A Quiet Revolution

Over the last quarter-century, these rules and other chapters of the public-education canon have been rewritten. Because of a simple but profound policy innovation, our understanding of how public schools can be operated, enrolled in, and overseen has been transformed. Even more remarkable is how these changes took place. They weren’t the result of bossy federal mandates or sweeping court decisions. Their progress wasn’t directed by distant administrators or fueled by a tangle of government agencies. They didn’t occur suddenly or all at once.

Behind this incremental revolution—the charter school movement, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this fall—was a collection of principles that will be familiar to conservatives especially. Charter schools explicitly shifted power from the government to individuals and neighborhood organizations. They prioritized local needs and local decision-making. They trusted families and practitioners to have better information and more wisdom than technocrats. They made room for entrepreneurialism and innovation. They cultivated a diversity of school options to suit a pluralistic society. They focused governments on outcomes instead of inputs. They emerged from piecemeal reform of a longstanding institution, which proceeded slowly from modest community initiatives, not all at once in accord­ance with grand plans devised by experts.

Though welfare reform is perhaps conservatism’s most visible domestic policy success of the last generation, charter schools may be more significant, and may have more ripple effects in the future. At a time when Donald Trump has tempted the Republican party and conservatism towards an embrace of statism, strong central leadership, and bellicose certainty, charter schooling represents a textbook case of the opposite: how individual empowerment, an enlivened civil society, and a modest skepticism about complex, centralized solutions can change lives for the better. Indeed, the story of charter schooling, a national movement that grew from an early-1990s Minnesotan pilot program, could serve as an inspiration for conservative policy leaders in the months and years ahead.

In 1990, there were no charter schools. Public education was still defined by the traditional school district’s “exclusive territory franchise”—its right to own and operate every single public school in its area. But in some reform circles an idea had been percolating. Perhaps educators and community leaders could partner and run public schools outside the traditional system. In 1991, Governor Arne Carlson of Minnesota signed legislation that would allow up to eight “outcomes-based schools.” They’d be secular public schools, free from many traditional regulations. They’d be operated by licensed teachers, and their performance expectations would be described in public contracts. City Academy High School in St. Paul opened in the fall of 1992, the first “chartered” school under the law.

Over the next few years, several states, including California, Michigan, and Massachusetts, embraced the concept. They crafted laws of their own and, as democracy’s laboratories, experimented. They developed different policies on who could run schools, how many schools could be started, how they’d be held accountable, and more. Today, 43 states have charter-school laws, and approximately 3 million kids attend almost 7,000 charters across the country. More astonishing has been the growth of charters in cities. In New Orleans, almost all public-school students attend charters. In Detroit and Washington, D.C., half of kids are in charters. In about a dozen other cities, including Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Kansas City, at least 30 percent of students attend charter schools. In just 25 years, chartering went from a flight of fancy to a distinct sector of public education that could soon become the dominant system for delivering K-12 education in urban America.

Chartering is premised on a basic if provocative idea: The principles of public education allow state leaders to cast the government in a role very different from the one it occupied for a century. Instead of serving as the monopoly public-school operator, government can also (or instead) oversee public schools operated by others. Rather than creating school districts that provide all of a locality’s schools, the state government can create “authorizers” to empower and then monitor nonprofit groups that start, run, and grow schools.

Chartering is a reimagining of the state’s part in an essential public enterprise. It follows from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government credo, that when there’s collective work to be done, the state can “steer” instead of “row.” It can generate public value by establishing principles and goals but give others the authority to do the work.

In one sense, the upshot of charter laws has been much like that of private-school choice programs: They gave families more K-12 options from which to choose. But chartering and vouchers are best thought of as similar species descended from different philosophical genuses.

Private-school choice programs aim to shift power and resources directly from the government to families. In the case of vouchers and education savings accounts, state funds are channeled to parents who can then choose a private school or some other educational service. In the case of tax credits, money that would otherwise have gone to the government is redirected to scholarship funds that support family choices. In most of these programs, there is negligible state control; families are trusted to make choices, and participating schools are indirectly held accountable for results via the voluntary decisions of parents. The logic is market-oriented: The public good will emerge from the accumulation of private choices.

