Introduction

American liberal democracy is being threatened in a way not seen in generations, in large measure, because white identity politics on the right, and racial identity politics on the left, make fights over policy seem existential. When policy battles appear to be part of a larger war rooted in a clash of ethnic and racial identity groups, both sides are more willing to disregard long-standing liberal democratic norms.

On the right, Donald Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transition of power after he lost the 2020 presidential election, and he talks of suspending the Constitution if he becomes president again. Left-wing activists, meanwhile, shout down speakers and create a chilling environment where people feel they can’t freely speak their minds.

Pundits often assume that working Americans, who must prioritize kitchen-table economic concerns, don’t care about these systemic issues. In fact, however, working Americans are especially affected by the breakdown in national unity and the decline in patriotism that serve as root causes of the erosion in liberal democratic beliefs.

To begin with, the decline in American patriotism directly offends the value systems of many non-college-educated voters. Polls reveal a patriotism gap between progressive elites and working Americans of all races. While 69% of working-class voters said that America is the greatest country in the world, among progressive activists, only 28% agreed.

It is good news, therefore, that Vice President Kamala Harris has, in her campaign for president, embraced a full-throated patriotism that puts her on the side of working Americans. At the Democratic convention, Harris advanced a powerful visions of liberal patriotism that identified the United States as “the greatest democracy in the history of the world.” She said America is an inspiration to people across the planet because in this country, “anything is possible. Nothing is out of reach.” She called for national unity, declaring, “We have so much more in common that what separates us.” She didn’t mention white privilege, and instead focused on “the privilege and pride of being an American.” She concluded that America has “the most extraordinary story ever told.”

Some highly educated elites may believe their less elevated view of America is related to a greater degree of sophistication and knowledge of America’s sins. But in fact, racial minorities, who presumably have an acute cognizance of racial injustice, are very likely to express patriotic feelings. Some 62% of Asian Americans, 70% of Black Americans, and 76% of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34% of progressive activists.

To the extent that many non-college-educated voters have immigrant roots, their patriotism may actually be based on a higher level of sophistication about the realities of the world outside the United States than educated leftists who are quick to find fault with the United States. Polls find that immigrants have more patriotic beliefs than those who were born in the United States. This patriotism may well stem from their first-hand experience with the repressive systems of government that are found in many other countries.

In addition, the decline in American patriotism and social cohesion is bad for non-college-educated Americans because it inhibits their efforts to fight for a fairer society. Emphasizing racial division typically hurts working Americans. In fact, the oldest story of American politics is one in which conservatives use racial division to keep working Americans from cooperating across racial lines to smooth out the roughest edges of democratic capitalism. By contrast, the great advances for working-class people have come when Democratic politicians, such as Franklin Roosevelt, appealed to patriotism and national unity. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, New Deal Democrats “extolled ‘the American way of life’ (a term popularized in the 1930s); they used patriotic symbols like the ‘Blue Eagle’ to promote their programs. In 1940, Roosevelt’s official campaign song was Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America.’” Only when Americans feel a sense of common mission is their sense of a shared responsibility for the fate of their fellow Americans activated.

Finally, non-college-educated voters are particularly hurt by a decline in American identity and patriotism because these realities are being used by right-wing advocates to undermine American public education — which has historically provided a critical path for social mobility for working Americans. In recent years, race-essentialist left-wing ideologies, such as critical race theory, which sees racism as endemic and permanent, and anti-racism, which posits that the only remedy to discrimination is more discrimination, have had an enormous impact on teacher schools of education, which then translates into what young public schoolchildren are taught. These approaches have understandably promoted a backlash. The appropriate response is to institute broadly-
supported teachings that frankly acknowledge America’s history of slavery and segregation, but also teach that because of our liberal, democratic structures, redemption has been possible.

Right-wing advocates, however, have used the cultural disconnect between what most Americans believe and left-wing indoctrination by some teachers as an excuse to discard the entire enterprise of public education. In the past few years, red states have adopted an unprecedented number of school privatization initiatives. Evidence shows that recent success with privatization efforts is driven by the perception that schools are feeding left-wing ideology to students.

Privatization, in turn, hurts working families in two ways. First, research shows that private school voucher programs can cause a decline in academic achievement compared with public district and public charter schools, robbing working-class students of the skills they need to advance. Second, a system of private school education, in which 80% of students will go off to be educated in particularly religious traditions, with no mandate to teach common American values, removes one of the few remaining vehicles in America for forging social cohesion and national unity.

What is to be done? In an in-depth Progressive Policy report, I outline nine ideas for local, state, and federal policymakers can adopt to help public schools — and colleges — return to the central goal of public education.11 The primary mission, encapsulated by the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, is to “teach children what it means to be an American,” by which he meant “a common set of values and beliefs” expressed most vividly in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Read the full report.

Find the Preface by Will Marshall in the full report below. 

INTRODUCTION

Charter schools are public schools, free and open to all. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity.

Much has transpired since the first charter school law was approved in 1991 by the state of Minnesota. Today, 46 charter laws have created about 8,000 schools and campuses. Cumulatively, they enroll 3.7 million students (around 7.5% of all public school students), according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ (NAPCS) Data Dashboard. NAPCS also reports that charter schools employ around 251,000 teachers. Around six out of 10 (58.1%) schools are in urban areas, with the others in suburbs (24.9%), rural areas (11.4%), or smaller towns (5.6%).

