The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing or promoting a religion. In this sense, it provides for a separation between church and state. How separate they are, though, continues to evolve. A trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court cases—Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Carson v. Makin […]
USA
2020: Resilience, Protest, and Policy Renewal
After more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Governors in 43 states issued directives ordering residents to stay at home and nonessential business to close. These orders changed how public education could be delivered. Seventy-seven percent of all public schools […]
2016: A Changing Political Climate
Just as the charter schools community was becoming more politically sophisticated, so were supporters of the status quo. This was perhaps most evident in Massachusetts. When that state’s law was first enacted in 1993, the number of charters was capped at 25. The cap was raised three times; however, charter advocates did not believe that […]
2010: Chartering in the National Spotlight
The documentary Waiting for “Superman” portrays the decline of American public education, not through statistics, but through the stories of five children—Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily, and Francisco—who struggled to navigate an unequal system. Though the film does not present an easy solution, it does offer hope for families. That hope is enrollment in a successful […]
2006: Charter Enrollment Tops One Million Students
Just fifteen years after the nation’s first charter schools law was passed, total charter enrollment surpassed 1 million students—or about 2% of national public school enrollment—in 3,600 schools across 40 states. This milestone demonstrated both the demand from families and the growing capacity of the charter community to replicate school models that achieved success for […]
2005: One Voice, Many Advocates: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Though the Charter School Friends National Network (“CSFNN”) was an active network of state-level charter support organizations and the charter movement’s leaders, it was not an advocacy organization. This left the charter schools movement without a national voice to advance and defend the charter schools idea. What type of organization would serve as this national […]
1998: Scaling What Works Through CMOs
Minnesota’s 1991 charter schools law set a precedent for how schools should be organized and operated. It envisioned teachers, principals, and community leaders coming together to apply for a charter to open one school at a time, with each charter governed by an individual board of directors. Though straightforward, this model provided limited opportunities to […]
1997: A Presidential Call for Growth
When Arkansas’ Democratic Governor Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, part of his education agenda was a little-known policy: charter schools. That election was a three-way contest between incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush, independent Ross Perot, and Clinton. Clinton’s support of the emerging charter schools policy supported differentiated his education agenda from Bush’s, […]
1995: Advocates and Implementers Join the Movement
The nascent charter schools movement was growing not only in laws passed and schools opened, but also by developing the institutions necessary to sustain it. The Center for Education Reform, a Washington D.C.-based think tank and advocacy organization, was founded by Jeannie Allen in October 1993. By 1995, two state-based organizations were launched: the California […]
1992: The Business Sector Enters Public Education
At the same time charter schools was emerging as a policy, another idea to improve education was emerging: privatization. In the early 1990s, “privatization” was a global trend to try to lower the cost of government and increase the quality of services with a goal of bringing the best of the private sector—efficient delivery […]
