Many advocates of school choice have slammed Senator Elizabeth Warren for her new education plan, released last week. We have joined them, on Twitter. But few have pointed out the inconsistency between Warren’s embrace of competition in the rest of her plan—and in many of her economic plans—and her embrace of district monopolies in public education. We thought it would be worth adding this note to what has been a full-throated and well-deserved chorus of derision for her abject capitulation to the teachers unions.

A Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan

On July 16, 2018, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren reassured the New England Council, “I am capitalist to my bones.” Capitalism.org defines capitalism as “an economic process where men do not compete to forcibly put down others, but to raise themselves up by creating values which are potentially unlimited.” The education plan Warren released last week, “A Great Public School Education for Every Student,” dangles huge federal grants to encourage values-driven competition. Unfortunately, she does not extend this rational to public charter schools, where such leverage could be enormously constructive for low income families—the constituency she repeatedly claims she is running to represent. 

In positioning herself as the most aggressive anti-charter Democrat, Warren has declared outright war with her pledge to eliminate the federal Charter School Program (CSP), created by President Clinton, then greatly expanded by President Obama. Because most public education policy is determined at the state and local level, completely eliminating this federal program is the most drastic anti-charter statement she could make. Warren claims it necessary to stop the expansion of charters because states do not ensure that they “are subject to the same transparency requirements and safeguards as traditional public schools,” amongst other complaints. She could’ve avoided harming poor families of color—the greatest beneficiaries of charter schools—and alienating that key constituency if she had only applied the competitive methods she suggested throughout other parts of her plan. 

For example, Warren proposes awarding $100 billion in competitive “Excellence Grants” to individual schools to restore arts programs and school-based mentoring. This would create competition between schools and reward those making the best efforts. She promises to award states generous additional Title I funding−a windfall few states could resist− if they implement fairer allocation formulas at the local level and more progressive funding policies at the state level. Again, competition designed to “raise up.” She also seeks to address school segregation with a $10 billion competitive grant for states that eliminate restrictive zoning laws that lead to residential segregation—which, of course, drives school segregation.  

So, why not—unless pandering to the anti-charter teachers unions—take the same approach with the federal CSP? Why not use it to strengthen charter schooling, which fills a desperate need for low income and minority families who otherwise do not have access to quality public education? Of the nearly 3.2 million public charter school students, 68 percent are minorities, 26 percent African Americans. More than a million children are on waiting lists nationwide. In many cases, low-income parents say charter schools are their only hope to break their children out of intergenerational poverty and the high crime, high unemployment, blighted neighborhoods in which they would otherwise be trapped. When they enroll in charters, those children learn far more than if they had stayed in district schools.

Of course, not all charter schools are great schools, and those that are not can be and should be closed. On average 3.7 percent of all charter schools have been shut down each year for the past 10 years, compared to just 0.2 percent of all traditional Title I (low-income) district schools during the entire nine years that the No Child Left Behind legislation was in effect. 

The charter school model is now too woven into the fabric of the American public education system, and the demand is for seats in them is too great, for them to be eliminated, regardless of any political promises Elizabeth Warren makes. More important, as the Washington Post editorialized, “There’s nothing progressive about strangling charter schools.” So why not use competition to find solutions to the ills of which Warren complains? Create conditions for awarding federal charter school dollars. Require transparency. Tighten up the charter authorization process, so if authorizes are not closing failing schools, no school they might authorize is eligible for federal grants. Don’t handing the approval process solely to school boards, as Warren suggests; districts are among the worst authorizers, because they are too busy operating schools to oversee charters carefully. (They are also too beholden to teachers unions, who help elect their boards, to make objective decisions about opening or closing charters.) 

According to the American Center for Progress, in a rare show of bipartisan cooperation, Congress has approved increased funds for the CSP as requested by each presidential administration since 1994, topping out at $440 million in fiscal year 2019. Senator Warren, use those capitalist bones to improve the system, not kill it while it is laying golden eggs of opportunity where none existed before. You seem to recognize the value of competition. Well-regulated charter schools create competition by their very existence. 

Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Read the full piece here on Medium.

