Paul Peterson: The tentative title of your forthcoming book is The Lost Decade. We had school closures for a year or two. Why do you say a “lost decade”?

Steven Wilson: I would point to a change in what schools in the reform movement are driving toward. For a long time, the essence of urban charters in the KIPP mold was to do whatever it takes to advance student achievement—to attend to what was called the 101 percent solution, because there’s no silver bullet for raising achievement. Internally, the test for every decision in the network or the school was “Does this advance student achievement?”

But now, that has really changed, as what I would call social-justice education has begun to substitute for the focus on an academic education. The new test of decisions is to make them as anti-racist as possible. So, in the largest sense, academics are less of a focus, and the new focus is on social justice.

You mentioned that everything was done with student achievement in mind. At Ascend Learning and other schools like it, what were you doing to maximize student learning?

The essence is an operating system that was much more favorable to student achievement than district schools. That operating system is the charter bargain. In starting a charter school, you have a degree of authority and autonomy to do things that really matter, like being able to hire and fire the faculty of your choice, being able to choose the curriculum that works best, control your budget—all things which principals in traditional, large urban schools have relatively little control over. The charter bargain was this fundamental change in the operating system on which we could build good schools.

But then you need an effective program, and that was a much more rigorous curriculum, enormous attention to who was in the classroom, an outsized investment in teacher professional development, a degree of internal accountability, frequent assessment, unalloyed conviction that testing matters and is our guide to whether students are actually learning—all of those things.

These schools, beginning with KIPP, put a focus on having an orderly, engaging classroom where students can achieve a little bit of academic success reliably every period. And those little successes add up academically, but also in terms of student motivation and commitment to the learning project. Those were some of the big drivers.

Given the success story, why is there a change developing within this very sector? Is it being forced upon them by some kind of external pressures, or is this coming from within the charter sector?

No, it’s not coming from within so much as from new employees. If we think back to 2008 when Teach for America was at its peak of popularity, 11% of the graduating class of Yale applied. Teach for America was thought of as a very sexy, exciting thing to do. Well, that changed. It began with a change in the culture on campus, a turning away from a liberal education. There was a new progressive left that emerged that was wary of traditional liberal arts commitments. The idea of exposing students to multiple competing points of view to have them spar with different ideas shifted.

Now, the focus was on eradicating racism, which was identified as the cause of the disparities in educational outcomes. That’s a very different premise. In the previous premise, the cause of the disparities that everybody laments and views as intolerable is that they’re getting a bad quality education. The new school of thought was that the cause of the disparities was racism. This gathered further steam, of course, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning, when the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo took on enormous force, both on campus and in these networks. And those ideas are in very substantial tension with the traditional commitments of no-excuses schooling.

Allegedly racist dimensions included things that we would take as absolutely ordinary, if not admirable: the notion of excellence, urgency, objectivity—all those things were now deemed to be symptoms of white supremacy culture.

I’m aware of this argument, and I know that it’s being articulated on college campuses. But how does it penetrate into charter schools?

It penetrates very deeply. This list of supposed characteristics of white supremacist culture are in circulation, both in elite higher ed institutions like Harvard, but also in community colleges. In New York City, educators were trained in that very same dictate. So it’s very pervasive. And when you introduce that into these kinds of high-performing school networks, you can imagine it introduced a tremendous amount of rancor, because long-standing staff members did not conceive of themselves as racist. They had extraordinary results in their own classrooms, in the schools that they ran as principals, but suddenly they were being called out as effectively racist.

I want to be careful. Equity is a very, very good thing. But that’s what we all thought we were doing. We were advancing equity by offering children an exceptional education. And the results were stunning. KIPP students who attended both a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school were achieving four-year college graduation rates just about equal to white non-disadvantaged students. Really a remarkable record.

Is there evidence that these schools have in fact become not as effective? Do we see anything in terms of student achievement that suggests this is all that harmful?

What we are beginning to see anecdotally is that very high-flying, no-excuses schools are starting to turn in results that have often plummeted to the level of the surrounding district. You might say, “Well, they had closures; there was Covid.” But why would they have fallen so much more than the school systems that they compete with? Both institutions suffered from school closures and the other pandemic effects.

Let’s turn to the future. You say in the tentative subtitle of your book “returning to the fight for school reform.” Returning sounds optimistic. You are saying we can return?

Yes. It will take time to turn back to a focus on excellent academics. A lot of people of all kinds of ideological predispositions are beginning to question what has happened. We can say all children, not just the privileged, should have a super engaging liberal arts education where they grapple with different ideas, competing ideas, other cultures—that is the most stimulating place you could possibly be. That’s the classroom you want to be in. We can absolutely return to that. And that is, I think, what we need to do.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Education Next. (2024). Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning. Education Next, 24(3), 83-84.

Since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the school reform movement has generated significant insights and promising practices for improving schools for children in poverty and students of color. The work of trying to radically improve student outcomes also produced glaring missteps and tough lessons. Few efforts demonstrate the complexity of attempting to provide a bold citywide plan to ensure educational excellence for all children better than the experiences in Newark, New Jersey. Much has been written about the political drama during my tenure as superintendent from 2011 to 2014. However, very little has been written about the actual playbook, results, and implications for educational policymakers and leaders.

I was appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools (NPS) in 2011 by then governor Chris Christie and the state’s education commissioner at the time, Chris Cerf. While most school districts have a local board charged with hiring a superintendent, NPS had lost that authority back in 1995, when the state took control of the district.

As I arrived in Newark, 39 percent of students who entered the system failed to graduate, and only 40 percent of third-graders could read and write at grade level. Enrollment was plummeting. The district’s nearly forty thousand students and one hundred schools still made it the largest in the state, with the majority of students living below the poverty level.

Local politicians and families had grown impatient. For the five years prior to my arrival as superintendent, many elected leaders had become early adopters of a growing national charter school movement that aimed to free schools from government red tape and allow them autonomy to innovate. These supporters included Cory Booker (then a young councilman), school board member Shavar Jeffries (who now heads the charter school behemoth KIPP Foundation), and state senator Teresa Ruiz, among other notable local leaders. Charters weren’t the only new option—other school models, such as magnet high schools (often with entrance requirements) and partner-run small high schools, had gained momentum too.

Some of these schools had notable evidence of improving achievement for Newark students, and it was understandable that they were gaining strong support from local leaders, influential funders, and certainly the families of the nearly 5,500 students who attended them.

But it was clear that the most impactful efforts at improving schools in Newark were working around the very system they were trying to improve. And in New Jersey, these new schools were funded on a per-pupil basis; in other words, the money followed the child out of the traditional system and into the public charter system. Logically, this made sense. But in practice, this proliferation of competitors to district-run schools was creating unintended consequences that few wanted to discuss.

Building a “System of Great Schools”

Given the perilous state of the city’s schools, the unrealistic expectations around quick achievement gains, and the pressure from ideologues on all sides, many speculated that the superintendent role wasn’t doable. But I was inspired by the scale of the challenge and the ferocious commitment of many leaders in the community.

We started with the theory that the unit of change was the school itself and embraced the idea that what we were building was what my former boss, then New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein, called “a system of great schools,” not a “great school system.” This was a subtle but profound distinction, because it meant we were seeking to ensure that there were one hundred excellent schools serving every child in every neighborhood—regardless of governance structure.

First, we needed to set a unifying goal for the district: every child would be college ready. That’s right, college, not just career—because we believed that choice of higher education should be up to the student, not simply determined by the inadequacy of their preparation, and because Newark families were demanding this.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, they told us very clearly: they wanted their children to graduate college ready. Moreover, they believed that “career ready” was a euphemism for low expectations. Families felt that academic excellence was a passport out of poverty.

Most parents were with us from day one. The challenge was the well-meaning funders and other influencers who wanted to muddy the waters and talk about everything except whether students could read, write, and do math at grade level.

When we started sharing actual data about proficiency rates and the number of young people earning diplomas indicative of their mastery of hard content, we started to encounter real pushback, both within and outside the school system. This was a theme I became increasingly familiar with: often what families say they want can be quite different from what those who speak for them are willing to stand for.

Ensuring “Four-Ingredient” Schools

With our North Star established, we rolled up our sleeves to improve the district, school by school. There was a large and growing body of research and evidence about high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Combined with our team’s years of on-the-ground school transformation experience, we zeroed in on four basic ingredients that every high-quality school possessed: people, content, culture, and conditions.

Our aim: ensure that every NPS school was a four-ingredient school so that we could make steady progress toward college readiness for all. Our philosophy: focus on what works regardless of ideology, which often led to “third-way” solutions—combining the best of seemingly disparate views or forging a new path to transcend old, binary thinking. Our mantra: implementation matters.

People. It’s critical to have the right people in the right seats, from the leadership team to the teachers to mental health professionals to custodial staff.

We know intuitively the power that a great teacher has, and a growing body of research reinforced this belief, showing us that teachers are the most significant in-school factor determining a child’s level of achievement. Further, the most significant factor in getting great teachers in every classroom is the quality of the principal.

We focused on leadership from day one in Newark. I’ve never been to a great school with a mediocre principal, and I have never been to a failing school with a terrific principal (except perhaps at the very beginning of a turnaround). Within two years, we had replaced nearly one-quarter of our principals through aggressive recruiting and selection, giving preference to Newarkers and leaders who not only knew instruction but thought of themselves as community organizers and change agents.

Many states at this time were starting to use quantitative test score data in teacher evaluations, and New Jersey was eager to follow suit. However, my team and I felt that the science for such “value-added” approaches didn’t hold up when it came to determining the effectiveness of individual teachers. Not only did we feel that using the value-added approach in teacher evaluations would be unfair to teachers, we also knew that including such a poison pill in our new evaluation plan would create a backlash that could sabotage the entire effort. We took a lot of flak from hardline education reformers, who had become fixated on using test scores as a shortcut to accountability and who worried that our questioning the use of test scores in teacher evaluations would water down reform.

To help non-charter schools accelerate the “people” ingredient, we negotiated what was widely considered an ambitious contract with Newark teachers. Despite agreeing to key labor reforms after more than two hundred hours at the bargaining table, some in the Newark Teachers Union and their national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, vociferously advocated against them within weeks of the contract being ratified by an overwhelming majority of teachers. Both groups had a long track record of preserving some of the sacred cows of teacher labor negotiations: seniority-based placement, infallibility of teachers with tenure (regardless of what they do), and resistance to any form of accountability—no matter how nuanced. Meanwhile, we found many of our own ideas to be popular among everyday teachers, who told us the quality of the teacher in the classroom next door is a factor in whether or not they want to stay at a school. I was pushing largely because I believed then—and still believe now—that teachers unions need to evolve to become part of the solution or they will become obsolete.

We also had to completely restructure and reimagine the central office to be in service to schools and families. This required breaking senior leaders into new teams and inviting them to clearly articulate how they would enable the four school-level ingredients. It also meant crafting clear plans with goals aligned with good management and coaching—not simply doing what had always been done.

Content. A high-quality school needs high-quality and culturally competent curricula. It also needs frameworks, protocols, and data that drive great instruction and continuous improvement.

I started in Newark about a year after the Common Core State Standards had become a force nationally and the same month that New Jersey adopted a version of them. Common Core gave us an unambiguous and evidence-based target. It also served as a catalyst to scrutinize our curricula with a more rigorous lens.

The research here is undeniable; high-quality, culturally competent instructional materials are critical to ensuring that students are truly internalizing difficult content. Historically, though, we had all underinvested in this area in the early reforms after A Nation at Risk.

High-quality instructional materials are an ingredient that is hard to get right when you are working only at the school or small-network level. Scale is your friend. These decisions are better made at a system level, where content experts can dedicate the necessary time to addressing academic needs and cultural contexts, as well as coherence and alignment between the plethora of different curricula and assessments. It is also the area that, at the time in Newark, brought the most consensus. We did “teach-ins” for administrators, educators, influencers, and families who all really seemed to get and support the mandate for good, rigorous content that was consistent across the city.

Culture. Schools with intentionally curated environments characterized by high standards alongside high support produce better student outcomes.

From day one in Newark, we focused on the seminal research work and promising practices that had emerged, connecting how kids feel, how adults feel, and student outcomes. Years after comparing student achievement results to staff, student, and family survey responses, researchers Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider found that the schools with high levels of trust were far more likely to get beat-the-odds results than their counterparts. Economists like Ron Ferguson and social policy experts like Christopher Jencks found a direct correlation between adult expectations, student surveys, and student outcomes.

Relatedly, an area where I have seen some of the greatest challenges for adults in establishing and preserving culture is in response to conflict and disruptive incidents. How we handle student discipline, struggle, and conflict is where adult biases show up the most. This is a problem not only from an equity and justice lens but also from a student achievement standpoint. Often students who need the most support and time on task are being excluded the most. Students can’t learn when they feel shame and helplessness. So it is no surprise to me that data shows that the relationship between the discipline gap and achievement is more than correlative—it is also causal.

For these reasons, we hired administrators who showed skill in building culture and partnering with families. We created an entire central-office team focused on student well-being and discipline.

We made progress, but admittedly, the playbook on culture is harder to run for many reasons. Too often, discussions about what student culture should feel like are preachy, ideological, or theoretical—devoid of practical, research-based, promising practices. Building culture is far from a paint-by-numbers task. Effective cultures don’t feel the same in every school, but they do share key components. This is nuanced and hard to teach to administrators. The culture work requires us to surface and address adult biases about what kids can accomplish and what is considered “dangerous” behavior, and this can cause real discomfort and resistance.

Conditions. This ingredient is all about strong operations and infrastructure.

It is important to address the physical environment and the day-to-day operations. None of the other ingredients of a strong school or system can succeed if we don’t address the conditions in which our children learn and our teachers teach. In Newark, we had a lot of work to do on this ingredient.

