Charter Schools: Opportunities to Extend Educational Models, a Positive View

Public education has reached a crisis that frustrates and embitters many educators and parents (Nathan, 1996). "A more effective system will recognize and reward talent, expanding opportunities for committed educators and parents who want to create new kinds of public schools" (Nathan, 1996, p. 83). Since there are no easy solutions for improving schools and student learning, a need exists for many vehicles focused on education improvement. Former U. S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley expressed the need for reform: "We are committed to focusing on turning around troubled schools and undertaking comprehensive education reform that creates and sustains safe and high-performing schools" (Riley, 1997, p. 8). Today a broad circle of academicians, classroom teachers, administrators, parents, teacher educators, researchers, writers, and developmental specialists are concerned with defining, developing, modeling, and demonstrating the best in educational practice. Historically divers theories, practices, formats, and applications have experienced the highs and lows of academic vogue. Among them demonstration schools have ridden the waves of popularity and near extinction. While riddled with difficulties beyond the scope of this paper, demonstration sites do provide valuable opportunities to model and extend excellent educational practice. Charter Schools as Opportunities Born of a climate ripe for educational reform, the charter school movement brought new options, within very practical contexts, for the application of educational theory. Designed to allow freedom from the constraints imposed by local school districts, charter schools have greater flexibility to select specific models of operation. This flexibility affords the opportunity to create academic environments that can be relatively theoretically pure. It also affords the opportunity to take advantage of the financial benefits of publicly funded education. Whereas, previously private schools had the privilege to design education programs specific to their needs they also bore the burden of total fiscal responsibility. Thus, charter schools can offer the opportunity to design, implement, demonstrate, evaluate, disseminate, and extend specific educational models. A Brief History and Description of Charter Schools While the charter school movement is part of a 200-year effort to expand opportunity in education, its real experience began in the late 1960s when parents and innovative educators were joining together to design education options for students. Congressional actions beginning in the mid-1970s that allocated funds to create magnet schools and the introduction in the late 1970s of alternative schools introduced choice into public education. The term "charter school" was coined by Albert Shanker who influenced the American Federation of Teachers to endorse the idea at its 1988 annual convention (Nathan, 1996). Shanker was influenced by the writing of Ray Budde who used the metaphor of the "charter" denoting a document that forged an agreement (Budde, 1988). Also laying the groundwork for charter schools, between 1985 and 1988, the governor of Minnesota, Rudy Perpich, proposed and the legislature adopted public school choice programs. Those programs included (a) postsecondary options (1985) which allowed high school juniors and seniors to take coursework in colleges and universities, (b) options to attend other public schools (1987) for those who had not succeeded in school, and (c) open enrollment (1988) which allowed students to attend schools outside their district. These options led the way for interest in expansion of choices for families. Also in 1988 Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), urged and obtained endorsement of the charter school idea at the 1988 convention of the AFT (Nathan, 1996). …