We’re all familiar with the term “hidden in plain sight.” Well, there may be no better way to describe the nation’s 6,900 charter schools.
These publicly-funded, privately-run schools have been around since the first one opened in St. Paul, Minn., in 1992. Today, they enroll about 3.1 million students in 43 states, so you’d think Americans should know quite a bit about them by now. But you’d be wrong.
“Most Americans misunderstand charter schools,” was the finding of the 2014 PDK/Gallup poll on public attitudes toward education. The survey found broad support for charters, but also revealed that 48 percent of Americans didn’t know charter schools were public. Fifty-seven percent thought they charged tuition. And nearly half thought charters were allowed to teach religion.
Now that the Trump administration has made school choice a cornerstone of its education policy, we thought it would be worth exploring how charter schools work, who runs them, how they’re funded and whether they work better than the traditional public schools they’re often competing against.
We asked three charter experts to help us out with a survey course. Welcome to Charter Schools 101, your professors are:
Ted Kolderie, a former journalist and senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He helped create the nation’s first charter law in 1991 and helped 25 states design their own.