When I started, Malcolm X Shabazz High School had a river running through its fourth floor on rainy days. Many schools didn’t have air conditioning, in a city where average temperatures reach above a humid ninety degrees for months. Some schools weren’t even wired for internet access, and only a few had laptops to check out to students for the day.

Local leaders openly talked about a “rolling start” at the beginning of the school year, which referred to the fact that it took weeks to sort out the basics: enrollment, special education schedules and services, buses, and even books. Honestly, I had never heard of a system where instruction didn’t start on day one.

Some of these intolerable conditions were due to bad public policy and some were because of poor management. My team and I would say we could tell if a school was getting results by how visitors were greeted at the door (if at all) and how quickly families could get the answer to whatever they were asking. We created school operations managers to attend to the operational needs of the school. At the time, this got me in trouble with the administrators’ union (because I was seen as encroaching on district administrator roles and jobs). Even today our approach to operations is considered innovative, which just shows how little we prioritize the conditions in our schools.

The One Newark Plan

While establishing a focus on college readiness and building four-ingredient schools was our primary focus right out of the gate, we knew we had to make progress on a citywide plan that addressed the schools beyond our purview. Looking at the full picture in Newark, you saw that everyone was doing their own thing, and the unintended consequences of this lack of coordination were becoming more evident and unsustainable every day.

From our earliest school visits, we could see that the poorest neighborhood schools were emptying out and becoming concentrated with the highest-need students and the lowest-quality staff. The diversity and variety of school models wasn’t materializing; with all the new schools, we weren’t actually providing a lot of choice, just more flavors of “no excuses” ice cream at the elementary level and a bunch of run-of-the-mill high schools.

Meanwhile, every year, including my first, our district had to cut about $50 million. While there was certainly a lot of bloated bureaucracy to streamline, more than 80 percent of that money was wrapped up in people. Newark Public Schools employs many Newarkers in a city with double the national poverty rate.

As a city, we had to ask ourselves: “Is it even possible for every child in Newark to have access to a school that meets their needs? Even those children facing the longest odds?”

Our team had no choice but to stare down these questions, which led us to some unconventional and controversial answers. The first thing we had to do: try to rise above political arguments rooted in ideology and self-interest about what type of school models should exist. There were about a hundred schools in Newark. We knew we would get to excellence more quickly if we had a variety of governance structures: traditional, charter, magnet, partner run, and hybrid. But we also knew we couldn’t simply let a thousand flowers bloom and allow others to die, especially when those vulnerable schools were serving our students with the highest need. We also knew that the community deserved excellence citywide.

We pored over our own data: student enrollment trends across governance models, overall city population trends, facilities assessments, and (of course) student outcomes. We fanned out and hosted more than a hundred community-based meetings with faith-based leaders, nonprofit executives, families in struggling schools, families in high-performing schools, charter advocates, charter operators, private schools, local funders, elected officials, union leaders, and early childhood providers. We began to socialize the idea that we needed one citywide plan across governance structures, as well as the harsh reality that the district’s footprint had to shrink. We wanted to find a way to preserve the best of the new-schools movement while also addressing some of the unacceptable consequences of its uncoordinated growth.

This process—over the course of about a year—led to a comprehensive plan we called One Newark. The plan opened with three core values to drive our collective decision-making: equity, excellence, and efficiency:

• Excellence: We must ensure that every child in every neighborhood has access to a “four-ingredient” school as quickly as possible and that no kid is in a failing school.
• Equity: We must ensure that all students—including those who are facing the longest odds—are on the pathway to college and a twenty-first-century career.
• Efficiency: We must ensure that every possible dollar is invested in staff and priorities that make a positive difference for all students.

We launched headlong into implementation in the winter of 2013–14.

We started publishing “family-friendly” snapshots—across both district and charter schools— so that community members could see how their schools were doing in comparison to schools with similar populations. We looked at overall proficiency but also at growth, critical in a city like Newark with low proficiency rates across the board. We also compared schools with similar student populations to one another.

We created a simple red, yellow, and green system so that the community could see the landscape clearly. “Red schools” were low-proficiency, low-growth schools. Green were high proficiency and high growth. Yellow schools were “on the move” (low proficiency, high growth) or “to watch” (high proficiency, low growth). The color-coding was clear and intuitive, and many in the community started talking about “no red schools.”

We placed an emphasis on transparent data about how schools were doing with students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners. We created standard measures—across district and charter schools—to report on student retention. People from all sides fought us on this level of transparency—the unions, some charter schools (which weren’t obligated to share their data with us), and some funders who worried we were reducing children to numbers. But many families and policymakers embraced the information. There’s no perfect system, but there was no way to make a citywide plan without a decent measure of school quality.

We performed detailed enrollment analysis and defined the need for a common definition of a “minimum viable school.” From a funding standpoint, schools with fewer than 500 students are hard to sustain with a staffing model that ensures things like appropriate class size, electives, teacher preparation times, and staff to attend to running operations. Newark had a lot of “red” schools that were also not financially viable, and many of them were in the poorest neighborhoods.

We also looked at demand data—who was applying to charters and from what neighborhoods, who was seeking new small high schools and from what neighborhoods, and which neighborhoods were growing and which were shrinking.

The picture was becoming increasingly clear: the need for a course correction was long overdue. We had traditional schools where 80 percent of families were on charter school waiting lists, but the district’s resistance to collaboration and the charters’ insistence on growing only one grade level each year meant large-scale closures and consolidations were inevitable.

The district had too many elementary schools overall, due to a population decrease, neighborhood shifts, and charter growth. We didn’t have enough early learning centers to meet the increased demand. We had too many selective high schools. Most of the new small high schools being incubated downtown were serving families from other wards, while iconic and historic high schools were emptying out. The picture was bleak. We had to make some hard decisions.

We decided to be radically transparent about our findings and the implications in a proposed ward-by-ward plan. Some charters should take over existing schools with high demand, keep families who opted in, and keep the buildings and the school name, instead of simply continuing to build new schools one grade at a time. Some elementary schools needed to convert to early learning centers. Some small high schools that were performing well needed to move into our comprehensive high schools, and some underperforming partner-run high schools needed to close. Magnets had to change their enrollment process. And some buildings had to be shut—some condemned, some repurposed, and some sold, potentially to charters.

Another anchor of the One Newark plan was ensuring that every family had equal access to choice. Both psychologically and practically, it didn’t make sense for one-third of families to get what they wanted and the rest to get what was left over. For starters, this dynamic was creating an almost civil war–like atmosphere, with charter and non-charter families pitted against each other and magnet and nonmagnet families screaming at each other in meetings. Also, one goal of establishing high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods is to feed the groundswell of belief that kids can achieve. Newark’s choice system was helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in the non-charter schools.

This is where universal enrollment came into play. All families could access the system and apply to all schools. An algorithm gave preference to kids in the neighborhood, followed by kids in poverty, then kids with disabilities, and then everyone else at random.

It was a game changer. Now all schools were required to think about how to market themselves and own their quality, or lack thereof. By year two, more than three-quarters of the families of kindergartners and ninth-graders were using the system. At one point, we opened a family support center to help families exercise choice. We had planned for a soft launch, but word got out and more than a thousand families showed up on the first day, and the situation almost devolved into chaos. While our critics crowed about our operational failure—and it was indeed a failure—it also showed how much family demand there was for choice and quality. This is one of the hundreds of examples I’ve had throughout my career that defies the ridiculous stereotype that poor families don’t care about education.

The universal enrollment system may have been hardest on some members of Newark’s political elite who were used to the benefits afforded to them in an unfair, transactional system. I recall one meeting in which a prominent official—previously a supporter of mine—yelled, “You made a liar out of me! I told my cousin I could get her kid into this school!”

Our team knew that the tenets of the plan were bold, unconventional, and controversial and that the politics were going to be tough to navigate. Choice, charters, labor reforms, and teacher excellence polled well. Laying off Newarkers and teachers and “closing” traditional schools or turning them over to highly successful charters were wildly unpopular. But to have the plan succeed citywide, you couldn’t have one without the other.

To add a deeper degree of difficulty, while the plan was emerging and leading up to the official launch, we suffered a series of seismic political blows. In September 2013, the Bridgegate scandal broke and increasingly sidelined Governor Christie. Shortly thereafter, then senator Frank Lautenberg tragically passed away. Mayor Booker, who had also been an active and strong supporter of the plan and was working hard to build momentum around it, announced he was running for that U.S. Senate seat. His announcement also spurred the need for an earlier-than-expected mayoral election where the leading candidates spent considerable time spewing hatred about charters and about me personally (although backstage and publicly, they had previously supported both). Shortly thereafter, Commissioner Cerf resigned. To use a sports analogy: the entire offensive line left the field.

The overall approach was comprehensive, and it had to be to ensure that none of our kids were trapped in failing schools, the district didn’t go bankrupt, communities weren’t living with vacant buildings, and the city was on a path to success. I described the plan to author Dale Russakoff as “three-dimensional chess” in an effort to convey why all the pieces had to happen at one time and couldn’t be phased. There were too many interdependent parts to a very complex system, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, in her 2015 book about Newark, The Prize, which went on to become a bestseller, this quote fed an inaccurate portrayal of me as a top-down, cold technocrat—a narrative that was taking shape across much of the media coverage about our work in Newark. It couldn’t have been further from the truth—the emotional pieces of what needed to happen were not lost on me or the team. I lived with my husband and baby son in Newark and had conversations with neighbors in grocery stores and local watering holes on a daily basis. It all felt so heavy, but also necessary.

Results and Lessons

During my tenure and the subsequent years under Cerf, our district teams improved outcomes for students in every neighborhood and every age group—from early childhood to high school.

In early childhood, we secured a $7 million Head Start grant (becoming only the second district in the country to do so) to add more than one thousand early childhood seats. We brought early childhood standards to life and sounded the alarm to focus on the importance of high-quality early learning. Newark went from having fewer than half of our residents eligible for free early childhood programs (which was most families) in those programs to enrolling nearly 90 percent.

In 2015, the Center on Reinventing Public Education named Newark as the top district in the country based on its share of high-poverty, high-performance elementary schools. By 2019, more than one-third of Black students attended schools that exceeded the state average, compared with 10 percent in 2011. The number of good schools and schools “on the move” grew every year due to our district-run turnaround approach, charter conversion schools, and some outright closures and consolidations. Newark was among the top four cities in the country for student outcomes of Black students living in poverty.

The citywide graduation rate rose 14 points, closing the gap with the state average by 7 percentage points—with almost double the percentage of students graduating having passed the state exit exam. About 87 percent of Newark graduates who enrolled in college returned for a second term, far exceeding national averages despite high poverty rates.

And we saw signs that the overall community—despite the political rancor we encountered— was starting to believe in the “system of great schools.” For the first time in decades, student enrollment was increasing overall in Newark, as was the population of the city.

Because we felt responsible for every child in Newark, we engaged all families, charter and district, with equal vigor. This was a good and mission-aligned approach, but it was almost impossible to execute, given the tensions (both perceived and very real) inherent in growing the charter footprint. The conundrum is perfectly exemplified by the mother who called in to ask me a question on-air during a local NPR show. She had just dropped off her kids at North Star Academy Charter School, she said, because she needed them to have access to excellence. At the same time, she was on her way to my office to picket against me on behalf of her nephew, who had lost his job as a school aide due to the smaller footprint of the district.

Our strategy all along was to be up front about failure and embrace accountability. Again, while our radical transparency seemed like a good idea on its face, it turned out that a lot of people don’t want to hear their school is failing—no matter how carefully crafted the message. We prioritized students who were at the back of the line. Our universal enrollment system gave preference to students from the poorest neighborhoods and those with disabilities. We revamped the magnet school admissions process to look at multiple factors for student admissions at the central office. These were good decisions for children, families, and equity, but it also put us in the crosshairs of power brokers who were used to getting what they wanted and considered coveted seats theirs to give out. They also had access to the biggest microphones and would use them to mobilize the community against our efforts.

Some charter school operators and their supporters mobilized their constituents in opposition to these citywide efforts as well. They wanted to grow where they wanted to grow, not necessarily in alignment with supply-and-demand patterns or the overall plan.

Charters weren’t the only group stuck in their own goals and plans—and at least most of their concerns were in service of building quality schools. School-based partners and vendors, local nonprofits, funders, and other leaders all had their individual projects, schools, and pet issues. The incentives to keep doing one’s own thing were profound. I was stuck in a daily loop of explicit and often threatening demands to support individual agendas—many of them having nothing to do with what was best for individual neighborhoods and schools, let alone the collective.

We had to find a way for the idea of choice to lift all boats, but it wasn’t happening—and it can’t happen without good public policy and collective action. I’ve had many school choice advocates dispute this. Some will have you believe that the mere presence of competition somehow magically raises everyone’s game. It certainly didn’t happen that way in Newark, nor in the dozens of systems I have worked in since. The One Newark plan should have been envisioned before the unintended consequences were at our doorstep. Maybe that would have given us more time.

I also made mistakes. My messages were not straightforward and sticky enough. This work, as you can see, is complex and multifaceted, and I could have paid more attention to how to ensure good, proactive, community-friendly communication.

More critically, I needed to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how to see the community in relation to the system of schools. In Figure 1, the center is the school, and the next level out is the families and students. The next ring is influencers—folks connected to the school who have direct influence on that specific school. The next ring is community-wide partners—community-based agencies and other city agencies like police and child welfare. And the outermost ring is elected officials and power brokers—for instance, pastors of large congregations, thought leaders, and community-based organizations serving the city.

