Charter schools in the United States

Based on Wikipedia: Charter schools in the United States

In 1991, a small high school called City Academy opened its doors in St. Paul, Minnesota. It looked like any other school—classrooms, teachers, students showing up each morning. But City Academy was something entirely new in American education: the first charter school in the United States. It operated with public money but outside the traditional school district bureaucracy, accountable not to school board regulations but to a contract—a charter—that promised specific results for its students.

That single school sparked a transformation that now touches nearly four million American children.

What Makes a Charter School Different

To understand charter schools, you first need to understand what they're not. They're not private schools—they don't charge tuition, and they must accept any student who applies (though they can use lotteries when applications exceed capacity). They're not religious schools—the separation of church and state applies to them just as it does to traditional public schools. And they're not homeschools or tutoring centers—they're fully functioning schools with campuses, teachers, and structured curricula.

What makes them different is autonomy.

Traditional public schools operate within school districts, governed by elected school boards and bound by layers of state and local regulations. Everything from the length of the school day to how teachers are evaluated to what textbooks get used can be dictated by rules written far from the classroom. Charter schools trade some of that oversight for freedom. They sign a contract—the charter—with an authorizing body, promising to achieve certain educational outcomes. In exchange, they get to decide how to achieve those outcomes largely on their own.

Think of it like the difference between being an employee and being a contractor. An employee shows up, follows the company handbook, and gets paid whether or not their specific project succeeds. A contractor negotiates a deal: deliver these results by this deadline, and we'll pay you this amount. How you get it done is your business. Charter schools operate under that contractor logic. Meet your promises, and you can keep operating. Fail, and your charter gets revoked.

At least, that's the theory.

The Origin Story

The charter school concept didn't emerge from a single eureka moment. It grew from multiple tributaries of educational reform thinking that converged in the late twentieth century.

In 1971, two professors at the University of California, Berkeley—Stephen Sugarman and Jack Coons—published a paper called "Family Choice in Education." They were wrestling with a fundamental tension in American schooling: public education was supposed to serve everyone equally, but in practice, wealthy families could buy their way into good schools simply by purchasing homes in affluent neighborhoods. Their solution was to give families direct control over educational dollars, letting them choose where their children would learn. They expanded this idea in a 1978 book titled "Education by Choice," though they called their proposed institutions "Independent Public Schools."

The actual term "charter schools" came from Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1974. But the idea sat dormant in academic journals until 1988, when it found an unlikely champion: Albert Shanker.

Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest teachers' union. He had made his name as a fierce advocate for teacher rights, leading the first major teachers' strike in American history when he shut down New York City schools in 1968. He was, in other words, an establishment figure—not someone you'd expect to champion radical reform.

But Shanker had grown worried. American students were falling behind their international peers. Traditional reforms weren't working. He proposed creating experimental "schools of choice" within the public system—places where teachers could try new approaches without bureaucratic interference. If an experiment worked, other schools could adopt it. If it failed, the charter would end and students would return to regular schools. The risk would be contained; the potential upside, unlimited.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, the education scholar, later called Shanker "the first person to publicly propose charter schools." Coming from the head of a teachers' union, the endorsement gave the idea mainstream credibility.

From Theory to Reality

Minnesota moved first. In 1991, the state legislature passed the nation's first charter school law. California followed in 1992. Then the floodgates opened.

By 2022, forty-six states and the District of Columbia had charter school laws on the books. Only four states—Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—held out entirely. Approximately 7,800 charter schools now operate across the country, and in the 2021-2022 school year, about 7.4 percent of all American public school students attended one.

That 7.4 percent sounds modest, but it masks enormous variation. In some cities, charter schools have become the dominant form of public education. New Orleans is the most dramatic example: after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city's traditional school system in 2005, officials essentially rebuilt public education around charter schools. Today, the majority of New Orleans public school students attend charters.

The growth happened fast. In 2009, about 23 percent of charter schools offered a longer school day than traditional public schools. By 2012, that figure had more than doubled to 48 percent. In the same period, the percentage of charter schools using performance-based teacher compensation—paying teachers partly based on student results rather than just seniority—jumped from 19 percent to 37 percent.

