better yet, to fund our public schools.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email, for the courage to withstand the pressures to back down on the new regulations, and for all that you do for our children every day.
Carol Burris
Executive Director
The Network for Public Education
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many thanks to Carol Burris for for her comprehensive research into all the waste in the federal charter school program. The interactive state map is informative and revealing. Thanks to NPE, the public can actually get a picture of the amount waste in the federal charter school program which has ballooned into a gigantic pork barrel. If Democrats lack the fortitude to terminate all this waste, they should put in on the ballot in 2024 and let the public decide if funding schools that vandalize the common good have merit, particularly when so many of these private schools never open and public school students see their budgets dwindle and services slashed in order to transfer federal tax dollars to the already wealthy.
I have been thinking about this for a … long time …, and I have finally concluded that the original concept of “charter schools” may not have originated with Albert Shanker. He may have picked up this idea from someone else in a conversation or something he heard. Then because he was the president of a teachers union, he had a national pulpit people paid attention to.
Let me introduce you to Santa High School in Rowland Unified School District.
“Santana High School, long established as a California Model Continuation high school, provides educational options for high school students in Rowland Unified. Students attending Santana are provided the opportunity for credit recovery or acceleration through the use of individualized and personalized instructional methodologies. A high point of the Santana High School program is a focus on student support services. The entire staff works to provide ongoing support to encourage and advance student academic, career and personal/social development.”
https://www.santanahs.org/about/mission.jsp
Santa had already been there for years when I was earning my teaching credential through a year long urban residency during the 1975 – 76 school year at an elementary school in the same public school district that Santa was located in. Over the years, I learned more about Santa where the teachers made most of the decisions based on what was best for their students. Most if not all of the students they taught were recommended from the two regular high schools in the district as having special needs (that doesn’t mean they were all special ed students).
Rowland Unified School district straddles the 60 Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley. There was a lot of poverty east of the freeway in La Puente and the City of Industry, and on the west side of the freeway there are middle to upper-middle class communities. I taught in that district for 30 years and forthree of those years, before I transferred to Nogales High School (for the last 16 years of my teaching career) in La Puente, CA, I taught at a middle school on the west side.
Many if not all of the students that ended up at Santana were recommended to Santa from the two regular high schools, Nogales and Rowland High Schools.
For instance, Santana had a pre school, child care program so pregnant girls and underage mothers could continue high school and their children (any age) would be in the Santana preschool while they were in class, at the same facility.
And, students that came from poor families who had jobs at an early age, to help their families survive financially, had classes at night and I heard there were also weekend classes, so they didn’t have to dropout of high school. Students that didn’t qualify to graduate on time, could also transfer to Santa and continue their high school education beyond age 18. One year, I heard the oldest young man to graduate from Santana was 25 at the time. He had a demanding job and sometimes could only take one class a semester at Santa, and he didn’t want to give up.
The teachers at Santa, at least when I was still teaching, had a lot of autotomy to decide what to teach and how to teach so their students would learn what they needed to learn to qualify for high school graduation at Santana in Rowland Unified.
Near the end of my teaching career, I was invited to apply for a position opening up because of a teacher who was retiring but at that time I was the journalism advisor the student high school newspaper at Nogales, the regular high school where I had been teaching for more than a decade after 14 years at two middle schools in the same district, and I loved working with the high school journalism students so I did not accept that transfer offer.
From what I heard, Santana had almost no staff turnover. I don’t know what it’s like today in the toxic environment that has been cultivated and worsened by the subversive, destroy public education crime syndicate, but back then the teachers I met who taught at Santana enjoyed teaching there with no complaints while many of the teachers at the two regular high schools in that district, including me, had lots of complaints because of the toxic politics pressuring public school to do the impossible, succeed with every student.
There was a professor at U Mass named Ray Budde who came up with charter idea in 1984, but there were probably similar ideas elsewhere. Shanker saw a school in Cologne, Germany, that impressed him. The teachers stayed with same students for 3-4 years. Didn’t look much like a charter (I visited the school) but he was looking for something to reach the kids who weee bored, not the high achievers.
An hour ago, Bloomberg reported about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. It was the 16th largest bank in the nation. The bank’s “lending service extended to a host of non-profits including charter schools.” Allegedly, the bank had high exposure to venture capital- backed loans. A high burn rate is a characteristic of VC.
Also, in news from Silicon Valley, Mercury News reported on March 8 that a charter school with 600 students has been closed due to a $4.5 mil. deficit for next year. IMO, once out of the public schools, there should a penalty to the parents who want to opt back into public schools.
Carol thanked the recipients “for the courage to withstand the pressures to back down on the new regulations”. Let’s say that again. And again! And again. Courage!