Figure 1: The community in relation to the system of schools

We knew it was critical to focus on our families and students, and we knew it was a tremendous amount of our work to build collective action focused on them. I give us high marks for our dogged and strategic work on the red ring. But in retrospect, we spent far too much time with folks in the outermost ring—the political and power class—and not enough with those in the orange. It wasn’t until nearer the end of my tenure that we started to create a database for each individual school’s orange ring. I came to realize a hard lesson—that while the politicians and power brokers confidently spoke for the community, they were often after a political win: a contract, a coveted spot in a school, a policy, or a job for a family member or friend. I wish I could take precious minutes I spent with those in the green ring and reinvest them in the orange ring.

The painful but informative experiences I had in Newark, along with a long career since then of working with systems leaders across the country, have convinced me that collective action is the missing link for change at the systems and community levels. Too often, we interchange concepts of true grassroots organizing and community engagement and sidestep the obvious truth that power brokers and special interest groups have an organized, well-resourced, and often outsized influence on speaking for the community.

Conclusion

The insights I’ve shared above are not based on any specific ideology. They were developed out of necessity and refined through years of application and practice across a wide variety of settings—from New York to California and many places in between, in both districts and charter networks, in small school communities, and in the largest cities and states.

It may seem like a lot to tackle, and indeed it is. But if we are to truly transform our systems at scale, we can’t simply cling to one specific ingredient or hew to a single governance ideology. The surest way to avoid bias and ensure a holistic strategy is to zoom out to the community-level goal. Make the community—not just one school, network, neighborhood, or district—the unit of change.

The story of Newark should push all of us to define the role of the “system” and why it is so critical and yet so difficult to fulfill that mandate for an entire community. In short: the system should manage the incentives, policies, guardrails, and resources to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality school by doing four things.

Enable “Four-Ingredient schools. As discussed above, we the value of a game-changing principal in every school and an excellent educator in every classroom; the impact of high-quality instructional materials that are culturally competent; the research on school culture and handling discipline; and what conditions have to be in place to enable achievement. Systems leaders should set direction and advocate; procure best-in-class materials; set policy to incentivize districts, schools, and charter management organizations to implement what we know works; and sanction practices antithetical to student progress.

Ensure quality and equity. The paradigm of districts versus charters sadly guarantees that many kids—particularly those with the most challenges—are left behind. Policymakers and community leaders should be held accountable when they allow kids and families to fall through the cracks. Leaders need to be accountable for ensuring all kids access high-quality schools. Our new accountability systems should correct for mistakes we made before, from focusing only on proficiency and meaningless graduation rates to treating growth, college-readiness, and retention as critical outcome measures.

Break bureaucracy. A fundamental way to clear a runway for accelerated school improvement is to actively tear down past practices and federal, state, and local policies that block individual schools from innovating. We need more of a “whiteboard” approach than one that tweaks decades of dysfunction. Policymakers and community leaders need to wake up every day wondering what they can do to ensure that people running schools have the time to do the right thing as opposed to managing byzantine policies and procedures from competing departments.

Create cross-system and community-based solutions. The students who face the most challenges have generally been failed by multiple systems. Statistically, they are likely to be students of color. Too often they are labeled “special populations” and further marginalized out of classrooms and into separate and unequal programs. To truly reverse patterns for students that systems have failed the most, we need cross-agency and community-based solutions with school success at the core: more out-of-the-box ideas to aggregate services and help students who are the most vulnerable succeed.

I share these ideas and epiphanies humbly and with tremendous gratitude to the countless friends, colleagues, and mentors in this sector who helped shape my beliefs about this work. It’s been more than a decade since I arrived in Newark and forty years since A Nation at Risk. My hope is that we’ve all gained a bit of useful perspective and are ready to roll up our sleeves and put the lessons we’ve learned into action.

Cami Anderson was superintendent of Newark Public schools from 2011 to 2014. She is the Founder and CEO of ThirdWay Solutions.

Excerpted from a chapter of A Nation At Risk +40: A Review of Progress in US Public Education, a collection of essays published by the Hoover Institution that reflects on education reform in the four decades since the landmark 1983 report.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Wallace, J. (2024). The Charter-School Movement Just Keeps on Keepin’ On: Its momentum catalyzed by shifting politics, new strength, better advocacy, and simple staying power. Education Next, 24(1), 8-15.

The post-pandemic generation—to be dubbed, perhaps, the Coronials—wrestles with fears, emotional distress, and social isolation. Bullying, chronic absenteeism, dropping out, drug use, shoplifting, and even suicide are on the rise. Device-staring replaces people-watching. Independence, energy, and entrepreneurship seem in scarce supply. With the social world shaking beneath their feet, district school teachers and leaders are easing academic standards, recruiting social workers, and emphasizing social and emotional learning.

Few public educators are openly asking for divine help, but that, too, could change. The Texas legislature is considering legislation that would allow local districts to recruit chaplains to “provide support, services, and programs for students” in public schools. A charter authorizer in Oklahoma has given the go-ahead for opening an online Catholic charter school in 2024, invoking the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in Carson v. Makin, that government funds may not be denied to religious entities if granted to secular ones. Still, the Sooner State is not the soonest to consider allowing religious instruction at a charter school. That honor belongs to Hawaii, where charter schools are seeking connections to the gods deeply embedded in Hawaiian culture and tradition.

This may come as a surprise to observers of Hawaii’s political alignments. Just as Hawaiian skies glow with a luminous blue (aouli), and its enveloping ocean gleams a darker hue (kai uli), state politics display a blue so deep we have yet to learn the equivalent Hawaiian word. Yet many public charter schools in the state are explicitly religious. For more than two decades, students at Hawaiian-focused schools have offered chants and prayers to the pantheon of gods who rule over skies, seas, and earth, including to the volcanic god, Pelehonuamea (“she who shapes the sacred land”), popularly known as Madam Pele.

Prayers begin the school day as part of protocol, a series of songs (mele), chants (oli), prayers (pule), and homilies (‘ōlelo no‘eau) reminiscent of morning chapel or classroom prayers at a Catholic or Evangelical Protestant school. Upon arrival, students declare their readiness to learn by requesting teacher permission to enter their classrooms. Embarrassed tardy students must chant a similar request before the assembled community.

On the occasion we visited one immersion charter school on the island of Hawaii—also known as the Big Island—boys and girls, neatly divided from one another, chanted their pule while standing perfectly erect, à la George W. Bush. (At the wish of the immersion schools we visited, we are not identifying the schools by name.) A class of 4th graders visiting from Maui, a bit less correct in posture, faced them at the door of the school throughout the 20-minute protocol, complete with chanted oli, ukulele-accompanied mele, and˛ōlelo delivered by faculty, students, and the school director on the importance of learning one’s heritage. The protocol was chanted in Hawaiian, as the curriculum at immersion charter schools is conveyed entirely in the indigenous tongue, even though nearly everyone on the islands speaks conventional English. That was the required language of instruction from the end of the 19th century, when the U.S. asserted its control over the islands, until 1986.

Gods make their presence felt on the Big Island, an isle so young it keeps growing. In late 2022, Mauna Loa erupted, pouring molten lava down the mountain for 16 miles, coming within striking distance of Saddle Road, the major thoroughfare between the island’s leeward and windward sides. In January 2023, Madam Pele’s home, Halema‘uma‘u, spewed fountains of lava 160 feet high, reminding everyone that in 2018 the volcano had poured forth a profusion of ‘a‘ā (stony lava) and pāhoehoe (smooth lava) that destroyed rain forests, roads, homes, and the Kua O Ka Lā charter school. Most recently, nearly 100 people lost their lives to wildfire on Maui’s dry side.

But why are students at charter schools reciting traditional prayers in Hawaiian? How did immersion charters emerge? How do their character-building practices, with their morning protocols, shape school culture and functioning? How do they survive in a state governed by a political party better known for its advocacy of strict separation between church and state?

We do not have all the answers. But one of us has studied and worked closely with the charter schools since they were founded. The other brings a mainland perspective enriched by brief visits to two charter schools that immerse students in the Hawaiian language and two that instruct students in English but are nonetheless infused with indigenous cultural traditions.

Hawaiian Renaissance

At the time when the earth became hot
At the time when the heavens turned about
At the time when the sun was darkened . . .
The intense darkness, the deep darkness
Darkness of the sun, darkness of the night
Nothing but night

So begins Kumulipo, the revered Hawaiian creation chant. “Nothing but night” expresses well the state of Hawaiian culture in 1970, about three-quarters of a century after Queen Lili‘uokalani surrendered her sacred lands to pro-American insurgents and the islands were annexed by the United States. To assimilate and acculturate a multiethnic population of Japanese, Chinese, and European immigrants, the government required that schools teach standard English, and the islands became celebrated as an integrationist nirvana. But the indigenous population paid a high price when asked to give up its language, the incubator and transmitter of so much of its cultural heritage. Attached to the land but resistant to work in the cane fields, native Hawaiians were pushed to the periphery, trailing all other ethnic groups in income, education, health, and longevity.

Then came the Hawaiian Renaissance of the late 20th century, when the indigenous population and its advocates acquired greater political influence. Protestors succeeded in convincing the U.S. Navy to give up the island of Kaho‘olawe, which the military once used for bombing and nuclear testing exercises. Farmers refused to make way for a large development in the Waiahole-Waikane valley in Oahu. Traditional Hawaiian songs and legends found their way into mainstream popular music. The law banning instruction in Hawaiian was repealed, and the language was finally offered in some of the islands’ public schools, typically as an additional subject for those who were interested. It was at immersion charter schools that the movement reached its fullest expression.

Immersion

Immersion has a different meaning in Hawaii than it does at most bilingual charter schools on the mainland. At the latter, immersion consists of dual instruction in both English and the native tongue spoken at home by recently arrived newcomers. In Hawaii, immersion means instruction conducted only in the Hawaiian language, which is seldom spoken at home. The goal is not to open the door to the mainstream language but to sustain a heritage that has been pushed to the periphery.

One may wonder whether such immersion programs prepare young people for life and work in an English-speaking society, but as a tool for cultural preservation, the strategy has many advantages. Both immersion schools we visited are enjoying rising enrollments, with hundreds of students pressing the school’s physical capacities, substantial waiting lists, strong leadership, and a stable teaching staff. You cannot teach a new language without high expectations and devoted teaching. And students benefit doubly from the instruction in Hawaiian, since learning another language can also enhance comprehension of the structure underpinning one’s original tongue.

Clearly, the immersion schools have an élan that other charter schools might hope to emulate. Administrators say that only one or two new teachers leave each year. A senior at one of the schools told us that his teachers, “except for the new ones,” have been there since he matriculated in preschool. New teachers are needed as the schools expand, of course, and at one of the schools, a few senior teachers have left to take positions at Kamehameha, a private, multi-campus school that serves children of Hawaiian descent (see sidebar). Others have accepted leadership positions at immersion charters on other islands.

Principals say the earlier a student begins at an immersion school, the better. Hawaii’s charter law lets the schools give enrollment preference to younger students, and parents of older applicants are counseled that language learning is more difficult beyond a certain age. Neither immersion school typically admits a child beyond the age of seven, though an exception was made for a passionate young person desperate to retrieve his heritage language.

For the school, the advantage of early recruitment can hardly be overstated. The child quickly adapts to school culture, parents connect to teachers, the dress code is accepted, and students learn early the practice of “talking story,” the Hawaiian way of conversing thoughtfully and showing mutual respect when issues arise. Our student guide at one school said, “I feel sorry for the kids who can’t come here.”

At both immersion schools we visited, we observed especially large preschool classes. The tiny tots at one school chanted and listened to the visiting 4th graders from Maui with as much composure as could be expected of preschoolers. A few knew the chants well, and the rest followed along. The worst error was committed by one of your authors, who, until corrected, lined up on the female visitors’ side of the room.

Our student guide said that children never receive explicit instruction in the chants they perform. Rather, they follow teachers and other students until they master the language and gradually come to understand the chants’ meanings. According to a faculty member in the Hawaiian Studies program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo—an immersion program itself—immersion students have a fluency with the Hawaiian language well beyond that of students who learn it as a second language at an English-speaking school; but, having learned by rote, immersion students are more likely to make grammatical errors.

Families of students at immersion charter schools show their commitment by arranging for their child’s transportation, purchasing the school uniform, and covering costs for extracurricular activities. Still, not all parents are devotees of the Hawaiian Renaissance. Some families calculate that an immersion experience in elementary school enhances chances for acceptance at Kamehameha, which gives priority to those with demonstrated cultural awareness. Others simply prefer the immersion schools’ emphasis on community and character building.

Are immersion students learning the skills needed to survive and prosper in contemporary society? We are told that most graduates go on to college. And Shawn Kana‘iaupuni, a sociologist who is now director of planning at Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu, reports that, despite low performance upon entry, students at Hawaiian-focused schools showed greater progress on state standardized tests administered between 2003 and 2006 than comparable students at the state’s traditional public schools. Whether that edge still exists cannot be ascertained by looking at state testing data. Many parents ask that their child not be tested, and administrators, aware that performance on standardized tests is not one of the schools’ strong points, do not seem inclined to press the point.

A few parents seek exceptions to other rules. One parent explained that her boy no longer wanted to participate in protocol. “That’s fine,” said the principal, “there is no need to participate in protocol. This is a school of choice. There are plenty of other schools your child may attend.” The boy decided to stay. He was not eager to attend a school administered by the Hawai‘i State Department of Education.

The Department of Education

Those who think school districts and local school boards should be abolished will find Hawaii the paradise travel agents claim it to be. The governor appoints the one and only board of education that governs the Department of Education, or DOE, which in turn operates all traditional public schools from its headquarters in Honolulu. The board also appoints the state’s one and only charter school authorizer. Currently, Hawaii has 37 charter schools serving about 12,000 students, or approximately 7 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment.

