Teaching in Charter Schools (Part 1)

Charter schools in the U.S. are over three decades old. Advocates for wider parental choice of schools lobbied state legislatures and local school boards to authorize a different way to organize a tax-supported public school with its own school board and a charter that included the freedom to create innovative organization, curriculum, and instruction. Accountable to its independent board, charter schools have enormous latitude in what they can do insofar as school culture, organization, curriculum, and classroom lessons. This flexibility and the charter mandate to innovate, advocates claimed, would create constructive competition with regular public schools. The theory was that having charter schools, then, would lead to competition for students between charter and non-charter schools and that competition would produce improved academic performance for both types of schools. That was the theory and promise of having charter schools over thirty years ago. Beginning in the early 1990s,…