Charter schools are now an enduring part of American K-12 public education. It’s time for policymakers and K-12 stakeholders to stop the foolish argument about whether these schools should exist. They’re here and aren’t going away. The real question is what the next phase of chartering should aim to achieve.
There are several answers to that question. I think one at the top of the list is figuring out how to use the tools that chartering developed, like performance contracting, authorizing, school-level autonomy, mission-driven governance and better measures of student success, to modernize all of U.S. public education for a changing economy and society.
No doubt, some of this has already occurred, as the charter idea has increasingly shaped mainstream expectations about how public schools should operate. — for example, innovation zones and portfolio school management. The challenge now is to ensure that chartering becomes a quality-and-opportunity strategy for all of K-12 public education.