The DOE has a collective bargaining agreement with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, which represents all DOE and charter-school teachers. In both sectors, teachers are licensed by the state and compensated according to a single salary and benefit schedule. The DOE assigns teachers to the schools it operates, but charter schools may recruit their own teaching staff. Teachers at DOE schools can switch to a charter school and remain at the same level on the salary schedule. If they choose to return to a DOE school, they also stay at the same level.

Charters do not necessarily receive the same per-pupil funding levels as DOE schools, because the state legislature determines a lump-sum allocation for all charters, and the money is distributed among charters on a per-pupil basis. Charters face a particular lack of funding for transportation, special education, other ancillary activities, and, of greatest import, land acquisition and capital expenditure.

DOE schools in the town of Hilo (population about 45,000) are large, impersonal, featureless, pale-yellow brick structures apparently built with Pacific winds and storms foremost in mind. By comparison, the charter schools we visited resembled tents in a forest.

The Hawaiian Renaissance has barely touched DOE’s educational mission. Since its founding, DOE’s principal goal has been the integration of a multiplicity of cultures under an English-only umbrella. Small Hawaiian-focused programs were initiated within DOE in response to Renaissance pressures, but when given the opportunity to separate themselves from DOE into charter schools, these programs chose autonomy and flexibility over stable physical facilities.

For its part, DOE was pleased to see them depart.

Sacred Land

Charters across the United States struggle to find adequate facilities for their schools, but the competition for space is even more intense on an island in the middle of the ocean. Nothing illustrates this point better than the fate of Kua O Ka Lā, a non-immersion charter school serving indigenous families in a rural area near Hilo. In 2002 the school’s founders leased 600 acres of oceanfront property owned by the Bishop estate (see sidebar). Students studied its rainforest vegetation, lava soil, and geothermally warmed ponds, which were on occasion used as swimming holes. Kua O Ka Lā had clearly found the right place for a Hawaiian-focused school. Its enrollment grew to 282 students during the school’s first 16 years.

Then, in 2018, Pelehonuamea lost her temper. The volcanic forces that had warmed the ponds destroyed both Kua O Ka Lā and the home of one of its principal benefactors. The school turned to the Hilo Boy’s and Girl’s Club for temporary space, making it possible to finish the school year. But the challenge of finding a permanent space forced a shutdown of the high school and a permanent shift to online learning for the middle school. “It was very hard to find a space for 282 kids at the time,” Susie Osborne, the school’s founder and development director, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. “When we lost our campus in Puna to the eruption, we had some transitional sites, but settled at the Nani Mau Botanical Gardens.”

One of the immersion schools we visited offered classes within a DOE building when it first began a small program of instruction in the indigenous language, but after receiving a charter it was pressed to shift to its own facility. After a prolonged battle, it left DOE in 2013 for quarters that a Tribune-Herald reporter found abysmally primitive:

[The school] has few permanent classrooms and many of the meeting and teaching spaces lack walls of any sort. Sometimes they are sheltered by nothing but a tent-like canopy. At stormy moments teachers put class on hold as students crowd into the few sheltered spaces to avoid getting drenched.

Today, facilities for the 222 students at the school have at least tent flaps for all classrooms except for the roof-only stage used for morning protocol and hula dancing, but everyone has learned to forgo socks so their feet dry quickly. Your authors did not “avoid getting drenched” on the day we stopped by.

We could observe only the exterior of Ke Ana La‘ahana, the second non-immersion charter we visited, because on the day of our visit the school held classes in a nearby park where local Hawaiian practitioners taught the school’s 37 students the basics of knot-tying, taro preparation, hula dancing, and star tracking.

The other immersion school, well-funded and with close to 600 students from elementary through high school, has an intensively used campus. The high school officially remains part of the DOE, where it had begun as an immersion program, and its students still play on DOE sports teams. An administrator avows that DOE team instructors welcome immersion students, as they are more coachable. However, high school classes are located on a separate campus that also houses the elementary and middle charter school, making for ever-increasing density as enrollment has accelerated. Our student guide recalled playing on once-open spaces now built over with preschool units. High school classes are held in the gymnasium.

Religious Charters?

In sum, Hawaiian immersion schools make a case for religious practices at school—or at least for charters that emphasize community, character, and commitment rather than academic accomplishment alone. Whether or not the practices are truly religious is open to interpretation. An employee at an immersion school on the island of Kauai filed a complaint in 2015 with the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission, claiming a violation of the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. Though the complaint has captured little attention, some school administrators prefer to avoid further controversy by emphasizing the strictly cultural aspects of the morning protocol. As one of them said, “There are cultural rituals built into these performances, but they should not be considered religious or compared to practices of prayer.” But in the words of the executive director of the Hawaii Charter Schools Commission, “The line isn’t always so clear. . . . If you are doing a chant that talks about the spirit and how to live, at what point would it cross the line to where it becomes prayer?”

However the spiritual practice is understood, many Hawaiian families are willing to sacrifice other educational amenities to have their child attend a school that emphasizes character development by recalling the gods and traditions of their ancestors. Despite crowded classrooms, despite modest playground space and minimal sports facilities, despite inadequate school budgets, despite family-dependent transportation, enrollments at the two immersion schools we visited continue to rise. Those instances do not seem exceptional. The growth of charter schools is posing such a challenge to DOE that the department constrains charters from exceeding their enrollment projections in any given year by more than 10 percent. If DOE is the Goliath that its reputation suggests, then Hawaiian charters must be Davids with slingshots.

The two English-speaking charter schools we visited that focus on the Hawaiian heritage are both suffering from enrollment declines, struggle to find adequate space, and have no guarantee of survival. From these two cases we do not conclude that an English-speaking approach is not viable. One non-immersion charter school in a nearby community is prospering. And Kua O Ka Lā’s survival despite volcanic destruction is testament to the personal courage and commitment of its founders. But the cohesiveness of the immersion schools, with their religious overtones, stands out.

To thrive on the mainland, religious charters will need to connect to the cultures and traditions of the populations they serve. They could do worse than to consider adopting a protocol as a way of unifying their community, strengthening ties to parents, and providing social and emotional support to what seems to be an increasingly distressed generation of children and adolescents. The successful immersion schools we visited were all led by talented and resourceful leaders of Hawaiian descent, some of them trained at Kamehameha and others at university-based Hawaiian language programs. Mainland educators could copy this model by drawing from the deep wells of their own religious and cultural traditions.

Sustaining tradition need not mean excessive attention to its ugly side. In Hawaii, many traditional practices are beset by questionable origins. Careful historians and anthropologists tell us that the indigenous caste system was so rigid no commoner could become a member of the nobility (ali‘i), that kapu (traditional norms and rules of conduct) required prostration by commoners before ali‘i, and that incest within the ruling elite was as pervasive on the Pacific islands as in ancient Egypt. We heard no such stories during our visit. Instead, Hawaiian-focused schools concentrate on the ancestral crossing of the Pacific Ocean in small boats with nothing more than the stars for guidance, the Hawaiian practice of “talking story” as a tool for tolerating differences and reaching compromises, and the beauty of traditional chants and dances. Mainland American schools might also recognize that children thrive on knowing the best, not just the worst, about their past.

Identity schools are almost by definition not statistically representative of the general population. We asked our hosts whether they were concerned that their schools might be ethnically segregated. “We are open to all that apply,” replied one. “We are socially diverse but not ethnically balanced,” another conceded. On the mainland, too, charters might better foster genuine equality of opportunity by developing strong identities with student traditions than by striving only for racial balance.

Finally, Hawaii highlights a fundamental defect in state charter policy: the too-frequent denial of state funding for land acquisition and capital costs. Schools need a stable place in which to build identities. Place is not an extraneous afterthought for a school, as if it were an accountant’s office that can simply shift files from one building to the next. Only a few charters have generous benefactors who can acquire land and construct buildings on their behalf. On the mainland, as in Hawaii, the lack of capital funding has left too many charters without adequate space for physical fitness programs, general assemblies, or even appropriately appointed classrooms. A number of small federal programs facilitate charter access to financial markets at reduced rates, but those funds are hardly sufficient to support the needs of 7,000 charter schools serving more than three million students.

Despite the challenges, immersion charters are prospering. A young professor explains why: “A language is a dialogue with the environment. . . . Being able to know . . . [a] couple dozen words for different types of rain that Hawaiian has, that English doesn’t . . . that’s something that’s . . . really meaningful to experience.” As the creation myth foretold:

Born was Expected-day, a female
Born was Midnight, born First-light
Opening-wide was their youngest
These were those who gave birth
The little ones, the older ones
Ever increasing in number

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Nina Buchanan is professor emerita at the University of Hawaii Hilo.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Peterson, P.E., and Buchanan, N. (2024). Does Hawaii Make the Case for Religious Charters? Immersion charter schools in the Aloha State infuse native language, culture, and tradition. Education Next, 24(1), 16-23.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Carson v. Makin that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a private-school-choice program—colloquially known as “town tuitioning”—for students in school districts without public high schools. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “the State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”

Carson was, in some ways, unremarkable. For the third time in five years, the court held that the Constitution prohibits the government from excluding religious organizations from public-benefit programs, because religious discrimination is “odious to our Constitution.” But the fact that Carson was not groundbreaking does not mean that it is not important. On the contrary, Carson represents the culmination of decades of doctrinal development about constitutional questions raised by programs—including parental-choice programs—that extend public benefits to religious institutions. Among the most important of these questions is whether there is “play in the joints” between the First Amendment’s religion clauses—the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause—that might permit government discrimination against religious institutions in some situations. Going forward, the answer in almost all cases is likely to be no. Both clauses, the court has now made clear, require government neutrality and prohibit government hostility toward religious believers and institutions. (The court clarified—but did not overturn—its 2003 decision in Locke v. Davey. In that case, the justices upheld, by a vote of 7–2, a Washington State law prohibiting college students from using a state-funded scholarship to train for the ministry; that law, the court ruled, did not violate the Free Exercise clause. Arguably, Carson narrows and effectively confines Locke to its facts by characterizing it as advancing only the “historic and substantial state interest” against using “taxpayer funds to support church leaders.”)

Carson does, however, leave at least two important questions unanswered. The first concerns the decision’s scope. The holding makes explicit that “a State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Carson is silent, however, on what it means for the government to “subsidize private education.” In particular, it leaves unanswered the question of whether the nondiscrimination mandate applies to charter schools, which are privately operated but designated “public schools” by law in all states—and supported by tax dollars. Does the Free Exercise Clause require states to permit religious charter schools?

The second question concerns which regulations states may lawfully impose as a condition of participation in private-school-choice programs. Right after the court issued its decision, for example, Maine’s attorney general, Aaron Frey, clarified that all private schools taking part in the program, including religious schools, are bound by the Maine Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. As a result, while Carson opened the door for religious schools to participate in the tuition-assistance program, many declined to do so because of the tension between the non-discrimination mandate and their religious commitments. Carson says nothing about whether such non-discrimination mandates—or other regulations that some faith-based schools may find objectionable on religious grounds—are constitutionally permissible.

Understanding Carson

In rural Maine, many small school districts have no high school. Since 1873, the state has given these districts the option of permitting residents to use public funds to attend private schools. Students could use these funds at religious schools until 1980, when the state decided that the Establishment Clause prohibited the practice. At the time, this conclusion was defensible: The Supreme Court’s existing Establishment Clause doctrine could be interpreted to prohibit students from using public funds at religious schools. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the court shifted course and began rejecting challenges to programs aiding religious-school students. When the exclusion of religious schools from the tuition-assistance program was first challenged in 1996, it remained unclear whether the constitution permitted, let alone required, Maine to permit participating students to attend religious schools. (I was one of the lawyers who filed that first challenge, Bagley v. Town of Raymond. We lost on establishment-clause grounds.)

In 2002, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court upheld a voucher program enabling disadvantaged children in Cleveland to attend religious schools. The court concluded that the program did not violate the Establishment Clause for two reasons. First, it was “religion neutral,” giving students the option of attending either secular or religious schools. Second, religious schools benefited only indirectly, as the result of parents’ independent choices.

Zelman clarified that states could include religious schools in private-school-choice programs but was silent about whether they could choose not to, as Maine continued to do. The answer to this question unfolded in three recent cases. Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017) held that Missouri unconstitutionally excluded a religious preschool from a playground resurfacing program. Espinoza v. Montana (2020) found that the Montana Supreme Court violated the Free Exercise Clause by invalidating, on state-constitutional grounds, a private-school-choice program because it included religious schools. And finally, Carson rejected the argument that there is a constitutionally relevant distinction between discrimination based on the religious character (or status) of an institution and discrimination motivated by a desire to avoid spending public funds on religious conduct (for religious use). In Carson, this so-called “status-use” distinction undergirded the argument that Maine was not discriminating against schools for being religious, but rather because they taught religion. Carson clarifies that the court has “never suggested that use-based discrimination is any less offensive to the Free Exercise Clause” than status-based discrimination. This clarification by the court is important. Since integrating religious and secular instruction characterizes schools in many faith traditions, asking them to stop teaching religion is tantamount to asking them to stop being religious.

Religious Charter Schools

Carson has few immediate implications for existing private-school-choice programs. Thirty-one states, D.C., and Puerto Rico each have one or more such programs, and only two states—Maine and Vermont—ever excluded religious schools. In the medium term, however, the Carson decision may open the door to (and certainly will prompt litigation about) religious charter schools. Here’s why: Carson makes clear that states choosing to fund private education must extend benefits to religious schools. And, although Carson does not address the question of religious charter schools, if charter schools are constitutionally analogous to private schools then—as one state attorney general recently concluded—charter-school laws prohibiting religious charter schools (as all such laws do) are unconstitutional.