By David Osborne and Emily Langhorne

Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Bernie Sanders calls for a halt to all federal funding for charter schools. Elizabeth Warren joins him in condemning for-profit charters.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served under a president enthusiastic about charters, told the American Federation of Teachers at a forum, “The bottom line is it [chartering] siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”

Even candidates who have been charter supporters in the past, such as Michael Bennet, Beto O’Rourke, and Julian Castro, have had nothing positive to say about charters. All seem afraid to draw the ire of the teachers’ unions, which contributed $64 million to candidates, party organizations, and outside spending groups during the 2016 election, according to the campaign finance tracking organization, OpenSecrets.

So it may come as a surprise to readers that chartering originated as a Democratic initiative. Democrats spearheaded charter legislation in most of the early charter states, and Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enthusiastically supported charters, pushing through federal legislation to provide funding.

The innovative Democrats who pioneered chartering were looking for a better organizational model for public education — a system designed for the Information Age rather than the Industrial Era. In their new approach, an “authorizer” — usually the state or local school board — grants performance contracts to groups of individuals or nonprofit organizations that apply to open new public schools. Exempt from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools, they are encouraged to innovate, to create new learning models that will appeal to children bored or otherwise dissatisfied with traditional schools. If a school succeeds, its contract is renewed; if it fails, it is closed. Families can choose between a variety of schools. Districts lose their monopolies on taxpayer-funded education, and their schools can no longer fail students for generations; the competition either takes away their students or forces them to improve.

The new schools are called “charter schools” because their performance contract is a charter. Over the past two decades, cities that have embraced chartering, such as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver, Newark, and Indianapolis, have experienced profound student growth and school improvement. The charter formula — school-level autonomy, accountability for results, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools — is far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach that developed more than a century ago.

Teachers at charter schools tend not to unionize, however, so as the charter sector grows, union membership shrinks. By 2000, union leaders and their allies had gone to war against charters. They claim that charters are a product of “corporate reformers,” a right-wing effort to “privatize” our public schools. These accusations are nonsense. More accurately, they are lies born of self-interest, designed to protect the jobs of mostly white, middle-class teachers and union officials at the expense of mostly poor, minority kids.

The Origins of the Charter Concept

In 1988, University of Massachusetts Education Professor Ray Budde, a former principal, published Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts. He proposed that districts allow teams of teachers to “charter” a program within a school for three to five years.

The following July, Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, expanded on the concept in his New York Timescolumn, suggesting that teams of teachers charter whole schools, not just programs. Shanker believed that the U.S. needed school systems that provided educators with autonomy and “genuine accountability” for results. He urged school systems to charter schools with a variety of teaching approaches, so that “parents could choose which charter school to send their children to, thus fostering competition.”

In 1995, just two years before his death, Shanker told Republican Congressman Steve Gunderson, who was writing an education reform bill for Washington, D.C., that “every school should be a charter school.”

Democrats Lead the Way in Early Charter States

In 1988, after reading Shanker’s column, members of a nonpartisan civic organization in Minnesota called the Citizens League began working on a report that outlined the framework for charter legislation, led by former League Executive Director Ted Kolderie. In October, when Shanker spoke at the Minnesota Foundation’s annual Itasca Seminar, Democratic State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge and Democratic State Representative Ken Nelson were in the audience. Afterward, Reichgott Junge began drafting charter legislation, with Kolderie’s help, and in 1989 she and Nelson introduced the bill. It passed the Senate but failed in the House, two years running. Finally, in 1991, with help in the House from Democratic Rep. Becky Kelso, a compromise version finally passed. And in 1992, a group of veteran public school teachers opened City Academy in St. Paul, the nation’s first charter school.

In California, conservatives were preparing a voucher ballot initiative that would allow Californians to use tax dollars to send their children to any school they chose, public or private. Democratic State Senator Gary K. Hart, who understood that the electorate was deeply frustrated with public schools, decided the Democrats needed legislation to counter the voucher movement. Hart felt that vouchers relied too much on a free-market approach, threatening the equal opportunity that should be built into public education. A former teacher, he’d already sponsored a bill that gave 200 public schools more autonomy in exchange for more accountability. Chartering was the next logical step: a third way between vouchers and traditional systems.

