Can We Finally Have The Necessary Debate About Charter Schools

Charter school advocates are pushing back hard against proposed rules changes in a federal charter school grant program. Having failed to make any headway during the public comment period for the proposed rule changes, they are now lobbying Congress hard to overrule the administration. 

It's important to remember that the rules under discussion are not rules actually governing charter schools, but rules about how new charters can score points when trying to grab a federal grant-- a single source of funding in a multi-source world. 

Still, this is important for a variety of reasons, but especially because it's the closest we've ever come to having the necessary conversation about what charter schools are supposed to be. 

Are charter schools public schools, or private businesses?

The pitch has always been that charter schools are public schools, that they are "laboratories of education" that would enrich the entire "education ecosystem." But that promise has existed beside the reality that charters have conducted themselves largely like businesses, holding onto their "proprietary information" and opening and closing for reasons that have more to do with business decisions than concern about the local education ecosystem.

The proposed rule changes highlight this dichotomy. To increase their chances of getting a chunk of grant money from the federal Charter School Program (CSP), new charter schools would have to do the following. 

Refuse to use a for-profit to run the school. This closes an old charter loophole; almost everyone says "Yeah, for profit charters are a bad idea" and virtually every state forbids it, but many states still allow a non-profit school to be owned and/or operated by a for profit business, which is clearly a violation of the spirit and intent of the rule. Charter advocates are not trying to push back on this point, either because they don't disagree or because they recognize it's not a winning argument.

Build and maintain a connection to the community. This includes doing a needs assessment in the area from which the school would draw students. The rules point out that "teachers, parents, and community leaders have expressed concerns about not being included as active participants in charter school decision-making." So the new rules say charters can score points through regular engagement with the community as well as regular engagement with current and former educators, reflecting the original idea that charters could be used by teachers to move outside the box. Charter advocates have tried to portray this as very limiting, saying that it would keep schools from starting in "saturated" markets. 

Collaborate with public schools in the community. To score points, the charter would have to develop at least one point of collaboration with a public school. Exactly the sort of positive relationship that the laboratories of education promised would benefit the education ecosystem. Instead, charter advocates are arguing that they should not be required to give up trade secrets to the competition 

“That’s like getting Walmart to promise to partner with the five and dime down the street,” says the Washington Post editorial board.

“This is like letting General Motors veto where Honda can sell cars,” says Robert Maranto in The National Review.

Address diversity. New charters should match the match the demographics of their community, putting an end to white flight charters. Advocates say it also interferes with charters that intend to set up charters that focus on, say, Black students, and have tried hard to make the story that the Biden administration is trying to deny charter opportunities for Black and Brown students, which is an interesting PR spin on what is essentially an anti-segregation rule.

The thread running through all of these rules and all of the objections to them is the question of charter school functional identity. Is a charter a public school or a private business?

The charter advocate arguments against the rules change all boil down to "This hampers our ability to function freely as a business in the marketplace."

In some cases, it's obvious. The "Walmart doesn't collaborate with other stores" argument is framed with charter schools as a commercial enterprise. But the objections to needs assessment also reject the notion of charter schools as public schools. Think of it this way; if your local school district announced they wanted to open an additional school building in the district without doing any needs assessment or community outreach, the taxpayers would revolt over such a thoughtless spending of their money (and in fact that exact scenario has played out in some public districts). The assertion by charter advocates here is that they should not have to do any of that, that they should be able to set up shop wherever they feel it makes sense or they think they could get a slice of the market.

The diversity issue is also a business issue. One of the fundamental parts of a business plan is deciding which slice of the market you intend to target, as opposed to public schools, which are expected to find ways to accommodate whatever students fall within their community. 

I don't believe that business is inherently evil. But business operations and public institutions like education and health care have fundamentally different values, different ways of deciding what is a good idea, different factors they weigh when making decisions, even different decisions that they make (public schools do not ordinarily weigh whether or not they should stay open another year). 

Those two sets of values cannot be combined to run one institution. Modern charter schools have tried to have it both ways, but they can't. They are either public schools or businesses, and in their opposition to these rule changes, they've come down hard on the side of being businesses.

This is not a surprise. Much of modern ed reform has been about trying to graft business values and practices onto the world of education. What has made the whole process particularly ungainly and contentious is that this has been done without ever really having a national conversation about it. We've been living through an attempt to change the very nature of public education in this country, but we have never had a real national conversation about it or ever asking people if they really want to replace the promise of public education with the business of business.

It might well be a conversation worth having, and there are valid good-faith arguments that can be made on either side (though I know what side I find more convincing), but the debate over these rule changes are one more example of our American habit of having a conversation about things other than what we're really having a conversation about, particular, this time, the charter advocates who are tossing out every argument except "Come on! These rules really get in the way of operating our charter businesses!"