The Atlantic this week offered one of what will likely be many pieces looking back at the first quarter-century of American charter schools.
One of the more noteworthy passages deals with the history of the idea. Like so many others, it emphasizes the role of a venerable teachers union leader.
Albert Shanker, the late head of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke in 1988 to a gaggle of Minnesota policy thinkers, pitching what he defined as an easy way of liberating inventive teachers from the burdens of staid classroom routines, bland textbooks, and cumbersome union contracts. Shanker trumpeted the idea of granting charters to creative teachers, a concept that had already been floated in policy circles.
Ember Reichgott, then a 34 year-old state senator, listened keenly to Shanker’s pitch. “As a good Democrat I wanted to create new opportunities—innovative possibilities,” Reichgott, who wrote the country’s first charter-school law, later told me. But she aimed her efforts way beyond the union chief’s proposal, instead striving to charter entire schools in which principals controlled their budgets and hired and fired their own teachers.
While Shanker clearly had a role in spreading the notion of charter schools, he was largely popularizing the ideas of an education professor named Ray Budde.
Others, including Ted Kolderie in Minnesota (who was instrumental to the birth of charter schools in his state) and Jack Coons in California, were kicking around ideas for publicly funded schools of choice that would be open to all students in the 1970s and ’80s.
As early as 1968, Kenneth Clark, known for his work on Brown v. Board of Education, proposed organizing public schools operated outside the traditional system, which he hoped would improve opportunities for minority students.
Much ink is likely to be spilled in efforts to render a verdict on charter schools, writ large, as they approach their 25th birthday (though this effort by two longtime charter observers will be hard to top). Critics would rather portray the current state of chartering as a union leader’s vision betrayed or a “market-driven” experiment gone awry, both of which obscure the true history of the idea, which extends well before the late ’80s.
The true intellectual origins of charter schools matter, because they show how the idea has roots in the cause of social justice.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of Jack Coons. We regret the error.
