The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  The anti-voucher forces mounted a lengthy legal challenge in state courts, but the pro-voucher forces ultimately prevailed. In June 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the legality of the voucher program and permitted religious schools to accept voucher students. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the state court’s decision, thereby removing the legal cloud that hung over the program. After the courts ruled the program constitutional and allowed voucher students to attend religious schools, it rapidly expanded. Before 1998, there were 2,000 students in the voucher program; a decade later, 20,000 students in Milwaukee were using vouchers to attend nonpublic schools, nearly 80 percent of which were religious schools.9

  In Cleveland, the situation was similar to that of Milwaukee. African American parent activists were angry about the persistently poor performance of their children and discouraged by the lack of progress after years of pursuing desegregation. Encouraged by Akron industrialist David Brennan and Republican governor George Voinovich, the Ohio legislature enacted a voucher program for Cleveland in 1995. Some 2,000 scholarships were awarded by lottery, with preference given to low-income families. Students could attend any state-approved school, including religious schools. As in Milwaukee, opponents challenged the program in state and federal courts. The legal battle ended in 2002 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that the Cleveland program did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, because the benefits of the program went to individuals to exercise free choice between secular and religious schools. Although the Court split 5-4, its approval gave a green light to state-subsidized voucher programs that included religious schools.

  Opponents braced for the creation of new voucher programs in urban districts, but only one such program was started in the wake of the Zelman decision. In 2003, the Republican-led Congress established a voucher program for nearly 2,000 students in the District of Columbia. About two-thirds enrolled in Catholic schools.

  At the very moment that the voucher movement achieved a victory in the highest court in the land, the movement seemed to lose steam. It was not that proponents of school choice had lost heart, but that they had found a new vehicle that was less troublesome than vouchers: charter schools. Unlike vouchers, which might involve religious schools, charters raised no constitutional issues. Beginning in the early 1990s, friends of school choice campaigned to persuade state legislatures to pass laws authorizing charter schools.

  The idea was simple, and it was closely related to the Chubb and Moe plan: Any group or organization could apply for a charter for three to five years from the state or a state-authorized chartering agency, agree to meet certain minimum requirements and academic targets, and receive public funding for its students. What was the difference between voucher schools and charter schools? Students could use vouchers to enroll in any private school, whether it was religious or nonsectarian; the schools remained private schools. Charter schools, however, were considered public schools under private management; they were required to be nonsectarian.

  In the 1990s, three versions of school choice emerged: voucher schools, privately managed schools, and charter schools. All of these schools receive public funds to educate students but are not regular public schools and are not run by a government agency.

  Voucher schools are private schools that might or might not be religious in nature. Children with public vouchers enroll in them by choice. The vouchers usually cover only a portion of the tuition. Voucher schools exist only where they have been authorized by the state legislature (Milwaukee and Cleveland) or Congress (the District of Columbia).

  Privately managed schools are public schools that an outside entity operates under contract with a school district. They may be run by for-profit firms or by nonprofit organizations. Usually the districts turn over low-performing schools to private managers, hoping they might succeed where the district has not. The private firms, in essence, work for the district but are given a certain amount of leeway to make changes in staffing and programs. If the district is dissatisfied with the results, it may terminate the contract and regain control of the school or assign it to a different management organization.

  Charter schools are created when an organization obtains a charter from a state-authorized agency. The charter gives the organization a set period of years—usually five—to meet its performance goals in exchange for autonomy. In some states, such as California, regular public schools may convert to charter status, thus seceding from their school district to become an independent district of one school. Charter schools may be managed by nonprofit groups or for-profit businesses. They may be managed by a national organization or by a local community group.

  In 1988, Ray Budde, a professor of educational administration in Massachusetts, first proposed the idea of charter schools. Budde published a paper called “Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts.” Budde wanted teams of teachers to apply for charters to run schools within the district. Each charter would have a specific set of goals and a specific term (say, three to five years) and would be rigorously evaluated to see what it had accomplished before the charter was renewed. In his plan, those who received a charter would have a bold vision and would take risks to explore the unknown. They would be expected to work on the cutting edge of research and knowledge, not to replicate what others were doing. Budde believed that the charter concept would lead to a restructuring of school districts, flattening their organizational chart while enabling teachers to take charge of decisions about curriculum, management, and instruction.10

  In the same year, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, put forward a similar idea of his own. In a speech at the National Press Club, Shanker suggested that groups of teachers should be able to run their own schools within regular schools and to pursue innovative ways of educating disaffected students. The reform movement inspired by the Nation at Risk report, he said, was raising standards and was working well for about a quarter of students; the successful students were the ones “who are able to learn in a traditional system, who are able to sit still, who are able to keep quiet, who are able to remember after they listen to someone else talk for five hours, who are able to pick up a book and learn from it—who’ve got all these things going for them.” But the old ways, he insisted, were not working for the majority of kids.11