This question has enormous implications for education policy, since charter schools command a sizable portion of the K–12 market. While the private-school-choice movement has gained tremendous momentum in recent years, only just over 700,000 students—about 1.3 percent of all K–12 students or 15 percent of all private-school students—participated in a private-school-choice program in 2021–22. In contrast, charter schools, which are authorized in 44 states and D.C., educate nearly 3.5 million students (7 percent of all public-school students). Charter schools are privately operated but universally designated by law to be “public schools.” All state charter laws require charter schools to be “secular”; many prohibit religious institutions from operating them at all.

The constitutionality of laws prohibiting religious charter schools was in question before Carson. Indeed, Justice Stephen Breyer flagged the issue in dissent in Espinoza, asking, “What about charter schools?” He reiterated his question in his Carson dissent: “What happens once ‘may’ becomes ‘must’? . . . Does it mean that . . . charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?”

The answer turns on a legal doctrine unrelated to religion, known as the “state action” doctrine. Under this doctrine, privately operated entities are not bound by the federal Constitution except when their actions are effectively the government’s actions. The state-action question is pivotal, because the Supreme Court has made clear that the Establishment Clause requires government actors, including district public schools, to be secular. Thus, if charter schools are state actors, state laws requiring them to be secular are not only constitutionally permissible, but also constitutionally required. On the other hand, if charter schools are not state actors, then states, after Carson, not only may permit religious charter schools but also must. That is to say, if charter schools are, for federal constitutional purposes, private schools, then charter-school programs are programs of private choice, and states cannot prohibit religious schools from participating in such programs.

Charter schools are, by design, distinct from district schools. Most importantly, they are privately operated and exempt from many public-school regulations. But are they different enough from district schools to be treated, for federal constitutional purposes, as private schools? The answer is far from straightforward. The Supreme Court has articulated a number of factors to determine whether a private institution is a state actor. These include whether it is performing a function that has been “traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the State”; whether the government controls it to such a degree that it is a governmental agent; and the degree of interdependence (or “entwinement”) between the government and the private actor. The overarching inquiry is whether there is a “sufficiently close nexus between the state and the challenged action to attribute the action to the government.” As the Supreme Court has observed, “a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.”

It is easier to explain which attributes of charter schools do not make them state actors than to explain which ones might: First, they are not state actors, because they are schools. Education obviously is not “traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the state,” since millions of children are—and have long been—educated in private schools or at home. Second, the fact that the law calls them “public schools” does not automatically mean they are state actors. The Supreme Court has held that legal categorization of an entity as public or private is not dispositive of the state-action question. Third, the fact that state laws enable their creation does not necessarily make them state actors. After all, most private schools (as well as most charter schools) are operated by private corporations, which do not exist before a state grants their corporate charter. Clearly, issuing a corporate charter to a private corporation does not make it a state actor. Fourth, they are not state actors simply by virtue of being regulated and funded by the government. In Rendell-Baker v. Kohn (1982), the Supreme Court found that a private school was not a state actor even though it was heavily regulated by, and received more than 90 percent of its funds from, the government. “The school,” the court observed, “is not fundamentally different from many private corporations whose business depends on [government] contracts. Acts of such private contractors do not become acts of the government by reason of their significant or even total engagement in performing public contracts.”

Federal courts are divided on the state-action question. In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that an Arizona charter school was not a state actor in a lawsuit challenging a teacher’s termination as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. The court rejected the claim that charter schools’ legal designation as “public schools” controlled the state-action question and found an insufficient nexus between the state and the school’s decision to fire the teacher, concluding that the termination was the purely private action of a private corporation. In contrast, earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that North Carolina charter schools are state actors in a case alleging that a classical charter school’s dress code, which requires girls to wear skirts, violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The majority’s opinion turned on several factors, including the degree of public funding and the fact that North Carolina law calls charter schools “public” schools. The majority also said that the state had delegated its constitutional obligation (to provide public education) to charter schools. Several judges vigorously dissented, arguing that the majority opinion adopted an expansive definition of state action that is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent.

No court has yet considered the question of whether the First Amendment permits and/or requires states to authorize religious charter schools, although litigation is undoubtedly on the near horizon. In December 2022, the attorney general of Oklahoma, John O’Connor, issued an opinion letter finding that provisions of state law prohibiting charter schools from being operated by or affiliated with religious organizations and requiring them to be “nonsectarian” in all operations likely violates the First Amendment. Having found that charter schools are not state actors, he concluded that “the State cannot enlist private organizations to ‘promote a diversity of educational choices,’ and then decide that any and every kind of religion is the wrong kind of diversity. This is not how the First Amendment works.” Although an attorney general’s opinion does not have the same legal standing as a court opinion, the state will permit religious charter schools for the time being.

Charter schools defy easy categorization, and it could be years before the Supreme Court weighs in on the issue (although a petition asking the court to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision is pending currently). It is also possible that, given variations in the ways they are regulated, charter schools may be state actors in some states, where they are more closely controlled by states or school districts, but not in others, where they enjoy significant operational autonomy. That said, it is my view that, in most states, charter schools are not state actors. If that is right, then charter schools are essentially programs of private-school choice, which Carson holds not only may permit religious charter schools but must permit them. That does not mean that religious schools must, should, or will seek authorization to operate as charter schools. Many may reasonably decide not to, especially in states with robust private-school choice. Indeed, a number of education reformers reacted negatively to the Oklahoma attorney general’s opinion authorizing religious charter schools; these critics raised prudential concerns about the risk of greater governmental control over charter schools than schools participating in private-school choice programs. I share many of their concerns and embrace their support for expanding private-school choice. But the prudential question of whether religious organizations should operate charter schools is not the same as the legal question of whether the Constitution gives them the right to do so—and a strong case can be made that it does. That case likely will be tested in court sooner or later.

The Regulatory-Strings Question

A second question left unanswered in Carson concerns the range of regulations that can be constitutionally imposed on participants in choice programs. Carson prohibits states from requiring schools to secularize as a condition of participation in a funding program, but there are many other regulations that schools might object to on freedom-of-religion grounds. Maine reminded schools about the state’s nondiscrimination requirements, which led many religious schools to decline to participate. Thus far, no school has challenged these regulations.

Private schools in the United States are lightly regulated. The same is true of private schools participating in choice programs, although most states impose modest additional requirements on the latter—for example, requiring them to hire minimally qualified teachers, to administer a standardized test (but typically not the state test), and to teach certain basic subjects. A handful of programs regulate student admissions. For example, Louisiana requires schools to randomly select scholarship recipients, D.C. prohibits schools from considering religion in admissions, and Maryland prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.

Before turning to the “regulatory strings” question, it is important to note that the government undoubtedly could impose many additional regulations on private schools regardless of whether they accept public funds. Private and religious schools might object, for example, to a rule requiring them to administer the state achievement test, but such a requirement would be constitutional. States have chosen to lightly regulate private schools. I believe that choice is a wise one that respects and fosters educational pluralism. But many of the regulatory choices made by states with respect to private schools are the result of political compromise, not constitutional mandate.

This is true even of some regulations burdening religion. Under existing doctrine, the Free Exercise Clause does not prohibit regulations that incidentally burden religion, provided that they are religion neutral and “generally applicable.” The Supreme Court has explained that a law is religion neutral if it treats religious conduct and institutions at least as well as like secular conduct and institutions. For example, a nondiscrimination regulation that applied with equal force to all private schools would be religion neutral. And a regulation is generally applicable unless it includes exceptions or gives government officials discretion to grant exceptions. For example, a regulation requiring private schools to administer the state achievement test except if doing so would be unduly burdensome would not be generally applicable. If a law fails to satisfy either of these criteria, then the government must offer a “compelling interest” justifying it and demonstrate that the government cannot achieve that interest in a less burdensome way.

There are, however, regulations that the government could not directly impose on religious schools but might be able to impose as a condition of participating in a private-school-choice program—that is, in order to receive public funding. Consider, for example, employment decisions regarding teachers in religious schools. The First Amendment prohibits the government from regulating in any way religious institutions’ selection of “ministers,” a category that includes—the Supreme Court has held—teachers responsible for religious instruction and faith formation in religious schools. (Disputes about the scope of this so-called “ministerial exception” will be set aside here.) The ministerial exception is situated within the court’s broader “church autonomy” doctrine, which precludes government interference with the internal organizations of religious institutions. Regulations outside the employment context might also fall within the protections of this doctrine—for example, rules prohibiting religious schools from preferring (or limiting enrollment to) co-religionists.

It is clear that the government may not directly regulate religious schools’ employment decisions about ministers, including some teachers, through nondiscrimination law or otherwise. The same is true of other regulations that implicate church autonomy. What is not clear is whether the Constitution permits the government to accomplish indirectly what it cannot accomplish directly. Can the government condition participation in a private-school-choice program on religious schools’ waiver of their constitutional rights?

The answer to that question turns on the so-called “unconstitutional conditions doctrine.” This doctrine reflects the concern that the government might use the power of the purse as leverage to accomplish what would otherwise be unconstitutional ends. Unfortunately, the doctrine is a hopeless mess, with some cases finding it permissible to condition the receipt of a public benefit on the waiver of a constitutional right, others finding such conditions impermissible, and none satisfactorily clarifying the line between permissible and impermissible conditions.

The application of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine to private-school-choice regulations undoubtedly will be addressed in future litigation. Thus far, there has been virtually no litigation about the issue, probably because existing regulations are unobjectionable to religious schools. In January 2022, a federal district judge held that Maryland violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment when it prohibited a school from expressing religious views on sexuality if the school chose to participate in a state voucher program. The decision, however, is narrow. The judge found only that the state’s restriction on the school’s expression ran afoul of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. She took care to clarify that her decision did not address the constitutionality of the underlying regulation prohibiting discrimination against LGBT students in admissions. At this point, it is premature to make predictions about how courts will rule on other claims that the government is imposing unconstitutional conditions on participation in private-school choice programs. It is worth noting, however, that Carson itself is an unconstitutional conditions case. Although the court did not discuss the doctrine, it made clear that Maine could not condition participation on schools shedding their religious identity. This suggests that the court might view skeptically other conditions that had similar effects on schools’ ability to live out their religious mission, including perhaps regulations limiting schools’ autonomy over the employment decisions subject to the ministerial requirement.

Even if the government can legally impose regulatory conditions that burden religious freedom as a condition of participating in private-school-choice programs, there are many good reasons not to do so, including respect for religious liberty and educational pluralism. Moreover, the success of choice programs turns in part on the participation of academically strong schools. Regulations, including those that ask schools to waive religious-freedom rights, will increase the cost of participating, likely leading some good schools to opt out and leaving fewer options for participating students.

Carson was an important victory for religious liberty that promises to have wide-ranging implications, both within and outside of K–12 education. The full extent of those implications, including the answers to the two questions addressed here, remains to be seen. These questions will undoubtedly be tested in future litigation. Both seem destined eventually to wind up on the Supreme Court’s docket.

Ultimately, the two questions may intersect. To date, the regulatory conditions placed on schools participating in private-school-choice programs have—by and large—been unobjectionable to religious schools. Legislative efforts to impose conditions in tension with the faith commitments of some schools have fallen short. If, however, advocates succeed in leveraging Carson to open the door to religious charter schools, especially in states without private-school choice, regulators may respond (as they have in Maine) by imposing operational requirements that are in tension with some schools’ religious commitments. Some existing charter-school laws likely include regulations that some religious organizations would find objectionable. These rules may dissuade religious organizations from seeking authorization to operate charter schools, prompt them to pursue litigation challenging the requirements as unconstitutional conditions, or both.

Nicole Stelle Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Garnett, N.S. (2023). Supreme Court Opens a Path to Religious Charter Schools: But the trail ahead holds twists and turns. Education Next, 23(2), 8-15.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

Few people in education policy get to see visible evidence of their work in real time and three dimensions. Not once, but whenever she wants it, Susie Miller Carello can stand on a subway platform in Harlem, and, for a few minutes on any given school day, watch the world she helped midwife pass before her eyes. “If you go to the subway station at 125th Street and Lenox from 7:15 to 7:30 in the morning, it’s filled with kiddos with school uniforms and backpacks,” she says. The kids in navy blue and white are en route to Harlem Village Academies. The bright orange polo shirts and ties or plaid jumpers belong to children who attend one of the four Success Academy schools in the neighborhood. Scholars in yellow and blue are on their way to Democracy Prep a few blocks up the street.

For a dozen years Carello served as executive director of the State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute, the lead authorizer for well over half of the state’s 357 charter schools. The explosive growth of New York City’s charter sector happened first on her watch, and then under her nose. “The first time it happened, I had just hopped on the train in Times Square and noticed the moms and dads and the kids in the subway car,” she recalls. “And when I got off the train, I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this! These are all our kids.’ And they’re going to these schools that are providing them much better options than they would’ve had 20 years ago.”

At a different moment, both politically and in education reform, Carello might have lots of company taking in the view from that subway platform. For some politicians, philanthropists, and other members of New York’s elite, the city’s charter sector has been an object of civic pride. That’s so particularly in neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, and downtown Brooklyn, where educational failure stretches back decades. Those neighborhoods have large concentrations of charter schools, including dozens run by the largest and most well-established charter management organizations in the country: KIPP, Success Academy, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, among others. A visitor might look at the passing parade of school uniforms and smile at the sight of disadvantaged children put on the “path to possible,” as one charter advocacy group’s slogan puts it, by energetic reform efforts backed by philanthropy and effective public policy. Over the last 20 years, New York City charters have launched tens of thousands of low-income Black and brown children to college and beyond.

