Charter Schools

Origins of the Charter School Concept

The earliest mention of the term charter school can be traced to the 1970s when a New England educator suggested that new educational approaches could be explored through contracts given to small groups of teachers. The idea was publicized in the late 1980s when a former president of the American Federation of Teachers suggested that local school boards could ‘charter’ a school with union and teacher approval. Philadelphia dubbed their schools-within-schools initiative in the late 1980s ‘charter schools.’ In 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school law developing a program to provide opportunity, choice, and responsibility for results. The following year, California followed suit.

Charter Schools and School Choice

The charter school concept has joined the ranks of school choice designs, including magnet schools, open enrollment, vouchers, and tax credits. Over the past 10 years, states and school districts have expanded opportunities for parents to use public funds to choose the schools their children attend in attempts to improve the quality of education available to students, particularly in urban areas.

Supporters contend that school choice can improve the public education available to all children based on two crucial factors. First, public school choice levels the playing field for less affluent families. Parents with financial resources can choose their children's schools through investing in private education or by virtue of the neighborhoods in which they choose to [Page 131]live. School choice provides educational alternatives for families without these resources. Second, school choice proponents argue that competition among public schools serves the diverse needs of students more efficiently than a system requiring students to attend neighborhood schools. Market forces would, in theory, force all schools to improve in order to survive. When parents have the opportunity to choose strong schools, less effective schools lose students and ultimately close. These arguments have led to increasing popularity of school choice programs in general and charter schools in particular.

...