by John N. Hale
The charter movement began to take hold, much to the excitement of Ray Budde. Minnesota passed charter school legislation in 1991, and California followed the following year. By 1994, sixteen additional states had proposed charter school legislation, often with political fanfare from state governors. It was the genesis of a much larger movement. Twenty-five years after the first charter legislation passed, over three million students were enrolled in nearly seven thousand charter schools by the fall of 2016.46
Yet at the very moment of exploration and discovery that Shanker articulated, troubling clouds were billowing on the horizon. The gathering storm all but destroyed the original intent of charter schools. When Minnesota legislators passed the first charter law in 1991, the plan that emerged did not place teachers in control of charters. It did not even mandate standard teaching requirements. It also precluded collective bargaining rights for charter school teachers. This severely undermined the agency of teachers envisioned by the original charter architects.47 Additionally, the charters first implemented in Minnesota targeted specific communities of color, in this case Somali, Hmong, and Ethiopian immigrant and refugee communities.48 This undercut the historic Black disenfranchisement that charter architects had sought to address through their schools.
State officials served a more integral role than the original proposals called for too. After the first schools were established in Minnesota, state boards of education and other public entities were permitted to apply for charters.49 In the original conception, school boards were supposed to charter departments or programs within a school, not necessarily an entire school. Teachers were initially meant to govern charter schools too. But reformers saw the potential for “educators and citizens of a large community . . . to revitalize their schools and create the conditions for giant leaps in the quality of education.”50 Teachers’ unions were consequently and deliberately excluded in charter legislation. Businesses were free to run charter schools, and credentials in teaching or the field of education were not required. Instead of empowering teachers and teachers’ unions, charter legislation undercut them. Chester Finn, a conservative education policy analyst who served in the Reagan administration, noted, “The single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like and pay them as they see fit.”51 By 2015, only five of forty-two states required charter school teachers to be covered by district collective bargaining agreements. Only 7 percent of all charter schools were unionized, as a result of antiunion legislation governing charters.52
One of the most notable mutations from the original charter school idea was the shift in agency from educators to corporate for-profit and nonprofit entities. With competition spurred by choice that underpinned the “education market,” the entrepreneurial spirit ran high, and federal legislation further opened the market and the ability to compete by supporting more charters. Charter schools, based on the logic of charter school reformers, should be run like a business, and their first two decades have been driven by for-profit initiatives. By 2013, thirty-three states granted legislative approval to allow for-profit organizations to run charter schools. In Betsy DeVos’s home state of Michigan, for instance, 80 percent of all charter schools were for-profit.53
Illustrating the nature of for-profit charters, the tennis superstar Andre Agassi captured headlines in 2001 for his newfound prowess in the education market. He formed a partnership with an equity investing firm, raising $750 million to build a network of charter schools to serve at least forty thousand students. It was built on the logic of school reform through free-market ideology. “I’m interested in seeing this school duplicated and used as a blueprint, a model for how our education system should be in this country,” Agassi informed the New York Times when he opened his first school. “You need a lot of private dollars so you don’t have to play by the same set of rules, so to speak.” Investment banker Bobby Turner noted that they wanted “to attract investors who realize that making money and making societal change don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”54 Agassi illustrated how for-profit initiatives shaped school choice, and an athlete with no education background or teaching experience—arguably the polar opposite of what Shanker and Budde had in mind—emerged as a force behind charter schools.
Agassi’s company was but one of many such entities in the growing realm of for-profit education. And most for-profit charter schools have produced dismal results. Since their founding, the largest for-profit charter groups, such as White Hat Management, Educational Alternatives Inc., and the Edison Project, have been investigated, reported for mismanagement and fraud, and justifiably accused of capitalizing profits by reducing the cost of instruction and teaching.55
This dire record has generated a retreat of sorts from the for-profit sector and spurred new investment in the nonprofit segment of the expanding charter school business, generating over $500 million by 2010. In 2019 the federal government invested over $200 million alone in two charter companies, KIPP and IDEA, to create or expand over one hundred schools.56 Though legally retaining 501(c)3 nonprofit status, charter management organizations—incorporated associations that attain the charter to operate in a given state—can still produce a profit because state laws permit school boards to hire a for-profit organization to manage, construct, or oversee parts of its operation. A board member of a nonprofit organization may also enjoy direct advantages from connections to a for-profit organization. Legal scholar Derek Black found that one of the biggest loopholes in nonprofit charter management is in facility leases and real estate management. Charter schools sometimes pay exorbitantly high fees—in Ohio, charter managers have charged millions in excess of average costs—that are much higher than what the real estate market demands. Some charter schools willingly paid inflated prices to another entity that they owned or governed, especially when compensated by tax dollars. They accepted public money and paid themselves a handsome fee for running the facilities. Other nonprofit organizations that manage charters are free to charge disproportionate administrative fees to the state and the public. Some founders of charter school chains have been awarded by charter management organizations they contracted with an annual salary and bonuses in excess of $400,000 for managing their schools. Exempt from the transparency typically imposed on public schools, charter schools have been largely free to exploit such profitable loopholes.57
Charter schools are often touted as a silver bullet for families ensnared in a failing school system, and the media regularly highlights high-performing charter schools. Plagued by decades of neglect, public schools in America were in desperate need of reform, and charters provided a quick means to do it. The free market ideology that supports charter development resonates with much of America too. So does the opportunity to address failing schools. In fact, “saving” disenfranchised students has become a civil rights issue.