  Shanker suggested that any group of six or more teachers should be able to submit a proposal to start a new school. “Do not think of a school as a building, and you can see how it works,” he said. Such a group of teachers could set up a school within their own school that would try out different ways “of reaching the kids that are now not being reached by what the school is doing.” Proposals for new schools would be reviewed by a panel jointly run by the union and the school district. These new schools would be research programs with a five- to ten-year guarantee that they could try out their ideas. The schools would be schools of choice for both the teachers and the students. But before they were approved, the other teachers in the building would have to agree to them, so that the new schools would not be in a hostile environment. This approach, Shanker said, was “a way of building by example. It’s a way not of shoving things down people’s throats, but enlisting them in a movement and in a cause.” He pledged to take this idea to all of his locals around the country.12

  At the union’s national convention, Shanker described his proposal for teacher-led autonomous schools within schools. He made clear that these new schools would be experimental, tasked with solving important problems of pedagogy and curriculum, and expected to produce findings that would help other schools. He did not want anyone “to go off and do his own thing.” While he originally called these schools “opt-for schools,” someone sent him Budde’s essay, which used the term “charter schools.” Shanker liked the name and used it in his speech. The new charter schools should be evaluated, he said, although he hoped it would not be done with “the crazy standardized tests that are drivin
g us all to narrow the curriculum.”13

  Over the next twenty years, as the charter movement spread, its supporters liked to point to Shanker as a founding father. The association with Shanker was intended to reassure people that charters were public schools, that they were not a threat to public education, and that they were not vouchers. But those who invoked his name routinely overlooked the fact that Shanker withdrew his endorsement of charter schools in 1993 and became a vociferous critic. As he watched the charter movement evolve, as he saw new businesses jump into the “education industry,” he realized that the idea he had so enthusiastically embraced was being taken over by corporations, entrepreneurs, and practitioners of “do your own thing.” He abandoned his dream that charters would be led by teams of teachers who were akin to medical researchers, seeking solutions to difficult pedagogical and social problems. He came to see charter schools as dangerous to public education, as the cutting edge of an effort to privatize the public schools.

  When Baltimore handed over nine public schools to a for-profit business called Education Alternatives Inc. in 1992, Shanker was appalled. When Republican governor John Engler of Michigan endorsed charter legislation, Shanker denounced him for ignoring his state’s poor curriculum and standards. In his paid weekly column in the New York Times, he repeatedly condemned charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”14

  After he turned against charter schools, Shanker steadfastly insisted that the biggest problem in American education was the absence of a clear national consensus about the mission of the schools. He repeatedly decried the lack of a national curriculum, national testing, and “stakes” attached to schooling; these, he said, were huge problems that would not be solved by letting a thousand flowers bloom or by turning over the schools to entrepreneurs.

  Ironically, as charter schools evolved, the charter movement became increasingly hostile to unions. Charter operators wanted to be able to hire and fire teachers at will, to set their own salary schedule, to reward teachers according to their performance, to control working conditions, and to require long working hours; with few exceptions, they did not want to be subject to a union contract that interfered with their prerogatives as management. The Green Dot charter organization was one of the few that was willing to accept teachers’ unions in its schools. The United Federation of Teachers in New York City opened its own charter schools, to prove that its contract was not an obstacle to charter management. But the overwhelming majority of other charter operators did not want a unionized teaching staff.

  Charter schools had an undeniable appeal across the political spectrum. Liberals embraced them as a firewall to stop vouchers. Conservatives saw them as a means to deregulate public education and create competition for the public education system. Some educators, sharing Shanker’s original vision, hoped that they would help unmotivated students and reduce dropouts. Some entrepreneurs looked at them as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry. Ethnic groups embraced them as a refuge in which to teach their cultural heritage without deference to a common civic culture. According to their boosters, not only would charter schools unleash innovation and produce dramatic improvements in academic achievement, but competition would cause the regular public schools to get better.

  In 1991, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law authorizing the creation of charter schools. The following year, the nation’s first charter school opened in St. Paul. City Academy High School was a paradigm of what Shanker had hoped a charter school would be: It aimed to help youngsters who had not succeeded in a regular public school. Its students, ages fifteen through twenty-one, had dropped out of school. They were from home situations marked by poverty or substance abuse. The school began with 30 students and eventually grew to about 120 students. In addition to academic classes, it offered job skills training, counseling, and other individualized social services. While City Academy is not a research laboratory for public education, it is certainly serving students who would otherwise be on the streets with no prospects.

