The Minnesota Foundation’s fourteenth annual Itasca Seminar brought together tinkers, doers, and policymakers to explore how to improve public education. Among this October 1988 event’s national speakers were Al Shanker and New York’s Sy Fliegel, the architect of East Harlem’s choice-based innovations. More local attendees included the Citizens League’s Ted Kolderie and the vice chair of the state senate education committee, Senator Ember Reichgott. At that gathering Shanker shared his idea of “charter schools.”
Reichgott had some experience with choice-based school reform. She was the sponsor of the state’s open enrollment law. From this, she became interested in the charter schools idea.
That November, the Citizens League released a report, Chartered Schools = Choices for Educators + Quality for All Students, that was primarily authored by Kolderie as a call to action for the Minnesota Legislature to enact a charter schools law. In it, Kolderie argues for “a policy environment that permits, first teachers and parents to participate in the management of their schools, and second, the creation of new high quality schools in the parts of the community most likely to serve disadvantaged populations.” This report became the blueprint for Reichgott’s charter schools bill
Reichgott, a member of the state senate’s majority the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (“DFL”), first introduced this bill during the 1989 session. It failed. The bill failed again in 1990. In 1991, over opposition from the state teachers’ unions, Reichgott succeeded in passing a compromise. This bill allowed school districts to authorize teachers to create an “outcomes-based” school via a three-year contract with the district. Part of the compromise was a cap of no more two of these schools per district, and no more than eight anywhere in the state.
Reichgott accepted the compromise, but thought that she had failed.
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