Their common thread is the belief that more alternatives for parents will better serve children and also place needed pressure on the system for reform. The first charter school in America opened only in 1991. Less than 10 years later, there are now more than 1,700 throughout the country. All of them are different from each other of course. But they are similar in one vital respect they are vastly different from traditional, over-regulated conventional public schools.
More differences mean more alternatives for parents.
More differences also mean more innovation and more experimentation. The last several decades have taught that monolithic instruction methods prescribed by a central bureaucracy do not improve education. If anything, they stymie innovation and lead to inertia. Charter schools, with their total freedom from bureaucratic control, are laboratories for what works. That kind of retail freedom, when coupled with a wholesale system of accountability for results, promotes positive change and gives parents options.