The National Civil Rights Museum awarded Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada the National Freedom Award in 2013. The Harlem Children’s Zone—a charter network in New York that focused on providing underperforming schools with wraparound services, which provide holistic student support (including counseling and familial support), and high academic expectations—was the inspiration behind President Obama’s “Promise Neighborhoods” program in 2010. Appropriating $10 million to replicate Canada’s school in twenty cities, the program illustrated integral federal investment and support for the charter model.58 The Harlem Children’s Zone, and the recognition and support Geoffrey Canada has received for it, demonstrate the popularity of the charter school idea in effecting change among marginalized communities.
Budde and Shanker did not foresee—and perhaps could not, given the high tide of teacher unionism—the support for charter schools among private, for-profit, and corporate entities. The rhetoric surrounding charters can be appealing and the ideas inspiring. Yet, in practice, charter schools, like every other option on the menu, have been controversial. In addition to having a record of fi
scal malfeasance and profit exploitation, some charters push low-performing students out of school or otherwise restrict access. Unencumbered by state regulations, charters are free to hire non-unionized teachers, resulting in an underpaid and overworked teaching force. As such, charters constitute one of the gravest threats to public education. Not only do they steer public dollars away from traditional public schools; they also privatize the governance of schools, limiting public oversight and eliminating professional teachers’ input.
At the same time, and in spite of lackluster or mixed results, charter schools remain one of the most tempting options on the menu.59 Films like the blockbuster 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman have heightened the urgency so many Americans feel about education. The film, by Davis Guggenheim, chronicled the heart-wrenching stories of five students trapped in failing schools across the nation. Their only hope is to enter the lottery to win a seat in a high-performing charter school—the film’s silver bullet for failing public schools. When the film concludes with parents and their children crying, grasping a ticket, waiting for numbers to be called, the solution seems clear: just open more charters. Not supporting charters is tantamount to standing in the way of children who need them the most.60
Another option on the menu is to completely sever ties with any formal schooling, private or public, and teach children at home. Over 1.6 million students are now taught in the confines of their own homes. This number has dropped slightly in recent years, but the number of homeschooled children doubled between 2000 and 2010, alongside significant charter school growth. The overall growth in homeschooling still marks a dramatic spike since the 1970s, when the movement began with only ten thousand to twenty thousand students.61 With more parents opting to pull their kids out of the system altogether rather than enrolling in a public, private, or choice school, the homeschooling movement speaks volumes to the lack of faith or interest in public education. The United States has consistently sanctioned homeschooling and private forms of education since the founding of the republic, enabling families to educate their children without government oversight or with very little of it. Convincing citizens to levy a property tax for public education has always been a more difficult pitch in a country resistant to taxation than allowing parents to teach their children at home.62
Homeschooling, like choice in general, grew during the 1960s and 1970s after the tumult inspired by full-scale desegregation attempts. As education historian Milton Gaither has pointed out, homeschooling was shaped by larger social and cultural shifts of the postwar era. During the 1960s and 1970s, suburbanization continued at the same time that counterculture grew, the latter sometimes entailing a back-to-the-land movement, with small, alternative communes and movement away from cities. In both cases parents, left and right, sought refuge from an encroaching government.63 When it came to education, Americans were ready for something new.