In recent years, though, those cheering on the charter sector have seen their numbers dwindle. With few exceptions, the bipartisanship that ushered in the heyday of the education-reform movement has badly eroded. That means diminished political support for charter schools and minimal appetite to thwart the will of the powerful teachers union in deep-blue New York City. In March 2019, the city reached a state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools permitted to operate. Less closely examined or well understood is the resistance that has risen from within the education-reform movement itself. Charter schools, particularly those run by networks with resources sufficient to staff energetic recruitment efforts, have long relied disproportionately on young, recent college graduates to staff their classrooms. But the energy, idealism, and agenda of those recruits has changed. To the founding generation of New York’s highest-performing charter schools, strict classroom management, academic rigor, and high expectations were the hallmarks of well-run schools and conditions necessary for student achievement. But that same school culture can register as abusive and harmful, even grounded in white supremacy, to younger staffers steeped in the argot of social justice and committed to “anti-racism.” This clash of ideals happens largely over the heads of parents, who continue to swell charter-school waitlists and whose vision of a good school never seems to change much: safety, solid academics, character education, and a fair shot at college and upward mobility, whether their children attend a school that’s part of a large network or a single-site “mom and pop” charter school.

New York is emblematic of charter schools nationwide and indicative of the growing pains in the sector, buffeted by changing ideals and priorities, including from within the sector itself.

* * *

After disgorging students onto the platform in Harlem, the 2 train rumbles north to 241st street in the Bronx, where other high-performing charter networks like Icahn Charter Schools and Bronx Classical opened schools in neighborhoods long beset by educational failure. But to catch a glimpse of an up-to-the-minute symbol of the state’s charter sector, you need to leave the City entirely and travel 150 miles up the Hudson River to New York’s capital region. There you will find Re’Shawn Rogers, one of the state’s newest charter-school pioneers.

There is still “cap space” to create new charter schools in New York state outside of the five boroughs of New York City. Thus, in September of 2021, Carello and her staff recommended to the SUNY board of trustees that they approve Rogers’ application to launch Destine Preparatory Charter School the following fall with 116 students in kindergarten and 1st grade and to enroll 435 children up to and including 5th grade over the next five years. The school’s name is meant to invoke “Destiny,” but there’s a Destiny Prep in Jacksonville, Florida. Rogers didn’t want to risk copyright infringement or bad press, so “destiny” became “destine.” The shortened name is meant to invoke the great things the school’s students are destined to achieve.

On a Saturday morning in May 2022, Rogers is expecting about half a dozen families for an information session in a nondescript office building in between Union College and a riverside casino in Schenectady. The place once grandly called itself “the city that lights and hauls the world,” a reference to General Electric, which was headquartered here, and the American Locomotive Company, which went out of business in 1969. The city has been losing population for nearly 100 years. A demographic mix of 65,000 people call Schenectady home today, nearly one third fewer than at the city’s 1930 peak. The poverty rate is 20 percent, roughly double the national average.

The first person to arrive for the information session is Osei, a bright, energetic, and chatty five-year-old boy, who bounds into the third-floor conference room several strides ahead of his father and announces boisterously, “I’m here to meet my new school!” Almost immediately his attention is captured by a pile of donuts on the conference table. Without breaking stride, he marches around the table and grabs one, which his dad orders him to put down. When Rogers asks the child to say his name again, perhaps to redirect his attention from the treats, the little boy reaches for a pen and paper and insists on writing it out, first and last name. He pushes the paper across the table to Rogers. “Now I get a donut,” Osei says, making an announcement, not asking permission. His father, Harry Rolle, smiles and relents. “You worked up an appetite writing.”

“Good job, buddy,” Rogers smiles warmly at the child. “Hard work gets rewards. I’m in the same bucket as you.”

Rogers has been working hard on the launch of Destine Prep for two years; his reward is only now coming into focus as the school moves from two years of planning and authorization to meetings with prospective students and their parents. Charter-school applications are mind-numbingly detailed, running hundreds of pages. Would-be school founders must document a demonstrated need for a new school, describe their academic model in detail, and show community support in the form of a strong local board of directors. Then there is the nuts-and-bolts work of real estate, contracts, construction management, hiring staff, fundraising, and persuading families to take a chance on a school that exists only as a PowerPoint presentation.

“I helped scale up Success Academy, but we had extraordinary resources, seemingly unlimited support, and [Success founder] Eva Moskowitz busting through barriers,” remarks Emily Kim, who founded the Zeta Charter School network after several years as general counsel at Success. “I know exactly what needs to be done because I’ve done it so many times. When I think about independent charter schools, given all the challenges school founders face, I don’t know how they overcome these massive obstacles solo.”

When no other families arrive for the information session, Rogers gamely launches into his presentation with Destine’s operations manager, Mashoma Brydie, who joins the meeting via Zoom. Much of Rogers’s talk could have come straight from a pitch for a no-excuses charter school two decades ago: Destine will offer an extended school day and year; kids are expected to be in school every day; and learning doesn’t stop over the summer. Rogers believes in “logical consequences” for behavior management and stresses he’s “big on communicating” with parents. Osei starts running laps around the table and trying to get his father’s attention as Rogers finishes his presentation. The mission of Destine Prep is to develop students in grades K–5 to become FUTURE CHANGE MAKERS (the PowerPoint slide renders this in all caps) through “rigorous academics, social and emotional learning, and affirmation of their identities.”

* * *

There was a time, fast receding into memory, when big-city charter schools were media darlings, lionized in movies like Waiting For Superman, and the subject of fawning coverage on 60 Minutes. They were the flagships of a fast-growing education-reform movement, luring the best and brightest new graduates of elite universities away from law schools and investment banks and into Teach For America, and from there to inner-city classrooms aspirationally named Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, or Michigan instead of Room 222. Tightly run charter schools were celebrated as a rebuke to district-run dropout factories, which had relegated generations of low-income students to second-class citizenship. Charters bristled with do-gooder energy and dubbed themselves “no-excuses” schools, in the belief that the Black-white achievement gap was evidence of low expectations and indifference, not poverty and certainly not race. When students failed, it proved merely that adults had failed them. And there must be no excuses for adult failures. Period.

At the federal level, charter schools had patrons and champions from across the political spectrum. Bill Clinton was an early charter-school supporter; so was George W. Bush. The number of U.S. students in charters more than doubled from 2009 to 2018, to 3.3 million from 1.6 million, with most of those gains coming during the eight years of the Obama presidency. In the years since, bipartisan support for charter schools has significantly weakened. Earlier this year, President Biden’s Department of Education proposed new regulations on the $440 million federal Charter School Program. Progressives cheered the move to rein in money “squandered on unneeded, mismanaged schools and the operators.” Conservatives complained the move was “designed to bring the boisterous, popular charter school sector to heel.”

No single event heralded the change in the weather. In 2011, the biggest and most well-established urban charter network, KIPP, released a study showing that one third of its earliest cohorts of students had graduated from college—four times the rate for low-income Black and brown children at large, but less than half of the figure its founders believed they could achieve. The report led to significant changes in KIPP’s program and pedagogy. As the decade wore on, a palpable reform fatigue set in as some Americans soured on the standards, testing, and accountability regime that had come to dominate public education at large. Antagonists like Diane Ravitch hammered relentlessly at charter schools, questioning their results, attacking their “harsh disciplinary policies,” and turning “no excuses” from a rallying cry to an epithet. When widespread protests over racial discrimination inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement broke out on college campuses in 2015, charter critics adopted the protesters’ language. Teaching “taxonomy moves” common to no-excuses teachers represented “carceral pedagogy” aimed at “controlling Black bodies.” Students marching through school hallways in tightly supervised straight lines was “practice for prison.” White-led charter schools were said to echo power structures in society at large.

The charter sector has largely accepted the criticism as sincere and tried to adjust to it rather than rejecting it outright. That’s somewhat puzzling, given that there was ample material with which to construct a defense. First, college-preparatory no-excuses schools had lost little of their luster among parents for whom high expectations, tight classroom management, and school uniforms were reassuring signs of safe, well-run schools and an antidote to chaotic inner-city classrooms. Internal measures of parent satisfaction and “net promoter” scores (e.g. “How likely are you to recommend your child’s school to a friend or family member?”) remained consistently strong. Even more pertinently, the schools delivered measurable results. A 2017 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes examined charter schools across 24 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and found that attending an urban charter school run by a larger network of schools was associated with improved educational outcomes.

That was precisely the point of nearly two decades of education policy. As the authors of the Stanford report observed, “we would expect that only charter organizations with a demonstrated track record of success would be allowed to open multiple schools.” The report concluded, “it is reasonable to expect current policies to result in continued improvement. However, there is still room for charter school authorizers to accelerate the rate of improvement by ensuring only the finest of charter school organizations are given the privilege of expanding their services to multiple schools.”

Written only five years ago, that language already feels anachronistic. New York has gone in a different direction, functionally denying high-performing charter management organizations the privilege of expanding their services to meet the demand. The sector itself now responds to different sets of impulses and metrics than in its days of heady and explosive growth.

* * *

When charter schooling’s old guard talked about the importance of their schools and movement being “led by people who look like the people we serve” and mused about the day their students would come back to teach in the schools they once attended, they were imagining Re’Shawn Rogers. He was a charter-school student in his native Detroit and worked as a teacher for several years after graduating from Eastern Michigan University in 2012, rising to be humanities dean at Achievement First’s Aspire Elementary school in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood.

As a child he struggled in school. “I didn’t really learn how to read until middle school,” Rogers says. During those years, his family moved from Detroit to Lansing, Michigan, where Rogers attended a diverse public school and got involved with its theatre and band programs. For high school, he moved back to Detroit and attended one of the city’s first charters, operated by Detroit Community Schools. “My teachers were just great and met us wherever we were,” he recalls. “For the first time I started to feel successful. I got into AP classes and stuff that I never would have imagined in elementary school.”

His dream was to open a charter school back home in the Detroit area, but in the summer of 2020, he was accepted as a fellow at BES, a Boston-based leadership-development program (the initials originally stood for “Building Excellent Schools”) that identifies and supports emerging school leaders. It was BES that encouraged him to consider applying for a charter in upstate New York, which was terra incognita to Rogers. “I created this huge spreadsheet of anyone who was doing anything important in the Capital region and started calling them,” he says. “‘Did you go to school here? What was your experience like? What do you think about a new school?’” His initial impulse was to apply to SUNY to open a school in Albany, but neighboring Schenectady hadn’t had a charter school in 15 years, since International Charter School was closed due to poor academic performance and financial stress.

As a BES fellow, and with both financial and technical support and advice from the organization, Rogers began working on the application for what would become Destine Prep at a tumultuous time in the charter-school movement and the nation. The Covid-19 pandemic had closed schools for the last several months of the school year and put much of the country on lockdown; the May 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police ignited profound anger among many. The summer when Rogers began his BES fellowship brought to a boil tensions that had long simmered in charter-school networks and the broader education-reform movement.

Seemingly overnight, social media accounts such as Uncommon Truth, Survivors of Success Academy, BnB@DP (Black and Brown at Democracy Prep) and dozens of others began springing up with students and staff posting accounts of perceived racist slights and abusive practices in their schools. KIPP, a national network of more than 240 schools serving more than 100,000 students, announced it would retire its famous “Work Hard. Be Nice.” slogan. CEO Richard Barth explained that the trademark phrase “ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, [and] supports the illusion of meritocracy.”

“As a white man, I did not do enough as we built KIPP to fully understand how systemic and interpersonal racism, and specifically anti-Blackness, impacts you and your families—both inside of KIPP and beyond,” co-founder Dave Levin wrote in a plaintive letter to KIPP alumni. “It is clear that I, and others, came up short in fully acknowledging the ways in which the school and organizational culture we built and how some of our practices perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

KIPP was the most visible example of the culture clash between veteran figures in the charter-school movement and younger staff and alumni more attuned to current thinking about social justice. However, few organizations are more emblematic of the shift in values and mindset than BES, which was also transforming itself in response to activism and heightened racial consciousness.

“The big networks—KIPP, IDEA, Uncommon, Green Dot, Achievement First, and more—build from within,” wrote Richard Whitmire in his 2016 book about early charter schools, The Founders, in an admiring chapter about BES. “It’s a winning formula, but it skips over another promising glide path: potential charter leaders who come from outside that pipeline—school pioneers who could build networks every bit as successful as KIPP and Achievement First.”

For nearly two decades under its founder Linda Brown and chief academic officer Sue Walsh, BES had operated as a kind of boot camp for school leaders who would visit top charter schools across the country like Newark’s North Star Academy; Brooke Charter Schools in Boston; and Purpose Prep and Nashville Classical in Tennessee. Brown routinely plastered the word “urgency” in office windows and around the walls at Fellows’ training sessions, which sometimes began at 5:30 in the morning. “If you’re going to start a school, you’re going to be showing up at your office at 5:30 in the morning,” explains Walsh, “because your teachers are showing up at 6:30 and your kids are showing up at seven.”

BES fellows have founded more than 200 schools in 50 U.S. cities, educating more than 63,000 students. In 2018, Brown stepped down from the organization she founded. Aasimah Navlakhi was promoted from chief of staff to chief executive officer; she had initially joined BES as communications director four years earlier. She began her tenure with a listening tour, meeting with past and present BES fellows. “These conversations illuminated a gap between BES’s stated mission and lived values,” said Navlakhi in an interview posted on the organization’s website. She responded by launching an effort to “evaluate our programs and internal operations through a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] lens.” It concluded with a commitment to make BES “an actively anti-racist organization.”

“I felt in my gut that this path forward was the only way that we could support leaders to truly transform education for the students in their communities,” Navlakhi said. The organization soon rebranded itself, keeping the acronym BES but changing its name from “Building Excellent Schools” to “Build. Excel. Sustain.” Walsh followed Brown out the door. “The seminal moment for me was when we were given readings as a staff that ‘urgency’ was racist,” Walsh told me.

