ANALYSIS Behind the backlash
Thirty years on, supporters and detractors of charter schools acknowledge drawbacks
In the largest public school system in the country, New York City Chancellor Richard Carranza recently scolded charter school supporters for disparaging traditional public schools. The year before, he had struck a far friendlier tone.
In the second-largest public school district in the country, Los Angeles teachers ended a six-day strike in January with a key concession from pro-charter Superintendent Austin Beutner: a commitment to call for a statewide cap on new charters until their effect on district schools can be assessed.
In the third-largest school district in the country, Chicago teachers at several charter schools are on strike, the second time within a month it has happened in the city. The December strike there was the first in the charter sector, which is largely (and intentionally) non-unionized and pays most teachers far less than district schools.
This country is nearly 30 years into an experiment with charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately operated, sometimes by for-profit companies.
Supporters first described charters as competitive vehicles to push traditional public schools to reform. Over time, that narrative changed and charters were wrapped into the zeitgeist of “choice” for families whose children wanted alternatives to troubled district schools.
Today, about 6 percent of America’s schoolchildren attend charter schools, with 44 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico having passed laws permitting them. Some states have only a few charters while some cities are saturated. In Los Angeles, 20 percent of children attend charters. In New York, it’s 10 percent. Charter backers say the movement is an important and sustainable feature of America’s education landscape and any problems it faces are expected growing pains.
Yet the movement, which has enjoyed Republican and Democratic support — including hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration — seems to be at an inflection point as supporters and detractors recognize that charters are not the panacea backers had long suggested.
Public support goes up and down, depending on the poll, and data suggest growth in charters is leveling off. Repeated financial scandals and other crises have tarnished the sector. While some charters are terrific schools that get better student outcomes than nearby district schools, others get similar or worse student outcomes. In cities with high concentrations of charters, some parents complain that they can’t get their children into the “best” charters and the notion of “choice” is false.
What looks like a backlash against charters has been several years in the making.
The Obama administration ardently supported charters, pushing states to open them. But in 2016, with President Barrack Obama’s second term nearly over and strong opposition to his education policies within both parties, the Democratic National Committee altered its draft platform to qualify its support for charters, calling for more transparency and accountability and opposing for-profit charters.
The election of President Donald Trump and the appointment of his billionaire education secretary, Betsy DeVos, who once called traditional public schools “a dead end,” gave pause to some Democratic charter supporters. Trump and DeVos made expanding “school choice” — including charters and programs that use public money for private and religious school tuition — its top education priority.
Trump critics accused him and DeVos of seeking to privatize public education. Being connected to the Trump agenda in any way became a step too far for some Democrats who had called charters “a civil rights issue.” Key Democratic groups began to call for moratoriums on charter schools, including the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the country, and the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the newest.
Public support for charters oscillates depending upon the survey and wording of questions; a 2017 poll by the charter-friendly Harvard University journal Education Next found that charter school support had dropped 12 percentage points from the year before, to about 40 percent. But a 2018 poll said it bounced back by 5 percentage points. Among teachers, support had dropped from 40 percent to 33 percent, it said.
In any case, support for charters has never been overwhelming.
And growth in the number of charter schools has been declining for a number of years, though there are varying statistics on whether it has leveled off. A new 117-page report by the consulting group Bellwether Education Partners, funded by the charter supporting Walton Family Foundation, concedes the point.
This is happening amid growing awareness that charters in California and other states are draining vital resources from traditional publicly funded and operated school districts, which the vast majority of America’s schoolchildren attend.
That was brought into focus by major strikes during the past year by teachers in Republican- and Democratic-led states who were fighting for higher pay and more resources for schools. In Los Angeles, the rallying cry of striking teachers was the existential threat they said charter schools present to traditional districts.
A May 2018 report by a nonprofit group, In The Public Interest, calculated that charters cost several California districts millions of dollars: They cost the San Diego Unified School District $65.9 million a year, the Oakland Unified School District $57.3 million a year and East Side Union $19.3 million annually.
In California, the state with the most charter schools and the most charter students, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, just told the state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, to create a panel to examine how charter schools affect the finances of districts. The California Charter Schools Act forbids school boards reviewing applications for new charters to consider how they might affect the traditional public school district.
Yet even as calls for more oversight in scandal-ridden sectors are gaining urgency, some charter supporters keep trying to water them down. An Arizona Republic story says:
“Legislation introduced by an influential Republican state senator would require charter schools to disclose more about their finances. But the bill contains a large loophole that would allow the state’s biggest chains like Basis Charter Schools and Great Hearts Academies to avoid revealing how they spend their money.”