Meanwhile, unionization rates at charter schools dropped. In 2009, about 12 percent of charter school teachers belonged to unions. By 2012, that number had fallen to 7 percent. The charter sector was developing a distinctly different labor culture than traditional public education.

Who Authorizes a Charter?

Here's where things get complicated—and where the fifty-state laboratory of American federalism creates a bewildering patchwork of rules.

A charter school can't just decide to exist. Someone has to grant it permission—to "authorize" it. But who has that power varies wildly depending on where you are.

In Arkansas, the State Board of Education authorizes charters. In Maryland, only local school districts can do it. Arizona and the District of Columbia have created entirely separate bodies—independent charter-authorizing commissions—specifically to evaluate and approve charter applications. In Minnesota and Michigan, multiple different entities can grant charters: state boards, local districts, universities, and more.

As of 2012, about 39 percent of charters nationwide were authorized by local school districts. Another 28 percent came from state boards of education. State commissions granted 12 percent, with universities, cities, and other bodies handling the rest.

This matters enormously because who grants the charter shapes what kind of oversight exists. A school district authorizing a charter might see that charter as competition for students and funding—creating a potential conflict of interest. An independent state commission might have more objectivity but less knowledge of local conditions. Universities authorizing charters bring academic expertise but may lack experience with school operations.

The variation creates what policy analysts call a natural experiment: we can observe how different authorization structures affect school quality. The results, unsurprisingly, are mixed.

Following the Money

Charter schools are public schools, which means they're funded with public money. But how that funding works is neither simple nor, critics argue, fair.

In most states, charter schools receive money through a per-pupil formula. When a student enrolls in a charter school, funding follows them from their home district. This makes intuitive sense: the money is meant to educate the child, so it should go wherever the child goes.

But here's the catch: charter schools typically receive less money per student than traditional public schools. A 2005 study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—a group that generally supports charter schools—found that across sixteen states and Washington, D.C., charters received about 22 percent less public funding per pupil than district schools. For an average-sized charter school of 250 students, that gap amounted to roughly $450,000 per year in foregone revenue.

In urban districts, the disparity was even starker. Charter schools in cities like San Diego and Atlanta received about 40 percent less funding than their traditional public school counterparts.

A 2010 study by the Center for Education Reform found charters received only 64 percent of what traditional public schools got—an average of $7,131 per student compared to $11,184.

Why the gap? Several factors contribute. Charter schools often lack access to local property tax revenue, which funds a significant portion of traditional school budgets. They typically receive no dedicated capital funding for buildings and facilities—they have to find and pay for their own space. And some funding formulas simply weren't designed with charter schools in mind.

Charter schools try to close this gap through private fundraising. On average, they raise about $500 per student from donors annually. But this creates its own inequities: charter schools in wealthy areas with well-connected boards can raise millions, while those serving low-income communities struggle to attract philanthropic support.

The picture is further complicated by what kinds of students different schools serve. Charter schools, as a sector, actually serve a more disadvantaged student population than traditional public schools. About 61 percent of charter schools have student bodies where more than 60 percent qualify for the federal Free or Reduced Lunch Program—the standard proxy for low-income status. But individual charter schools may not enroll proportionate numbers of students with disabilities or limited English proficiency, who cost more to educate. This makes apples-to-apples funding comparisons genuinely difficult.

The Accountability Question

The fundamental promise of charter schools is a trade: autonomy in exchange for accountability. Free charter schools from bureaucratic rules, the theory goes, and hold them responsible for results instead of compliance. If they succeed, they thrive. If they fail, they close.

In practice, this accountability has proven messier than the theory suggests.

The United States Department of Education has found that charter schools may not actually be held to higher standards than traditional public schools. When charters perform poorly, they're often allowed to remain open—perhaps with new leadership, perhaps with restructuring, or perhaps with no change at all.

Charter school advocates push back on this characterization. They point out that charters do close at significant rates. As of March 2009, about 12.5 percent of the more than 5,000 charter schools ever founded in the United States had shut down, usually due to academic, financial, or managerial problems. That closure rate is far higher than for traditional public schools, which rarely close even when they perform terribly year after year.