Interviewed jointly, both Brown and Walsh make a point of praising Navlakhi’s “commitment to equity and humanity.” But Walsh adds, “What we did not expect was the clear rejection and denigration of our work and our intentions, which are manifest in so many strong schools that are the platform on which the work of BES sits.”

“It’s become clear they’ve shifted from the primacy of academic excellence to the primacy of anti-racism,” observes Ed Kirby, an ed-reform fixture who was intimately involved in the design and launch of BES, and authored its “core principles,” which guided its work for two decades. “I’m not going to get into judging them and their new direction. But the place is completely unrecognizable to me,” he says. For her part, Navlakhi says she sees no tension in BES’ evolution. “In quality schools, academic excellence and anti-racism reinforce one another,” she says. “Promoting anti-racism and a community-centered approach creates an environment that respects students and families and, in turn, contributes to academic success.”

Some New York charter-school leaders are worried, however, that these shifts in emphasis will adversely affect students. Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who runs the Brilla charter school network in the South Bronx, describes what she sees as competing priorities of charter-school parents versus staff “who have gone to elite colleges” and see schools as vehicles to promote societal change. “I think it’s going to have a real impact on academic outcomes for underserved kids, and the opposite of the intended effect. Kids are not getting what they need academically,” she says. “Even in my own child’s charter school, half of their professional development is on racial equity. How are they learning how to be excellent teachers? It’s really worrisome.” Saroki de Garcia has occasionally faced pushback from her own staff over Brilla’s classical curriculum and school culture. “Our response has always been, ‘Look, we’re here because the state has given us permission to teach kids a set of academic standards, and that’s Job One.’ If we don’t do that well, we shouldn’t be in business,” she says.

The transformation of BES stunned Brown. Walsh suggests that current voices in education reform “don’t have enough grounding in bad schools.” This last point comes up frequently in conversations with charter-school veterans: as the movement has grown and evolved, younger staffers have either forgotten or never knew the conditions to which no-excuses charters were created as an antidote.

“The numbers certainly show that parents prefer order and safety over chaos. It also shows in high school and college matriculation,” observes Lester Long, a 2004 BES fellow and the founder of Classical Charter Schools, a network of four schools in the South Bronx. “Deep learning can’t happen in fearful environments, either of other students in a too-chaotic school or of the teacher in a too-strict one. Ultimately, great teachers and schools find that balance.” Long also points out that “no excuses” was too poorly defined, but it was “a shorthand form of deep respect for Black and brown students. The key point was ‘I know you can do this. I believe in you.’ There were disappointing exceptions, but the original meaning and intent was one of empowerment,” says Long, whose schools were frequently visited by BES fellows prior to the change in leadership, but not since.

For Re’Shawn Rogers, meanwhile, the die was cast when there was an opening to become the interim principal at his school, but Achievement First turned him down. “We had a number of meetings with [co-CEOs] Doug [McCurry] and Dacia [Toll] about equity and just having more Black people in positions of senior leadership within the network,” Rogers says. But he didn’t see that happening for himself. “My overall feeling was that there was not a place for me as evident by the lack of senior leadership that looked like me or thought like me.”

* * *

In hindsight, New York was an unlikely locus of charter-school dynamism. “There was never a moment where there was great political enthusiasm for charters in New York,” notes James Merriman, the longtime head of the New York Charter Center, an advocacy organization. “It was just not in the DNA of New York, New York,” a Democratic stronghold and a stalwart union town. In 1999, Governor George Pataki approved a pay raise for state lawmakers in a political bargain that led to passage of the law authorizing charter schools. In New York City, a few years later, charter-school operators lucked into a pair of staunch allies in Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein, who raised millions of philanthropic dollars and lured the most successful charter management organizations with the promise of rent-free “co-located” space alongside traditional schools in buildings owned and run by the city’s Department of Education. The availability of facilities for start-up charter schools was “more than a shot in the arm,” Merriman recalls. “It was life itself.”

Bloomberg’s last day as mayor was December 31, 2013, but he remains a player in the city and in education reform. In April 2022, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a pair of $100 million dollar gifts, one each for Harlem Children’s Zone and Success Academy. In Schenectady, Re’Shawn Rogers is operating on a much smaller scale. He and his school have received grants totaling $100,000 from BES, another $50,000 from the Albany’s Brighter Choice Foundation, and $70,000 from the Schenectady Foundation. “I had to work for that myself, so I’m very proud of that,” Rogers tells me over sandwiches and coffee at a downtown Schenectady pub. He’s equally pleased to have secured a deal that folds construction costs for his new school into the monthly rent for the space, which also offers room to expand as he enrolls more students in the next five years. And there’s another thing he’s proud of, now that he’s left a big charter management organization to open his own school: “It’s become important to me to make sure I see people of color in positions of power, and now I have the opportunity to put people in those positions.” A lot of his friends who are leading and starting schools are people of color, he adds, “so it’s starting to become more normalized to me.”

After lunch, we walk a few blocks to his school. Destine Prep is wallboard, insulation, and ductwork—a construction site, not an elementary school. It seems inconceivable that more than 100 kindergarteners and 1st graders will march up the stairs and into classrooms in less than two months. Rogers is unfazed. Like those early charter-school founders, he does not suffer from a lack of confidence.

But it’s all different now. The mission and vision of charter schools, the politics, the concerns of activists and advocates, and the deliverables demanded by philanthropists have all shifted over time. So have the values and ideals of the young people who still flock to this work, albeit in fewer numbers than in its halcyon days. Carello left SUNY over the summer to join the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. New York’s charter-school cap remains in place, but lobbyists and advocates suggest things might be different under Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Eric Adams, who sometimes sounds more favorably disposed to charter schools than the staunch enemy he replaced, Bill de Blasio. When charter advocates nowadays pitch lawmakers on lifting the cap, conversation is more likely than not to mention creating opportunities for more community-based charter schools like Destine Prep, rather than giving more charters to the big networks.

The one thing that hasn’t changed in 25 years are the parents. On an unseasonably chilly Saturday afternoon in June, Mashoma Brydie welcomes parents to a community center in Schenectady. Two dozen kindergarten and 1st graders are scheduled to be fitted for school uniforms for the school year that’s now just two months away. One of the first to arrive is Christine Lawson, whose grandson Jayceon will start kindergarten this fall.

If Re’Shawn Rogers is the school leader that charter trailblazers imagined would one day lead their movement, Lawson is the matriarch of the archetypal family charters were built to serve. Her own mother worked for the New York City Board of Education, but Lawson wanted something better for her five children, who today range from 18 to 45 years of age. So she cobbled together a mix of public, private, and Catholic schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx for them. All five graduated, which she suggests was no mean feat “during the drug era” in New York City. One went on to earn a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Jayceon’s mom Whitney is also at the uniform fitting, but when it comes to schools, Lawson is clearly the decision maker in the family.

Her youngest son is about to graduate from Schenectady High School, but Lawson’s grandson will not be setting foot in the city’s schools. “Public school? Nah,” she says, then quickly adds she has nothing against them. The teachers in her son’s school “go hard for the kids,” but public schools “believe in social promotion” and don’t have high enough standards. “You’re just not walking out of high school with everything you need. I know that for a fact,” Lawson tells me. She’s certain Destine Prep will offer a “deeper level” of attention for her grandson. “It’s a brand-new school, but I trust them. I just trust them,” she explains. “We need more attentive people and hard-working teachers, and they’re in charter schools.” She learned about Destine Prep via a Facebook post. If she hadn’t, she would have “done her homework” on other options for her grandson. Even now, her daughter is still considering moving back to New York City. “If she goes back, then I’m gonna follow her, and we’re going to choose a Catholic school” for Jayceon.

She joins a handful of other families in front of a long table, covered with an array of neatly folded sky-blue Destine Prep uniform shirts and khaki pants. Lawson smiles, sighs, and says to no one in particular, “There’s just something about a charter school.”

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2023). What Next for New York Charter Schools? The era of explosive growth of network-run, “no excuses” charter schools is over. Tentatively emerging: “community-based” charter schools. Education Next, 23(1), 36-44.

When I recently decided to step down from leading Blackstone Valley Prep, an organization I cofounded and helped develop over 13 years, I was flooded with emotion. BVP is a highly acclaimed and intentionally diverse K–12 public charter-school network in Rhode Island that serves more than 2,200 students. To help process my thoughts and feelings about leaving, I turned to journaling, which helped shape an open letter to my school community.

Many people reached out to me about this letter and my upcoming departure. Several of them asked me to expand on a particular paragraph—my musings on mission:

Mission is everything. BVP needs to better articulate its mission to ensure that families know what they are signing up for and that BVP is delivering on the promise of that mission. BVP’s current mission is focused on college success, in large part because of a founding belief that college readiness is truly a path to accessing the American dream. Many people in the BVP community, however, want something else entirely. While that may be perfectly fine, BVP’s efforts should be to either find them a school that offers what it is that they are actually seeking, or BVP should revisit its mission and reinvent itself accordingly.

The importance of articulating a clear and ambitious mission seems obvious. Mission statements set the foundation for strategic plans and help guide the work of the staff. In a healthy organization, every employee should be able to look at their daily work and know that their time was spent in direct support of the mission.

The mission at Blackstone Valley Prep has been the same since 2010: to prepare every scholar for success in college and the world beyond. Each year since, I have led professional-development workshops with incoming staff where we reflect deeply on our mission statement. We discuss the words and phrases that resonate the most and the elements that might ring hollow to some. By the end of the session, everyone is expected to be able to recite the mission and be ready to explain it in their own words.

Over the years, every word in our mission statement has been affirmed by some and challenged by others. I have observed that the most celebrated word has been “every,” while the most polarizing word has been “college.”

I understand both sentiments. “Every” epitomizes aspiration. The idea that a school would aim to serve “almost every” or just “some” students is the antithesis of what we, as educators, are called to do. I cannot imagine walking into a classroom and celebrating a teacher who was doing an excellent job with “most” of the students while ignoring others. Even so, “every” has its detractors. Should every school seek to excel at teaching every field of study? Is every school equipped to serve every type of learner? If one school does not have the expertise or resources to serve a certain population, but another school nearby has both, why not match the learner with the better-equipped school? Are these not the very reasons that different types of schools exist? (Think Career and Technical Education schools or those that specialize in serving students with severe disabilities.)

“College” is also aspirational. The data on lifetime outcomes are clear: college graduates, on average, earn more, are more engaged in society, and live longer than those without postsecondary degrees. One of my greatest motivations in joining BVP was to address the not-so-soft “bigotry of low expectations” displayed by too many schools that counsel young people, especially low-income and BIPOC students, away from college.

My heart sinks whenever friends and colleagues recount that they told their own guidance counselors they wanted to attend a particular highly selective college only to be redirected to a less-distinguished institution. I myself had such an experience with a college counselor—I shared that I wanted to go to Prestigious University and was instead pointed to a small local college. That was all the motivation I needed. At that moment, I resolved to attend a school ranked at least as high as PU. For many students, however, that counselor downgrade is not a motivation but a permanent deflation. Yet, over the past several years at BVP, there have always been at least a few new teachers (every one of whom has at least a bachelor’s degree) who question whether college should be in our mission.

What is most perplexing to me, however, is that despite how clearly we communicate our mission, several young people each year tell us they have no desire to attend a two- or four-year college. I understand that a kindergartener may have little or no conception of college, but it baffles me that we have high school students who do not want college in their future. Why would students attend a high school that is focused on college—where classrooms are named for teachers’ college alma maters and which offers more than a dozen AP courses each year—if they have no desire to attend college?

At BVP, we are committed to serving the students who are in front of us, which may include counseling them on options such as non-degree pathways or careers in the military. But the question is, should every school be expected to serve everyone? Should a pre-nursing or pre-culinary high school serve students who have no desire to become nurses or chefs? Should a school designed for pregnant or parenting teens enroll students who are neither? And should BVP serve students who don’t want to go to college? If the answer to this last question is yes, should BVP change its mission accordingly?

As a strong believer in school choice, I am proud that BVP recently added a “high school transition counselor” who focuses on helping every 8th grader find their “best match” high school, including, for example, an acclaimed CTE school with specialized programs and an arts-themed school with a portfolio admissions process. What we are learning from this work is underscoring something we have known for a long time: no school is perfect for everyone, and there are not nearly enough great choices for our kids, especially those who live in certain zip codes. My greatest hope for the K–12 system is that we continue to attract and retain innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs who will do whatever it takes to ensure every child has a choice and an opportunity-filled life. I wish BVP well as it continues to wrestle with these crucial questions.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Chiappetta, J. (2023). Mission Is Everything: The most celebrated word has been “every.” The most polarizing? “College.” Education Next, 23(1), 83-84

Applying for a federal grant to support the creation of new charter schools is about to get a lot harder. That’s the upshot of draft regulations for the Charter Schools Program that the Biden administration released for public comment in March. It is an unfortunate proposal at a time when new research confirms that charter schools are an asset not only to their students but also to the broader communities in which they operate (see “The Bigger Picture of Charter School Results,” features, this issue).

For nearly three decades, Congress has provided funds to assist charter schools with start-up expenses such as staffing, professional development, facility improvements, and community engagement events. The bulk of the money goes first to state education departments who, in turn, award grants of up to $500,000 to charter schools preparing to open, replicate, or expand. When Congress last renewed the program in 2015, it permitted successful charter management organizations to apply directly to the U.S. Department of Education for comparable support.

