As we get older, we sometimes find ourselves thinking about the “good old days,” which were often not quite as good as we remember them. That’s not a problem in the case of charter schools. It’s a pretty straightforward task to separate nostalgia from an impartial assessment of which charter laws work best. Our just released National Charter School Law Rankings offer a guide to their strengths and weaknesses in four key areas: authorizing bodies, limits to growth, operations, and equitable funding; and they provide a clear picture of the factors that drive success and failure.
Charter schools were born a quarter-century ago, when Minnesota enacted the first such law in the country. Although modified along the way, it remains one of the best laws in the U.S., and Minnesota’s 167 charter schools and more than 53,000 charter students are a testament to its success. In that respect, it is typical of states that embraced charters at the outset: of the 13 strongest charter laws, 12 became law between 1991 and 1999, and although 44 states and the District of Columbia now have charter laws, the original dozen (plus Indiana) account for more than 56 percent of today’s charter schools. The early adapters were faithful to the original charter school vision and had laws that struck a skillful balance between providing autonomy and requiring accountability.
In the best states, charter schools offer a wide variety of authorizers, including universities; lots of autonomy; no cap on the number of charter schools allowed; funding equity; and wide latitude to innovate.
But the impact of many charter laws, especially some enacted in recent years, is a different story. A significant factor is what’s called “institutional isomorphism,” the tendency to make charter schools look and act more and more like the traditional schools they were intended to supplement or replace. There is widespread evidence of creeping regulatory intrusion in charter school decisions dealing with academic programming, curriculum, discipline, and teacher qualifications. Policymakers seem no longer able to tell the difference between policies that advance the cause of effective charter schools and those that strangle them.
Teachers’ unions tried, and mostly failed, to prevent expansion of the charter movement, and now they’ve shifted tactics. If they’re unable to prevent a charter law from being passed, they can often at least ensure that it is weak, shaping laws and regulations to smother charters with the same sort of rules and bureaucracy that have prevented innovation and opportunity in traditional school systems for at least a century.
Some pro-charter organizations seem to have wandered into this thicket, mainly because they haven’t prioritized safeguarding charters from regulatory burden. They are concerned more with assessing the scope of charter laws than with the impact of laws in practice.
One of these groups puts Kentucky, the latest state to adopt a charter law, in their top ten because its new law follows their model. But although it became law more than a year ago, not a single charter school has been established there. Also in their top ten is Alabama, whose charter law was passed in 2015 but has seen a dearth of charter school applications and has only one charter school in operation. We rank them considerably lower, but not nearly as low as Iowa, whose law we find to be the worst charter law in the country. It’s been on the books since 2002, but 16 years later, there are only three charter schools in the entire state.
In some cases, limits on growth are explicit, featuring numerical caps on the number of charter schools allowed. One of the states with a long waiting list is Massachusetts, the only state given an “A” or “B” score in our survey that places a severe cap on charter enrollment. It caps the number of charter schools in the state (72) and puts a cap on the amount of tuition that districts can send to charter schools. A ballot measure in 2016 would have raised the cap in underperforming districts where demand is greatest, but teachers’ unions were successful in defeating it.
In the best states, charter schools offer a wide variety of authorizers, including universities; in some states, however, the last several years have seen the rise of “uber-authorizers,” a new category of regulatory body that “authorizes the authorizer.” But instead of being a guarantor of quality (their ostensible purpose), they strip authorizers of their independence and school operators of autonomy, both of which are essential for success.
Finally, matters of equity weigh heavily on charter schools. Too many states fund charter schools at a dramatically lower level than their traditional counterparts: Ideally, the money for tuition should follow the child, but often it is considerably less than in traditional public schools. Moreover, most states provide charters with little or no per-pupil facilities funding, forcing charters to pay for buildings and operating expenses out of funds that should go to students. For all intents and purposes, inequitable funding means that charter schools are expected to do far more with much less.
After an initial period of rapid expansion, experimentation and impressive innovation, charter growth has slowed over the past decade. During the current school year, it has nearly ground to a halt. It’s certainly not due to lack of demand — there are more than half a million students on charter school waiting lists around the country who can’t get in. Rather, it’s caused by deliberate efforts to write laws and regulations that disadvantage charter schools from the moment they open, discourage creation of schools that could be creating a big difference in students’ lives in the first place, or hobble them in myriad ways largely invisible to the general public if they somehow are able nonetheless to open their doors.
State governments everywhere need to be alert to this threat to one of the most important educational innovations of our time and restore the original vision of the charter school movement before it’s too late.
Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is CEO and founder of the Center for Education Reform. Patrick S. Korten is a senior writer and communications advisor for CER.