While there are many nuances, the primary difference between public charter schools and traditional district schools is their governance model. In addition to oversight from a charter school authorizer accredited by state statute, public charter schools are governed by their own nonprofit boards. Board members are normally selected for their strong community connections and their commitment to advancing the particular mission of their school or network of schools.

In contrast to the traditional school district one-size-fits-all model, public charter schools are free to innovate to meet the needs of the children and parents who choose to attend them, whether it’s a unique curriculum, a unique school calendar, an emphasis on project-based learning, access to specific career pathways, or something else.

Decision-making in public charter schools, unlike traditional schools with central district offices, happens far closer to the students and the families who enroll them — in the vast majority of cases, by the teachers and school leaders who interact with students on a daily basis.

In states with strong charter school laws, charter schools are held to higher accountability standards than traditional district schools, which are rarely closed for poor performance.

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law — in force from 2002-2015 — was designed to scale up the federal role in holding schools accountable for student outcomes. NCLB is now frequently criticized for being too punitive, but even under its aggressive restructuring requirements, only 3% of very low-performing traditional public schools were taken over by state departments of education, and only 1% were reopened as charter schools.

Charter schools, on the other hand, commit to obtaining specific educational objectives in return for a charter to operate a school. A school’s charter is reviewed periodically by the entity that granted it and can be revoked if the conditions of the charter are not met. In New Orleans, for example, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University (ERA) found that the replacement of underperforming schools with higher performing schools was the single most important factor in the system’s rapid improvement. ERA’s 2016 report, “The Effects of Performance-Based School Closure and Charter Takeover on Student Performance,” stated, “If policymakers can identify and intervene in the lowest performing schools (however they choose to define it), and ensure that students will end up in better schools afterward, then the evidence here suggests that school closure and takeover can have large positive effects and be a meaningful contributor to school improvement efforts.”

A new University of Colorado study released in September 2024 on the Denver reform “era” (20082019) found that most students who left closed Denver schools and attended new ones saw their test scores go up, with greater gains for English learners and students with disabilities. Student achievement also went up districtwide, which study authors attribute to years-long efforts to give school leaders more autonomy, hold them accountable for results, and make it easier for families to choose among a range of schools.

Decades of empirical research supports what ERA found in 2016 and what University of Colorado learned last month: When thoughtfully implemented with strong accountability measures, innovative, autonomous public schools move the needle for thousands of students, especially children from low-income households in urban areas.

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has undertaken many local studies and, in 2023, released its third major national report in a series spread out over the past 30 years. In that massive study, CREDO researchers assessed the performance of students at 6,200 charter schools in 29 states between 2014 and 2019, confirming that charter-school students, on average, outperformed their peers in demographically-matched traditional public schools.

There have also been studies that find a “spillover effect.” In other words, when a system has a mix of different types of public schools, including public charter schools, student learning increases for everyone. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank, in 2024 found that “…average test scores for all publicly enrolled students in a geographic region rise when the number of charter schools increases.”

Of course, test scores are not the sole means of measuring school quality. Another indicator is parent demand. Most parents, if given a choice and — importantly — are provided the information needed to make informed choices, will naturally do what is best for their children’s education. Every school year, hundreds of thousands of families nationwide demand increased access to high-quality public school choices like charter schools, as evidenced by data from waiting lists for oversubscribed charter school seats. For example: In North Carolina alone, more than 85,000 students were on waiting lists for the 2024-25 school year.

Minority parents nationally are the most enthusiastic charter school users. According to the NAPCS’ Data Dashboard,16 charter schools have consistently enrolled more students of color and students from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven out of 10 (70.7%) charter students are students of color compared to around half (53.8%) of district students, with six out of 10 charter students receiving free and reduced lunch compared to half (50.3%) in district schools. An opinion poll released in May 2024 by Democrats for Education Reform found that 77% of parents, including 80% of Black and 71% of Hispanic parents, had a favorable view of public charter schools.

The student performance data in this new report adds an important dimension to the growing body of research highlighting the superior performance benefits of growing well-designed portfolio systems that include a mix of both traditional and charter public schools.

Importantly, this analysis looks at correlation, not causation. There are many theories about the cause of this spillover effect. Our findings add credence to the long-stated supposition that public charter schools create a competitive dynamic that compels traditional district schools to upgrade their teaching and learning to maintain enrollment, so that conditions improve for all children. Another common explanation, as charter schools uncover better ways of motivating learning, other schools in that same geography then adopt those innovative practices. Or, an increase in school options to make it more common for parents to find a school that is the optimum fit for unlocking their child’s potential.

While more research on these theories is required, the existing evidence of positive spillover effects bolsters the case for making public school choice a key element of a national policy. We call on the nation’s elected leaders to embrace policies aimed at expanding high-quality autonomous schools so that more cities can strive for the gains we describe here.

The report concludes with recommendations for further research into why increased public school choice lifts school quality and how cities that currently have even a small share of public charter school students can strengthen their gapnarrowing capacity.

KEY FINDINGS

The major findings of this report are as follows:

1. Over the last decade, cities that have aggressively expanded high-quality public school choices available to students have seen a true rising tide: Low-income students across these cities — whether they attend a public charter or district-operated school — have started to catch up to statewide student performance levels.

2. This is particularly true when at least one-third of a city’s students are enrolled in a public charter school or charter-like school: Outcomes improve citywide over time.

3. In the 10 U.S. cities serving majority low-income students with at least one-third enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide have made meaningful progress toward achieving on par with students statewide.

READ THE FULL REPORT.