The program is modest by federal budget standards—Congress authorized $440 million for it this year—but over time it has been a major driver of the charter sector’s expansion. What’s more, the states, none of which wants to leave federal money on the table, often design and implement their charter school programs according to the criteria Congress uses to select grant applicants.

That’s one reason the administration’s recent proposal is so troubling. Among other new requirements, the regulation would force applicants to submit a detailed “community impact analysis” demonstrating that the number of schools they propose to open or expand “does not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.” The language says nothing about the quality of available schools. It would effectively prevent charter schools from opening with federal support in the growing number of areas with flat or declining enrollment—often places where high-quality options are scarcest.

The regulation would also require applicants to collaborate with a traditional public school or district on “an activity that would be beneficial to all partners in the collaboration”—a nice-sounding concept that would effectively give districts veto power over charter expansion. Applicants would even need to provide “a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration.” Charter entrepreneurs unable to find a willing partner would be out of luck.

The entire proposal seems to reflect the view, heavily promoted by teachers unions and their political allies, that charter schools are a drain on school districts’ resources to be tolerated, if at all, as pockets of innovation within expanding systems. That same perspective has informed key revisions to state charter-school laws in recent years, including California’s 2019 move to allow districts to reject charter school applications based not on the proposal’s quality but on its impact on their finances. The result was a dramatic slowing of charter growth nationally in the years leading up to the pandemic—just as charter opponents intended.

Yet the research case for the charter sector’s expansion continues to strengthen. In this issue, Doug Harris and Feng Chen of Tulane University offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of how charter schools affect the combined outcomes of both charter and traditional public-school students in the school districts in which they are located. Looking nationwide and comparing districts with a substantial charter presence to those without charter schools, they find substantial gains in both test scores and high-school graduation rates. A January 2022 study by David Griffith for the Fordham Institute, “Still Rising: Charter School Enrollment and Student Achievement at the Metropolitan Level,” similarly found greater charter enrollment associated with increased math achievement by Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

If Biden administration rule makers are not swayed by these findings, the reality underlying them is persuasive to many of the families who have chosen to enroll their children at charter schools. Despite an oddly short window for public comment, more than 25,800 members of the public, many of them charter parents, weighed in on the proposed rule before the April 18 deadline. A group of 17 Republican governors wrote to education secretary Miguel Cardona to register their objections to the proposed changes. When a similarly tone-deaf draft rule on civics-education grants prompted an uproar last year, the administration backed down and replaced the rule with something more sensible. Here’s hoping that pattern prevails again.

— Martin R. West

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2022). New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth: Parents, governors protest. Education Next, 22(3), 5.

Charter schools now represent 7 percent of national school enrollment. In a growing number of cities, this number is well above 40 percent. This represents one of the most dramatic shifts in the structure of U.S. schooling in the past half century. An entire sector of publicly funded, privately run schools has emerged from scratch that now rivals private schools in its size and scope.

We have learned a great deal from the charter-school experience. Most prior research has focused on how well charter schools serve the students who attend them. These “participant effects” are, on average, small and positive for test scores—more positive in urban areas and in schools using a “No Excuses” approach to instruction and discipline. The results have also generally improved over time, perhaps because charter schools and their partners have had more time to learn from experience.

But charter schools could have broader effects on schooling systems as a whole. Other studies have examined the effects of charter schools on nearby traditional public schools. Sometimes called “competitive effects,” these influences actually reflect a range of ways in which nearby traditional public schools might respond to charter schools. The competitive effects documented in past research, too, are typically small and positive.

Another potential effect of competition is that traditional public schools might be forced to close. Charter schools draw enrollment from traditional public schools. The loss of students can make the traditional public schools less viable, financially and academically. Closures are painful, to be sure. However, a growing body of research suggests that if the schools that close are among the lowest performing, then students benefit academically because they end up in better schools. We know little, however, about the effect of charter schools on the closure of other schools.

More generally, we are not aware of any studies that capture the net or systemwide effects of charter schools including all of these mechanisms. Prior research therefore gives us only a partial picture. We decided to address this issue. Instead of focusing on one particular mechanism—participant or competitive effects—we try to estimate the net effect of almost all the potential mechanisms. Instead of focusing on particular cities or states, we take a national look. And, instead of focusing on test scores alone, we consider both scores and high-school graduation rates. In short, we aim to provide a bigger picture of charter school effects.

National Data and Analysis

We included essentially all school districts in the United States during the years 1995–2016. During this period, 608 of the nation’s approximately 12,000 districts had at least one charter school. Sixty-one percent of these districts have 10 percent or more charter enrollment, and 39 percent of these districts have 20 percent or more charter enrollment. (The number of districts in each group is smaller for the sample we use to study graduation rates.) The remaining, no-charter districts serve as a potential comparison group.

These data come from the National Longitudinal School Database, or NLSD, which we created at REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. The NLSD combines a wide variety of school and district data sources, including test-score data from the Stanford Education Data Archive, high-school graduation data from the federal Common Core of Data, and demographic data from the Common Core of Data and the U.S. Census.

While these data are not unusual, our approach to the analysis is in one key respect: We focus on system-level outcomes, which are an average of the outcomes of traditional public schools and charter schools located within districts’ geographic boundaries, weighted by school enrollment. This approach has two key advantages. First, it allows us to capture system-level results, which reflect the outcomes of all students (excluding private schools and home education). Second, one of the main concerns in studies of charter schools is that they might select or “cream-skim” the best students and inflate their outcomes. However, this type of selection is largely irrelevant in a district-level analysis of the total effects of charter schools. All students are counted in the analysis regardless of which type of school they attended. This is really an analysis of “systems” instead of “districts.”

We analyze these data using a method called difference-in-differences that compares a control group of districts with a treatment group. In this case, the control includes only districts that have no charter schools. The treatment group includes only “charter-heavy” districts, which we initially define as those that eventually reach at least 10 percent charter enrollment share. We then compare the trends over time in each group to see whether they diverge after charter schools open.

A key challenge in understanding any effect of charter schools is separating their impact on student outcomes from the impact of other policies aimed at improving schools that were adopted at roughly the same time. For example, states might adopt charter schools as part of a larger education agenda—which might include changes in school funding, investments in school facilities, or school accountability—that also affects student outcomes. Our matching method helps address this by focusing the comparison on districts that are otherwise similar and therefore are similarly likely to experience additional policies. If a state institutes new policies for low-performing schools, for example, the analysis will account for this by comparing districts that initially had similar performance levels.

It is also possible that non-policy factors could change at the same time that charter schools open. For example, demographics of a district might change, and, since outcomes are correlated with demographics, the results might change for reasons that have nothing to do with charter schools. To account for this, we sometimes control for demographics. We also test directly for demographic shifts that coincide with charter entry.

Yet another problem is that charter schools might intentionally seek to open in locations where the performance of traditional public schools is expected to decline. In that case, it might appear that charter schools are having a more negative impact than they actually are. The matching partially addresses this as well. In addition, we carry out “placebo” analyses in which we look for “effects” of opening high-school charter schools on elementary outcomes, which should not exist.

Average Effects on Test Scores and High-School Graduation

Though we examine a number of factors, we focus here on comparing districts with charter enrollment of 10 percent or more to no-charter districts, while controlling for other district characteristics including race/ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, and urbanicity.

Figure 1 shows the effects on elementary- and middle-school test scores in math and reading up to six years after charter schools open. The first bar indicates that, when enough charters open to reach at least a 10 percent enrollment share, math test scores increase by 0.15 standard deviations, or approximately 6 percentage points. For reading scores, the increase is 0.08 standard deviations (the equivalent of 3 percentage points).

The right side of Figure 1 also shows a 2.8 percentage point increase in high-school graduation rates over an eight-year period when comparing districts without charter schools to districts with at least 10 percent charter enrollment.

Additional analysis reinforces our conclusion that these effects are the result of charter schools. To test the robustness of our estimates to different analytic choices, we alter the matching method, vary the control variables, fix the number of years after charters enter at five years, and address the staggered nature of charter-school openings. The results vary somewhat across our methods, but the general picture is the same. In fact, with graduation, the effects often appear considerably larger when we estimate them in other ways. The estimates in Figure 1 might therefore be conservative.

The analyses also generally pass the usual tests that give us confidence that estimates reflect causal effects. The comparison and treatment groups were on the same trajectories before charter schools opened. The placebo estimates reinforce our findings by confirming that the expansion of charter high schools is unrelated to outcomes of elementary-school students.

We also used an entirely different method. Rather than compare charter-heavy districts to no-charter districts, we compare each charter-heavy district to itself as charter enrollment changes. This “fixed effects” approach makes somewhat different assumptions than our main analysis, but this, too, yields very similar results.

Diminishing Returns

The 10 percent charter enrollment share threshold is arbitrary, and there are reasons to expect that the effects would be different if we picked other thresholds. For example, some have argued that having too many charter schools may reduce the performance of traditional public schools.

We find that increased charter enrollment share is generally associated with larger effects in the lower ranges of charter enrollment. Figure 2 shows that the improvement is especially pronounced once the threshold reaches 10 percent. When we raise the threshold above 15 percent, the effects continue to be positive, but they do not get larger.

New Orleans is an extreme case with the highest charter enrollment of any district. It has also been one of the more successful and well-documented examples of improved student outcomes. To test whether New Orleans might be driving the results, we dropped it from the analysis. The results are essentially unchanged when we do this. As in the prior analyses, this pattern holds when we use other comparison groups and other methods.

Do Charter Effects Vary by Student and District Characteristics?

The 10 percent charter enrollment threshold yields a positive effect on math scores for almost all of the subgroups we examine. In particular, our results show that the increase in math scores for districts with charter schools is larger in metropolitan areas. This is consistent with prior research, though, again, that research had focused on particular mechanisms, such as participant effects, not the broader systemwide effects.

More novel is our analysis by grade level and initial achievement level. Here, we consider high initial achievement as the top 50 percent of math scores nationwide and low initial achievement as the bottom 50 percent of math scores. We find some evidence of larger effects in middle schools and where initial (pre-charter) achievement was low. This is consistent with the theory that it is easier to improve when outcomes are low to start.

Our analysis includes not only average test scores, but also scores by student race/ethnicity and family income. We find evidence of improvements for every group as well. We see positive and statistically significant effects on math scores for low-income, higher-income, white, Black, and Hispanic students.

What Mechanisms Explain the Total Effects?

What exactly about charter schools leads to these effects? Prior studies have focused on whether charter schools are more effective than nearby traditional public schools or whether charter schools induce traditional public schools to improve through competition.

One key contribution of the present study is focusing attention on the net effects of all of these methods, including a third possible mechanism: how charter schools might replace low-performing traditional public schools. To analyze this, we use the same methods described above, but here we are interested in whether the opening of charter schools led any traditional public schools to close or be taken over. We find that higher charter enrollment share does increase the likelihood of closure or takeover of traditional public schools.

To further understand this, we used school-level measures of achievement growth from Stanford Education Data Archive. These measures are created by calculating the change in achievement between cohorts and years (for example, the change in scores between 3rd graders in 2010 and 4th graders in the same school in 2011). Prior research suggests that these growth measures are similar to “value-added” measures that more accurately capture what schools contribute to student learning.

We find that traditional public schools that close as charter schools open have lower-than-average achievement growth. We also find that charter schools tend to locate near relatively low-performing traditional public schools. This may partly explain why charter schools tend to be slightly higher performing than the schools their students would otherwise attend.

We also examined the effects of charter schools on private-school closures, but we find no evidence of such effects. This is important, too, given the possibility that students might switch from private to charter schools. We might also expect competition between schools when there are more charter schools; more schools mean more competition for students and funding. Indeed, we find that traditional public school performance rises with the charter enrollment share, though only slightly. This evidence may reflect correlation more than causation, but it is consistent with prior research that has examined charter entry more rigorously in specific locations.

Putting this research together with prior research, it does seem clear that multiple mechanisms play a role in explaining how charter schools improve student outcomes.

Implications

This study continues a general trend. Charter results continue to improve in studies using rigorous designs of charter effectiveness—including one recent study of voting—as well as more descriptive studies. The fact that we see find systemwide gains in high-school graduation rates on a national scale is significant, given how important graduation is for long-term life outcomes.

There is still much we do not know. While our work advances understanding of the system-level effects, we still know little about some indirect effects of charter schools. Some recent research finds that charter schools attract more high-performing teachers to the profession, some of whom end up in traditional public schools.

On the other hand, critics also point out that charter entry might be accompanied by increases in average student funding. This happened in New Orleans and may also have occurred in other locations where traditional public schools are funded mainly by local property-tax revenue and charter schools are funded separately by state funds. Relatively little research has examined this topic.

Another legitimate concern is about how charter schools operate and how they might affect other outcomes. In New Orleans, we found, for example, that the intense charter-school focus on test scores took schools’ attention away from the city’s centuries-long traditions in the arts. Whether this has happened on a national scale is less clear.

Charter schools may also have contributed to weakened ties between parents and schools, and among families within neighborhoods. School choice generally means that students have longer commutes to school, which can make it more difficult for parents to make it to parent-teacher conferences, attend sporting and other afterschool events, or pick up their children when they are sick. Choice may also weaken neighborhood ties as students living across the street walk to different bus stops and attend schools that are not in their neighborhoods and often on opposite sides of the city.

The bigger picture, as it turns out, is even bigger than it might appear. Still, this study is an important step forward.

Douglas N. Harris is director of REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. He is chair of the department of economics at Tulane University, where he also holds the Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education. Feng Chen is a PhD student in economics at Tulane University. A more technical version of this paper is available at reachcentered.org.

This article appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Richmond, G. (2022). Choice, Flexibility, Accountability Drive School Improvement: One kind of public school is improving faster than another kind. What explains charter success? Education Next, 22(2), 36-43.