Homeschooling, building on the work of Milton Friedman, represented a libertarian, if not radical, approach to education reform. Educator and author John Holt became emblematic of the movement.64 His books, including How Children Fail, No More Public School, Deschooling Society, and The 12-Year Sentence, painted a clear portrait of educators and reformers fed up with a broken public system. His later work, such as Freedom and Beyond (1972), promulgated an ideology of pulling out of and abandoning public schools altogether. Publishing the magazine Growing Without Schooling—the first to focus on homeschooling—Holt communicated an evolving message that resonated with a small but influential core of parents, scholars, and policymakers: “My concern is not to improve ‘education,’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and anti-human business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.”65 Building on the larger libertarian shift in education and part of a larger intellectual movement that supported divestment from public education, Holt published Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling in 1981.66
Organizations such as the National Homeschool Association, the Home School Legal Defense Association, and a score of state and local groups guided parents through the convoluted pathways to homeschooling. Though the surge in homeschooling after 2000 is in part grounded in a larger nonsectarian movement outside the church, homeschooling is largely perceived as a religious movement, and homeschooling parents are viewed as the “educational conscientious objectors.”67 The mission of the Home School Legal Defense Association—an organization founded in 1983 to provide legal counsel to and defense of homeschooling parents—is illustrative: “To preserve and advance the fundamental, God-given, constitutional right of parents and others legally responsible for their children to direct their education.”68 The states agreed that this was indeed a right. By the early 1990s, parents who wanted to homeschool their children were legally protected by every state. Public opinion supported them as well. By the mid-1990s, a Gallup poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans supported homeschooling, a near reversal from one decade earlier.69
No longer part of a marginal religious education movement, parents increasingly pursue homeschooling out of frustration with both the public school system and the private, free market alternatives. As education journalist Melinda Anderson and lawyer Paula Penn-Nabrit explain, homeschooling in the African American community is part of a long history of self-reliance, driven by determination to provide a quality education by any means necessary—including pulling out of the system altogether.70
Homeschooling also feeds into the current push for online education. Building on the ideology and rhetoric of choice, online or virtual education has grown markedly in the past decade. During the 2014–15 school year, approximately 2.7 million K–12 students, the majority of whom were enrolled full-time in traditional brick-and-mortar schools, enrolled in 4.5 million supplemental online courses. Of this number, over three hundred thousand students were enrolled full-time in virtual classes—and that number is growing, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2014 alone, there were over 130 bills introduced in thirty-six states to expand the role of e-learning, and by the next school year Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, and Virginia actually required students to take some online courses. In thirty states and the District of Columbia, full-time cyber schools are now readily available for parents and their kids who do not want to step inside a traditional brick-and-mortar school.71 Wherever one can connect, one has access to a virtual education that meets the criteria of mandatory K–12 education laws. As nearly two million families look for homeschooling instructional support, online material and curricula are the most efficient way to get it.
To millions of students left behind by traditional public education, online learning understandably holds great appeal. It seems logical to incorporate the technology at our fingertips into how we deliver instruction and curricula. Virtual course offerings particularly thrive in rural areas, where traditional public schools fall short in providing a wide array of classes or qualified teachers to offer them. Due to the significance of the property tax in funding public education, rural schools simply cannot raise the capital necessary for high-quality instruction. Charters or other choice options are less feasible in rural areas due to a less concentrated student population. Increasingly, virtual programs are the first and only choice other than traditional public schools that rural parents have when selecting schools. They cover ground where traditional public schools do not have the resources to venture.
Of all the choices on the menu, this may be one of the most alluring to remotely located parents and families whose children have physical, emotional, or academic needs not met by rural school districts. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, it has also become central to delivering an education nationwide, not just to rural students. Virtual education sometimes promises a self-paced, personalized curriculum, and specialized courses that appeal to the lived realities of struggling and working parents, and it puts technology front and center in a nation with an insatiable appetite for the newest innovations. But these promises have
rarely translated into a quality education, as parents and children alike can attest. Students have sometimes been assigned teachers who were then rarely available to answer questions in real time. And class sizes have sometimes been impossibly large—as many as 250 students in a class—to the degree that teachers could not possibly respond to all of the students’ and parents’ questions.72 The live chat functions that many use are painfully slow. To make matters worse, not every student received the technology or materials, such as their own computer, that were promised by the virtual school or the district that approved the program—such an obvious, integral part of virtual education. Some students have been marked absent as a result, and those children started school behind. Some have had to rely on a slow connection to download an abundance of material. Many turned to paper and pencil, the very means of education they had sought to avoid. The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated extant problems, including the fact that nearly 20 percent of students lack the ability to reliably connect to online instruction, if at all. The pandemic has highlighted the fact that BIPOC families disproportionately suffer from the digital divide. All told, many students have become lost in the virtual shuffle, vexed by this education “choice.”73
