Charter school path paved with choice, compromise, common sense

Creation of the nation’s first charter school law surprised even its most ardent supporters. Today, schools need more collaboration from all corners in order to deliver a better education.

The pioneering charter school story is about ordinary people taking an extraordinary stand for change. Since Minnesota passed the first charter school law in 1991, new education formats have consistently emerged and taken root nationwide. Today, more than 2.3 million students attend about 6,000 charter schools in 42 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly a million students are on waiting lists, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Chartering is supported by nearly 70% of the American public according to the 2013 PDK/Gallup poll and every presidential candidate since Bill Clinton. How did chartering move from having a “zero chance of passage,” according to one Minnesota lawmaker, to its wide acceptance today? What sustained chartering as a significant redesign of public education for over 20 years? What lessons from the origins can inform educators and policy leaders for the future?

Three responses to a critical report

In 1983, the landmark and transformative A Nation at Risk report sounded a clarion call with its highly critical review of America’s public education system. Three notable responses in Minnesota, each building on the other, came from a visionary governor, a teachers union reformer, and a group of Minnesota community leaders who paved the way for charter schools.

#1. The governor was Rudy Perpich, Democrat of Minnesota, who in 1985 drew a firestorm of protest when he proposed the nation’s first public school choice initiative. That included Postsecondary Enrollment Options, which allowed high school students to enroll in college courses for credit, and open enrollment, which allowed students to attend any public school in the state. These initiatives all became law by 1988 and opened the door to chartering. While most of the nation’s governors were proposing tighter standards, Gov. Perpich thought more public school choice would provide what he called “Access to Excellence.”

#2. But once students had more access to choices, what if all the choices were the same? Not all students could travel across town to attend their public school of choice. Minnesota needed more choices in its neighborhoods. One answer emerged from an unlikely source. In March 1988, Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, laid out his ideas about charter schools to a National Press Club audience in Washington, D.C. Charter schools, he said, would provide teacher autonomy and professionalism. At an education reform conference in northern Minnesota a few months later, he said his proposal came about in part because of his concern that school districts could “take their customers for granted.” As policy makers, we agreed.

#3. A third visionary group created a legislative template for chartering.  In 1988, a Citizens League task force  in Minnesota picked up Shanker’s idea as it worked to identify ways to improve public education. Leaders from business, labor, education, and the community, with guidance from former Citizens League executive director Ted Kolderie, laid the groundwork for the nation’s first charter school legislation.  I was then a Minnesota state senator and agreed to introduce the legislation in the state senate in 1989.   According to Kolderie, chartering was about “withdrawing the exclusive franchise in public education.” Only by withdrawing exclusivity could we move beyond public school choice to create new public schools. And creating new public schools outside the traditional K-12 system was key to making the traditional system more responsive and open to change.

These leaders didn’t have a political agenda. Chartering came from outside the political system. Sometimes, the best thing policy makers can do is step back, remove the barriers, and let citizens take the lead.

Note that chartering is the process of granting a charter to a group of teachers and parents to offer public education with public dollars. A school becomes chartered only after it receives that authorization. While the proper and accurate term for the schools is “chartered schools,” in common parlance they have become known as charter schools. In return for granting autonomy, the charter school leaders commit to accountability in their performance contract. They must live up to their performance commitments, or the school can be closed. That kind of accountability does not occur in traditional public schools. In my view, charter schools trade regulation for results, bureaucracy for accountability.

Chartering did not introduce a particular kind of school. It might have, but instead the idea was to leave the door open for teachers and others to try new and different forms of school and approaches to learning.

Charter schools were originally envisioned as the R&D sector of public education. The charter sector must rise to that challenge.

Defying political odds

The idea of opening the K-12 system wasn’t easy to pass in the legislature. Resistance came from everywhere. The powerful Minnesota teachers unions were opposed, creating political pressure on the large Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) majorities — my political party — in the legislature. (Teachers unions have traditionally been among the biggest spending lobbyists in Minnesota state politics.) The new Republican governor, Arne Carlson, had defeated Gov. Perpich after winning the endorsement of the Minnesota Education Association (MEA) — in part because Perpich championed open enrollment. Carlson appointed the MEA lobbyist as commissioner of education. This was the political climate in 1991, the year chartering legislation finally passed.