A 2013 study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (known as CREDO) found something interesting about these closures. The overall improvement in charter school quality over time wasn't primarily because existing charter schools got better. It was because bad charter schools closed, raising the sector's average. Natural selection, in other words, was working—but on the school level, not within individual schools.

This raises a philosophical question: Is closing a failing school really accountability? For the students who attended that school before it shut down, the experience was still a failure. Their education didn't get better; it ended. They had to start over somewhere else. Whether that constitutes "accountability" depends on your perspective.

The Results Debate

Do charter schools actually work? This seemingly simple question has consumed billions of research dollars and generated thousands of studies without producing a clear consensus.

Part of the problem is methodological. Students who attend charter schools are different from students who don't—their families chose to apply, which already distinguishes them. Maybe charter school students would have done just as well in traditional schools. Maybe they would have done worse. Without randomly assigning students to different school types (which is usually impractical and sometimes unethical), researchers can't definitively untangle selection effects from school effects.

What we can say is that the results are wildly variable. Some charter schools produce spectacular outcomes, particularly networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which has shown consistent gains for low-income students. Other charter schools perform no better than district schools—and some perform dramatically worse.

Online charter schools have proven particularly problematic. A 2015 national study—the first major examination of online charters—found "significantly weaker academic performance" in both mathematics and reading compared to conventional schools. The math gap was equivalent to students missing an entire academic year. The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, Stanford University, and Mathematica Policy Research, identified student focus as the core challenge: keeping kids engaged through a screen proved far harder than in-person instruction.

The Department of Education itself has acknowledged the limitations of comparative studies. As one report noted, the research design "does not allow us to determine whether or not traditional public schools are more effective than charter schools." We're often comparing apples to oranges—different student populations, different resources, different community contexts.

The Innovation Promise

Albert Shanker's original vision for charter schools emphasized experimentation. These would be laboratories where teachers could try new approaches, with successful innovations spreading to the broader system.

Has that happened?

Charter schools have certainly experimented with different models. About 30 percent focus specifically on college preparation. Eight percent emphasize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—often called STEM education. Another 16 percent build their curricula around Core Knowledge, a specific educational philosophy that emphasizes building shared cultural literacy. Some charter schools specialize in arts, others in vocational training.

Blended learning—mixing online and in-person instruction—emerged largely in the charter sector before spreading more broadly. So did extended school days and years: many charter schools offer significantly more instructional time than traditional schools, based on research suggesting that time-on-task matters for learning.

But here's the tension: charter schools are still judged by standardized test scores, just like traditional public schools. They still face state mandates and accountability requirements. These external pressures create powerful incentives to teach to the test, to focus on measurable outcomes, to look more like conventional schools over time.

Many charter schools that opened with ambitious visions of innovation have gradually normalized. The radical experiment becomes a slightly different version of what already exists. The truly innovative school struggles to show the short-term test score gains that keep its charter intact, while the charter school that looks most like a traditional school—just with more hours and stricter discipline—survives and expands.

The Marketing Problem

Unlike traditional public schools, where students generally attend whichever school is closest to their home, charter schools must attract families. This creates a marketing imperative that traditional schools don't face.

The overwhelming majority of charter schools advertise to recruit students. They have to—their funding depends on enrollment, and unlike district schools, they have no guaranteed student population.

This advertising can get expensive, and the relationship between marketing spend and educational quality is often inverse. In Utah, Mountain Heights Academy spent $819,000 on marketing between 2015 and 2019. The state gave the school an "F" grade in 2016.

Pennsylvania's cyber charter schools—online academies serving students statewide—illustrate the dynamic particularly starkly. Twelve of the state's fourteen cyber charters spent more than $21 million in taxpayer dollars on advertising over just three years. That's money not going to instruction, not going to teachers, not going to technology—going instead to billboards and television commercials and social media campaigns.

Critics argue this represents a fundamental distortion of educational priorities. Schools should compete on quality, not on marketing savvy. But in a choice-based system where parents have limited information about actual school quality, the school that advertises most effectively may attract more students than the school that teaches most effectively.

The Church-State Question

For three decades, one principle remained clear: charter schools, as public schools, could not be religious. The First Amendment's establishment clause, which prohibits government endorsement of religion, applied to charter schools just as it did to traditional public schools.