  From there, the charter movement took off. In 1993, Jeanne Allen, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s chief education analyst, established a new organization—the Center for Education Reform—to lead the battle for charter schools across the nation. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council endorsed the idea of charters, too, because it was an ingenious way to promote public school choice, to “reinvent” government, and to break the grip (as its chairman, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, wrote) of “ossified bureaucracies governing too many public schools.”15 In 1994, as part of President Clinton’s education legislation, Congress established a program to award federal dollars to spur the development of new charter schools. By fall 2001, some 2,300 charter schools had opened their doors, enrolling nearly half a million students. By 2009, the Center for Education Reform reported that there were about 4,600 charter schools with 1.4 million students. As of that date, forty states and the District of Columbia had charter schools; 60 percent of all charter school students were located in six states: California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio.

  Charter schools proliferated in urban districts, where academic performance was lowest and the demand for alternatives was greatest. In the fall of 2008, twelve communities had at least 20 percent of their public school students in charter schools. Nearly a third of all students in Washington, D.C., Dayton, Ohio, and Southfield, Michigan, were enrolled in charter schools. The district with the largest proportion in charter schools was New Orleans, where 55 percent of students were in charters. New Orleans was a unique case, because its public school system had been decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and officials decided to place their bets on charters and privately managed schools when rebuilding the education system.16

  As charter schools grew in popularity, the demand for vouchers ebbed. Charter schools met virtually the same needs as vouchers. They competed with the regular public schools. They offered choices to families. They freed the schools from the regulatory control of a school district. They included schools that were focused on specific cultures, whether Afrocentric or Greek or Native American or Hebrew or Arabic.

  Charter schools came closer to the ideal set forth by Chubb and Moe than to the one proposed by Shanker. He had wanted charter schools started by teachers to concentrate on solving the problems of low-achieving, unmotivated students. But it soon became clear that charter schools could be started by anyone who could persuade the state or a state-approved agency to grant them a charter. Charters were opened by social service agencies, universities, teachers, parents, philanthropists, hedge-fund managers, for-profit firms, charter-management organizations, community groups, and other groups and individuals. Depending on the state, they might include public schools that converted to charter status, religious schools that removed the religious symbols, or tuition-charging private schools that decided to become tax-supported public charters. Some charters had efficient management teams that ran first-rate schools, but others were operated by minimally competent providers who collected public money while offering bare-bones education to gullible students. And a few were opened by get-rich-quick schemers who saw easy pickings.

  The advocates of choice—whether vouchers or charters—predicted that choice would transform American education. They were certain that choice would produce higher achievement. They based their case for choice on the failings of the public schools, pointing to low test scores, low graduation rates, and the achievement gap between children of different racial groups. They invoked the clarion call of A Nation at Risk as proof that America’s schools were caught in a downward spiral; only choice, they argued, could reverse the “rising tide of mediocrity,” though the report itself never made that claim. They were confident that when schools compete, all students gain. Parents would surely vote with their feet for the good schools. Good schools would thrive, while bad schools would close. Some advocates believed that choice was indeed
a panacea. Having chosen their schools, students would get a superior education, and the regular public schools would improve because of the competition. The basic strategy was the market model, which relied on two related assumptions: belief in the power of competition and belief in the value of deregulation. The market model worked in business, said the advocates, where competition led to better products, lower prices, and leaner bureaucracies, so it would undoubtedly work in education as well.

  I GOT CAUGHT UP in the wave of enthusiasm for choice in education. I began to wonder why families should not be able to choose their children’s schools the way they choose their place of residence, their line of work, their shoes, or their car. In part, I was swept along by my immersion in the upper reaches of the first Bush presidency, where choice and competition were taken for granted as successful ways to improve student achievement. But I also wanted to help Catholic schools, as a result of my contact with the great sociologist James Coleman in the early 1980s. His work convinced me that these schools were unusually successful in educating minority children. When I became assistant secretary of education in charge of research, I was invited to speak to the National Catholic Education Association. I asked my staff to gather information comparing the performance of Hispanic and African American students in Catholic and public schools. I learned that minority kids who attended Catholic schools were more likely to take advanced courses than their peers in public schools, more likely to go to college, and more likely to continue on to graduate school. The Catholic schools could not afford to offer multiple tracks, so they expected all students to do the same coursework. I became interested in seeing whether there was any way public policy could sustain these schools. Long after I was out of office, I coauthored an opinion piece with William Galston, who had served as President Clinton’s domestic policy adviser, proposing a national school choice demonstration project in at least ten cities.17