Democratic Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin introduced a charter bill at the same time, but it required sign-off by the district’s collective bargaining unit for charter approval. Teachers unions pressured Hart to amend his bill to do the same, but he refused. He also stood his ground against demands related to parent involvement and teaching credentials. Hart believed such decisions should be left up to school founders and leaders. He wanted a simple bill that would create a system with limited bureaucracy, in which schools were judged on the basis of student outcomes, not compliance with rules.

Both bills passed the legislature, but Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Eastin’s and signed Hart’s into law. The legislation took effect on January 1, 1993, and that fall, 44 charters opened.

The third bill passed in Colorado, where Democratic Governor Roy Romer was instrumental in pushing it through the legislature. In 1992, Republican Senator Bill Owens and Republican State Representative John James Irwin introduced a bill to create a new, independent school district to authorize and oversee “self-governing” schools. That bill died in the Senate Education Committee, whose chairman, Republican Senator Al Meiklejohn, stood firmly against choice and charters.

Irwin died before the 1993 session, so Owens and his allies reached out to Democratic State Representative Peggy Kerns, to sponsor a new charter bill in the House. The unions and other establishment groups opposed the bill, and Meiklejohn neutered it with amendments in the Senate.

In the House, Kerns and fellow Democrat Peggy Reeves re-amended the Senate bill so that it more closely resembled the original. Gov. Romer met with the Democratic caucus and rallied support on the House floor. The bill narrowly passed, the two bills were reconciled in conference committee, and both houses passed the new version. On June 3, 1993, Romer signed the Charter Schools Act into law.

In Massachusetts, Democratic State Senator Thomas Birmingham and Democratic State Representative Mark Roosevelt, then co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education, spent several years developing the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, which sought to reform the state’s education financing system while increasing academic expectations and school accountability.

In the fall of 1991, a mutual friend introduced Roosevelt to David Osborne, who had recently finished a new book, Reinventing Government. Roosevelt described for Osborne the higher academic standards he planned to include in the legislation. Osborne said, “That’s great; standards are important. But what are you doing to do when districts don’t meet them?”

Roosevelt explained that the state would take over underperforming districts. Osborne pointed out that takeovers would stir up intense resistance, severely limiting their use. You need another strategy, Osborne told him. You need choice and competition.

Shortly afterwards, he introduced Roosevelt and his staff to the concept of charter schools. A few weeks later, when Ted Kolderie told Osborne he was planning a trip to Boston, Osborne put him in touch with Roosevelt, and Kolderie helped Roosevelt and his staff write charter language for the bill. When the teachers unions came out against the charter proposal, Roosevelt and Birmingham introduced a cap on the number of charter schools, as a compromise.

In 2016, Roosevelt and Birmingham urged Massachusetts to raise its cap: “We included charter public schools in the 1993 law to provide poor parents with the type of educational choice that wealthy parents have always enjoyed…. We now have enough data to conclude that charter schools have exceeded expectations. In our cities, public charter schools consistently close achievement gaps. No wonder more than 32,000 children are on charter school waiting lists. Imagine being one of the parents crushed with disappointment when your child is not selected.”

By the end of 1994, seven more states had enacted charter laws. Democrats spearheaded the legislation in Georgia, Hawaii, and New Mexico, Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin, and there was overwhelming bipartisan support in Michigan and Kansas. Of the next 23 states, which passed bills in the rest of the ’90s, all but three had strong bipartisan support.

Even today, most education reformers are Democrats. A study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) showed that 87 percent or more of the political contributions made by staff at education reform organizations over the past decade went to Democratic candidates. “The leading participants in the school-reform ‘wars’ are mostly engaged in an intramural brawl,” the authors concluded, “one between union-allied Democrats and a strand of progressive Democrats more intent on changing school systems.”

As reform-minded Democrats attempt to put children first, union-backed Democrats block them. They betray America’s children — particularly those whose parents lack the money to move into a district with strong public schools or send their children to private schools.

Voters should ask this year’s presidential candidates: Which type of Democrat are you?

David Osborne, author of Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System, leads the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute. Emily Langhorne, a former associate director of that project, is now at DAI, which works on economic and social development in low-income countries around the world.