Then came Oklahoma.

In June 2023, Oklahoma approved the first explicitly religious charter school in American history: St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, sponsored by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. The school planned to integrate Catholic teaching throughout its curriculum, something no previous charter school had attempted.

The approval immediately sparked legal challenges. In April 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court took up the case to examine whether a religious charter school violates constitutional prohibitions on government establishment of religion.

The case raises fundamental questions about the charter school concept. If charter schools are truly public schools, how can they teach religious doctrine? But if charter schools are so autonomous that they can operate with religious curricula, are they really public schools at all—or are they just publicly funded private schools?

However the courts ultimately rule, the Oklahoma case marks a significant moment in charter school history: the first serious attempt to breach the wall between church and state in publicly funded education.

The Cultural Dimension

Charter schools don't just differ in their governance structure—many deliberately create distinct school cultures, particularly to serve minority students in urban districts.

This cultural dimension addresses something test scores don't capture: the social experience of being a student. Researchers have documented how phenomena like stereotype threat (the anxiety of confirming negative stereotypes about one's group), accusations of "acting white" (social pressure against academic achievement in some Black communities), and what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls the "code of the street" (survival-oriented values that can conflict with school expectations) affect student performance.

Some charter schools explicitly design their cultures to counteract these forces. They create environments where academic achievement is celebrated, where high expectations are communicated constantly, where students from disadvantaged backgrounds see people who look like them succeeding. Whether this works better within the charter model than within traditional schools remains debated, but the intentionality is notable.

Teachers seem to value autonomy. By a margin of 68 percent to 21 percent, teachers say schools would be better for students if principals and teachers had more control and flexibility about work rules and school duties. Charter schools, at least theoretically, offer that control.

A Movement Divided

The charter school landscape in 2024 looks nothing like what Albert Shanker imagined in 1988. He envisioned teacher-led experiments within the public system. What emerged was something far more varied: corporate-managed school networks, online academies, college-prep boot camps, arts-focused schools, and now, potentially, religious institutions.

About two-thirds of charter schools remain freestanding and independent—single schools operated by local boards. But the remaining third are managed by charter management organizations (CMOs) or education management organizations (EMOs). These entities, which can be either for-profit or nonprofit, operate chains of charter schools, bringing economies of scale and standardized approaches. In most states, for-profit companies can manage charter schools but cannot hold the charters themselves. Arizona alone allows for-profit entities to hold charters directly.

The for-profit dimension particularly troubles critics. Education, they argue, should not be a business opportunity. When stockholders demand returns, corners get cut—and those corners often involve the students who need the most support.

Supporters counter that the profit motive drives efficiency and innovation. Traditional public schools, insulated from competition, have little incentive to improve. Introduce market forces, and schools must perform or perish.

Both arguments contain truth. Both also contain blind spots.

Where We Are Now

Three decades after City Academy opened in St. Paul, the charter school experiment has produced neither the transformation supporters hoped for nor the catastrophe opponents predicted. It has produced, instead, a complicated addition to the American educational landscape—one that serves millions of students, operates under wildly different rules in different states, and continues to evolve.

The evidence suggests that charter schools are neither systematically better nor systematically worse than traditional public schools. Some succeed brilliantly. Some fail miserably. Most fall somewhere in between, much like traditional schools themselves.

What charter schools have unquestionably done is create options. For families frustrated with their local schools, charters offer alternatives that didn't exist a generation ago. Whether those alternatives represent genuine improvement or merely the illusion of choice in a system that still struggles with deep structural inequities—that question remains open.

The charter school debate is, at its core, a debate about how we think about public education itself. Is a school "public" because it's funded with public money? Because it's accountable to elected officials? Because it serves all students regardless of background? Because it's integrated into a democratically governed system? Different answers to these questions lead to radically different conclusions about what charter schools represent—and what role they should play in American education's future.

What seems certain is that charter schools aren't going away. They've become too established, serving too many families, backed by too much political and financial support. The question now isn't whether charter schools will exist, but what they'll become—and whether the original promise of autonomy for accountability will ever be fully realized, or whether it was always more aspiration than achievable reality.