Chartering departs from a different station. It preserves a larger role for government. Because public money will directly support the charter schools, and because the results of these schools are of great public importance, it creates a system of public accountability. Authorizers require prospective school operators to go through an application process; approved schools must have clear performance goals; the authorizer tracks schools’ compliance with applicable state policies; the authorizer closes schools that fail. Parents are one source of accountability—a charter unable to attract or retain students will be closed—but democratic control also plays an important part.

Because of these differences, some on the right have tended to see chartering as “school choice-lite.” They argue that public oversight of authorizers limits the supply of schools and that forcing charters to follow many rules and regulations substantially limits their operational freedom. Such charges are fair. But chartering has had two positive effects (even beyond its creation of thousands of new educational options) that weigh against these concerns.

First, charters have slowly acclimated policymakers to the virtues of school choice. In years past, a charter school law was seen as a safe fallback for officials favoring school reform but nervous about vouchers. Chartering made it possible for legislators to vote for choice without making themselves vulnerable to attacks that they were diverting public funds to religious schools. Some states adopted charter laws in no small part because choice advocates pushed so hard for vouchers.

But the arrow may also point in the other direction—that chartering helped make possible other forms of choice. Chartering demonstrated that school differentiation, parental empowerment, and nonprofit operators were consistent with the principles of public education. As one city after the next produced charter sectors that were popular with parents, served high-need kids, and generated encouraging results, school choice found new allies. The apocalyptic warnings that anything other than the district model would ruin public education were shown to be unwarranted.

In this new political climate, debates about private-school choice have become less about ideology and more about practical considerations, such as which students will be eligible, which schools will be allowed to participate, and how schools should be held accountable. Importantly, the growth of chartering has run parallel to the growth of other types of school choice. Today there are 16 states with voucher programs, 17 with tax-credit scholarship programs, and 5 with education savings accounts.

The second cause for enthusiasm is the contribution of the charter movement to the health of civil society. There’s growing reason to believe that charter schools are fostering the kinds of social capital-building and civic activity our communities need. No doubt, the district model has important benefits—it’s a rational, orderly, democratically controlled system that made K-12 education accessible to more students than ever before. But especially in big cities, it can erect obstacles to family and neighborhood involvement.

For instance, assigning students to schools by rote can undermine individual agency. Explicitly creating highly similar schools (PS 1, PS 2, PS 3, etc.) can be seen as homogenizing cities with vast diversity. Allowing only one public body to run schools, and then centralizing key decisions in its large bureauc­racy, can inhibit the initiatives of neighborhood leaders. And empowering a citywide elected board enables the priorities and values of the majority to take precedence over those of discrete communities and neighborhoods.

The parental-choice aspect of chartering counters these tendencies by drawing educational authority away from a single state body and redistributing it to families. But what is more striking is how mature charter-school sectors recombine that potentially atomized authority in socially beneficial ways. While opponents expressed concern that school choice would isolate families and dissolve community bonds, the opposite seems to be occurring.

In cities with thriving charter sectors, scores of self-organized nonprofits are now running schools. Community-based organizations are providing technical assistance to aspiring school founders, helping existing schools find facilities, offering after-school programming, and more. City leaders have formed a range of organizations to help facilitate the new choice-based system, for instance, by collecting and publicizing information on schools and helping families on waiting lists find other options.

Families, no longer merely told where to send their children to school, have collaborated to push for new types of schools and directed the evolution of existing schools. Educators, no longer merely assigned to a school by a district central office, have teamed up with colleagues to found new schools. A recent study on D.C.’s charter-school governance found that chartering has given hundreds of citizens (parents, lawyers, neighborhood leaders, business executives) an opportunity to participate more fully in schooling through seats on governing boards.