With these political dynamics, the passage of the first chartered school law was not exactly  “Civics 101.” Supportive DFL and Republican senators had easily passed the bill in good form two years in a row. But the heavily DFL House of Representatives was greatly influenced by the teachers unions, and the unions had a strong friend in the chair of the House Education Committee who vowed to stop chartering. The only way to pass the bill over the objections of this powerful committee chair was for the senate to attach chartering to the senate omnibus education funding bill and get it into a House-Senate conference committee. There, chartering could be approved by the vote of only three members of each legislative body. The strategy worked. On the last day of the 1991 conference committee, the House provided the minimum three votes (two DFL and one Republican) for the bill, even as the education committee chair voted against it in conference committee. The final funding bill then had one more hurdle:  final approval by the House of Representatives. Because of the unusual legislative process, this vote on the omnibus education funding bill would be the first and only time the full House of Representatives would debate chartering and then only in the context of one issue among hundreds in the funding bill. The teachers unions, taken off guard, had only 24 hours to stop the bill on the House floor. They unleashed a torrent of last-minute lobbying, leading to the final dramatic House vote.

For me, a union-endorsed DFL legislator, this last year of our three-year journey to legislative passage was especially painful. My constituent and friend was president of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers. My local school district lobbyist was my 9th-grade math teacher! Splitting with my union friends during the intense battle for passage was heartbreaking.  As we neared the end of the 1991 legislative session, my role as lead author of the chartering legislation became “firefighter-in-chief” as we battled the multitude of fears and myths about chartering raised by opponents. The teachers unions and their school district allies were vigorous in their opposition, and they were mobilizing their troops in the public schools.

With this intense opposition, no one knew if chartering would survive the final vote in the House of Representatives.  In the end, chartering passed the House by only three votes.

Chartering passed because it came from the middle of the political spectrum. It was bipartisan. In the House, the legislation not only passed with a bipartisan coalition but with a minority of the majority party legislators voting for it. Only 42% of the majority DFL representatives voted for it; 56% of the minority Republican representatives voted for it. That would not have occurred without an education reform-minded DFL Speaker of the House. Even as the voting board lit up with red negative votes, the speaker was the only person who could see the cumulative vote totals. When he directed that the roll be closed, chartering emerged victoriously . . . and 10 legislators had not yet voted!

The bill also passed for another reason: It was significantly compromised. Chartering supporters were disappointed — and I was devastated — about the compromise, which meant that only local school districts could approve charters. We were convinced that meant a charter school would never open because there was no alternate sponsor (now known as an authorizer) or state appeals process to make the K-12 system more responsive. My senate colleagues had to convince me to accept the compromise and come back to improve the law. Twenty years later, I realize that, had we not compromised, chartering would not have passed.

The lesson here? Compromise is not defeat. It is essential to good governance. As former U.S. Senator and moderate Republican Olympia Snowe wrote in her recent book, Fighting for Common Ground (Weinstein Books, 2013), “compromise is not a capitulation of one’s principles. Rather, it is a recognition that not getting all that you may want may be the only way to acquire enough votes to achieve most of what you seek — and to institute policies that will reflect the needs and desires of your constituents” (p. 228).

Going national

Much to my surprise, within two weeks, Minnesota’s Republican U.S. Sen. David Durenberger and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, then chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, took hold of the chartering legislation as a bipartisan form of public school choice. Both men saw it as a centrist and pragmatic alternative to President George H.W. Bush’s proposal for private school vouchers and the status quo desired by Congressional House Democrats. They knew the public was demanding “tradition-shattering changes” in K-12 public education and demanding results.

Creating new public schools outside the traditional K-12 system was key to making the traditional system more responsive and open to change.

Both national leaders had connections to Ted Kolderie and the Citizens League. Most surprising to me was to learn years later that Clinton was advocating for chartering nine months before the Minnesota law even passed, using nothing more than Kolderie’s paper in describing the need to “withdraw the exclusive franchise” from our traditional K-12 system.