From Tocqueville on, observers of American social institutions have noted the power of this country’s voluntary associations. These small-scale groups may seem quaint, even parochial. But they enable individuals to live in harmonious communities, pass on their values and histories, and act together without being acted upon. They serve as essential mediating institutions, filling the space between our smallest units, families and households, and our largest, massive corporations and government agencies. They show, day in and day out, that not all public value is created by government bodies and that democratically controlled state institutions are not the only way for citizens to act in concert.

But because these organizations are local, particular, and voluntary, their growth is typically slow and organic, not premeditated or managed by powerful outside forces. Accordingly, policy can’t call them into being; it can only create the conditions that make them possible. Chartering seems to have done precisely that. State laws made space for a new sector of public education built on nonprofit schools and parental choice. Without mandates on how many or what kinds of charters had to be created, families and civil society could take the lead, gradually creating new organizations and webs of relationships.

Though it has taken a quarter-century—a snail’s pace in the progressive’s view of reform—chartering has enabled the development of stable but dynamic systems of public schools. These sectors, now thriving in some of America’s most troubled cities, have found a way to blend democratic control, subsidiarity, family empowerment, and civic activity. For decades, our nation tried to wage war against our urban-education problems with a conscript-army mentality: Compulsion and a rigid, hierarchical system were the tools at hand to drive change. It’s becoming clear, however, that the volunteer-militia approach—a network of Burkean “little platoons”—may be a far better answer.

Conservatives keen to apply these lessons to other domestic-policy fields may nevertheless be given pause by the timeline. Obviously, it’s better politics to think about reforms in terms of election cycles rather than generations. And it would be far more dramatic, not to mention tidy, to swiftly enact a massive decentralization measure and call it a day. But the experience of chartering suggests the deliberate pace is a feature, not a bug, of initiatives that lean on civil society. Three examples are worth highlighting.

First, it is not always obvious which collective decisions should remain in the hands of elected officials and which should be relinquished to private groups. For example, there are still legitimate debates over whether the state government or independent schools should make final decisions about the measures used to define school quality and the credentials teachers should possess. Most states have reached conclusions, but it has taken time, and the answers vary among states. Similarly, if the provision of, say, veterans’ health services were to be entrusted to nonprofits, we would probably still want a political process to determine who is eligible and for which services. Whether in education, health care, or housing, the right mix of state and civil-society authority is probably better revealed through experience than reason.

Second, it’s impossible to foresee all of the complications associated with unwinding longstanding government systems. Creating a quilt of autonomous urban public schools may sound straightforward until you have to make sure those schools have buildings, transportation plans for their students, and enrollment policies. The most mature charter sectors have now developed revolving loan programs for capital projects, transportation co-ops, and algorithm-based enrollment systems. But that has taken huge investments of time, effort, and political capital. Fundamentally reforming state programs related to other public services would almost certainly involve similar challenges.

Third, when individuals and mediating institutions are given more authority, it’s impossible to fully predict how they will use it. As Chester Finn, Bruno Manno, and Brandon Wright’s new book Charter Schools at the Crossroads describes, chartering has produced more “no excuses” college-prep middle schools for low-income kids than many would’ve guessed. But it has also produced fewer schools focused on gifted kids than many had hoped. This has caused some policymakers to reconsider provisions in state laws. Leaders in other fields should expect similar unexpected developments and course corrections.

All these particular issues, however, underscore a basic point: Chartering has quietly revolutionized public schooling. It didn’t happen through clever, technocratic administrative fixes or a gigantic, rapidly passed omnibus legislative package. Nor did it humbly take for granted longstanding arrangements or merely tinker with the mechanics of existing programs. Instead, chartering took the long view. It trusted families and communities, carved out space for a new approach, and then allowed civil society to slowly create and change the new system. The result has been more individual empowerment, educational options, respect for pluralism, competition, civic-sector activity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism.

The calamity of the 2016 campaign is sure to engender deep debates over the meaning and future of conservatism. But in the meantime, policymakers interested in getting things done have been handed a heuristic. When assessing their domestic-policy proposals, they should simply ask, “Does this sound like chartering?”

Andy Smarick is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He worked at the White House and Department of Education in the George W. Bush administration and was appointed to education posts by governors Chris Christie and Larry Hogan.