But even as the national conversation became more robust, local school boards in Minnesota didn’t see it the same way. As I feared, school boards rejected seven of the first nine applicants for charter schools.  Peggy Hunter, the designated chartering official at the Minnesota Department of Education, called it the “fox guarding the chickens.”

The only two charter schools approved by local school boards were City Academy, serving youth who dropped out of the system, which opened Sept. 7, 1992, as the nation’s first charter school, and Metro Deaf School, serving a special population. But the seven rejections by local school boards ended up having a positive effect because they created support to amend the law in 1993 by adding an appeals process. Later, the Minnesota legislature allowed other authorizers as well, including large nonprofit entities, postsecondary institutions, and single-purpose charter authorizer nonprofits. One reason why the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ranks Minnesota’s charter school law the best in the nation is because it comes closest to the organization’s model law.

Chartering today

Chartering continues to spur innovations in learning, curriculum, teaching models, policies, and structures from startup schools to national legislatures. Chartering — or similar models — is now being discussed or implemented globally in countries such as India, England, South Africa, and New Zealand. As long as legislative policies stimulate continuing innovation in the public education system, chartering accomplishes a fundamental purpose envisioned at its origins. For example, today chartering is being applied to preschool and kindergarten education as well as adult education. And in New Orleans, charter schools serve three-quarters of the city’s public school students.

Perhaps the most important innovations around chartering have emerged from teachers. Teacher cooperatives were formed allowing teachers to become owners of their services. In 2011 in Minnesota, teachers union leaders — the same leaders who vigorously opposed chartering 20 years earlier — led the way to create the first union-initiated chartered school authorizer in the nation. (See Louise Sundin’s article.)  The state approved the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, and the Guild authorized its first charter school for the 2014-15 school year.

The ideas around teachers in partnership have been presented beyond chartering by the Minnesota policy group Education|Evolving to more than a dozen individuals and organizations deeply concerned about improving teachers and teaching, including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the Carnegie Corporation for Advancement of Teaching, among others.

While there are many examples of innovations around the nation in chartering, there haven’t been enough. We need more. Charter schools were originally envisioned as the R&D sector of public education. The charter sector must rise to that challenge.

There is another challenge in the spirit of innovation that I invite both sectors of public education to address, perhaps together. Nothing has been as difficult and contentious as the question of whether chartering is working. Clearly, charter schools are being created. But how well are their students learning? Are students learning better in charter schools than in district schools? We all want quality public schools in both the charter and district sectors. Have we thought clearly about what that means? Key to the original concept of chartering are a few fundamental points: A school in itself is neither good nor bad; students don’t learn or fail to learn because a school is chartered or district-run; students learn when their schools engage them and that depends on each school’s approach to teaching and learning. How do we relate success to that? Unfortunately, too little study has been done to describe and classify school approaches to learning in either sector.

That’s why I answer the charter vs. district question this way. There are great charter public schools and great district public schools. There are low-performing charter schools and low-performing district schools. Let’s focus in both sectors on how they define learning, how they go about learning, how their approaches are working, and how they achieve results. If a school is not working, let’s end it. That’s how we’ll improve public education for all.

How do we grow and support a high-performing and innovative chartering sector across this nation? In my view, there are several critical components. We need well-trained authorizers and charter school governing boards. We need to encourage more entrepreneurial school leaders and teachers to take on the challenge. We need equitable per pupil funding. We need equitable funding for quality charter school facilities.

The charter school story

The charter school story as related in this article comes from my book, Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story (Beaver’s Pond Press and Charter Schools Development Corporation, 2012). The title came from my colleague, DFL Rep. Becky Kelso, who championed the charter school bill in the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1991. When asked years later what she thought when I gave her the bill to author, she replied, to my enormous surprise, “I had zero confidence it would pass.” I suspect every reader of this article faces something with “zero chance of passage.” But anything can happen when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand for change.

CITATION: Junge, E.R. (2014). Charter school path paved with choice, compromise, common sense. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (5), 13-17.