Texas charter schools recently saw their smallest enrollment bump in state history, signaling that similar forces crushing traditional public districts may soon hit them as well.

Students have enrolled in charters at significant rates since they launched in the state three decades ago — even as traditional public school enrollment started to fall. But with birth rates going down, new schooling options popping up and fears regarding immigration enforcement spreading, experts say that growth may soon reverse.

“They’re headed to a cliff, for sure,” said Bob Templeton, a senior consultant with an Austin-based public policy firm called STRIVE. He has studied Texas school demographics since the 1990s. “And I don’t know if it’s going to be next year, but it could definitely be within five years.”

This year, Texas public schools experienced their in nearly 40 years. The drop of more than 76,000 students, mostly Hispanic children, occurred primarily in traditional neighborhood campuses.

But charters — public schools managed independently by nonprofits and private companies — continued growing their enrollment. The number of students in state-approved charters increased every year since the Legislature authorized them in 1995.

Charters now educate roughly 446,600 — or 8% — of Texas’ nearly 5.5 million public school students.

Texas’ 178 charter operators oversee 935 campuses, according to from the state education agency — up from about a decade ago. Significant growth in the number of charters, coupled with families searching for schools tailored to their children’s educational needs, largely contributed to the enrollment uptick over the last 30 years.

Parents, for example, have grown tired of schools’ emphasis on standardized testing, the overuse of technology and the time kids spend indoors, said Inga Cotton, founder and executive director of the School Discovery Network, a San Antonio-based group helping parents access improved educational options for their children.

“Families feel under pressure from the world changing so fast,” Cotton added. “If humans are looking for alternatives, then what systems are going to best be able to present those options for families? And charters have been really good at that.”

But the uptick has slowed. State data shows that year-to-year growth in charter enrollment over the past three decades ranged from 3.1% to a high of 217%. However, that growth this year, according to nonprofit group Texas 2036.

That in turn affects every component of education because Texas funds schools based on how many kids show up to class.

“It is an adult-centered issue that adults really need to figure out. It shouldn’t have to impact the students. Sadly, it does,” said Axinia Zepeda, principal of the Raul Yzaguirre Schools for Success Early Childhood Academy, a Houston-based charter school. “Just knowing that enrollment is going to impact funding, funding is going to impact resources, resources are going to impact the instruction that’s being given.”

To stay ahead of enrollment shortfalls, Zepeda’s campus recently expanded from offering only pre-K and kindergarten to adding first grade. The school plans to teach second grade in the near future, she said. It also started offering child care services to families willing to pay tuition.

“It’s a lot of us having to hit the streets and do a lot of recruitment, setting up tables at fairs — at school choice fairs — going to neighborhood libraries or local restaurants and asking if they can put our flyers out,” Zepeda said. “We’re having to hit the streets and try to figure out how we can get kids in.”

Although , families are having fewer children. That means fewer kids entering school. The state’s growing immigrant population that helped schools overcome the birth rate decline has decelerated too. Educators have said some of their students stopped showing up to classes out of fear that immigration officers will show up to arrest them.

“It was the changes in immigration enforcement that caused the enrollment to turn the way that it turned this year, especially as it relates to the Hispanic community,” said Templeton, the education demographics expert.

Expanded school choice options also played a significant part in enrollment decline, Templeton said, more than factors like birth rates.

Public education advocates have long for flooding urban communities with new schooling options that already exist on traditional neighborhood campuses, contributing to districts’ enrollment drops. But now both school districts and charters are seeing families choose another part of the education ecosystem: home schooling.

The Texas Home School Coalition estimates that more than receive instruction in their households, far outpacing enrollment in charter schools. Home-school enrollment has skyrocketed in the years since the pandemic, a nod to families’ with public schools and desire to personalize their children’s learning experience.

Meanwhile, the state is launching a voucher program that allows families to use public funding for private schools and home schools, which could mean more students leaving public options.

The overwhelming majority of students will continue with public education. Still, if families opt in to the new education savings accounts, that means less money for every child absent — a challenge that educators say will only grow worse without consistent and reliable funding increases from the Legislature.

At Por Vida Academy at Corpus Christi, 28 students just earned their high school diploma from the college prep charter campus. Principal Sandra Valencia hopes that the school’s recruiting phone calls, TV advertisements and meetings with parents will help the campus recoup the more than two dozen kids who graduated.

“The thing that affects me the most is trying to stay competitive,” Valencia said. “That’s important, because if they can’t get from you what they can get at the ISD, well then what’s the reason really for them to come to you?”

The state exempts the privately run charters from many of the laws and policies districts must follow, with charters’ approval contingent upon whether such campuses offer specialized instruction — from project-based learning to STEM programs — that families cannot easily access at a traditional neighborhood school.

Texas charter schools reported late last year having nearly on a waitlist, according to the Texas Education Agency.

Brian Whitley, vice president of communications for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, notes that campuses have slightly fewer students on the waitlist than in recent years. Still, he views the current data as an indicator of “strong parent demand.”

Some public education advocates hope traditional neighborhood campuses and charters work together to identify solutions to the enrollment challenges — either through convening to share ideas or partnering to provide innovative academic programming for kids.

“Institutions need to be able to be willing to innovate and grow,” said Marisa B. Pérez-Díaz, a San Antonio Democrat who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, which votes on whether to approve charter applications.

“Because if not,” she added, “we’re gonna get left behind.”

Disclosure: Texas 2036 and Texas Public Charter Schools Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

Like them, she’s part of a Latino family from East Tulsa and wanted to give back to the community she loved. She kept her word. The new charter middle school quickly performed among the best schools in Oklahoma with an A on the state report card. 

But on a recent sunny morning in May, she sat in a conference room in the former paper mill the school purchased and renovated and spoke words uttered by countless school leaders since 2020: “Then the pandemic happened.”

The school’s ranking fell. Chronic absenteeism spiked, and instead of being two or three grade levels behind academically, some students arrived as much as four years off track. Even as she worked to expand the network, Pollock that she would be able to fulfill her commitment to get kids in and through college. Students went to work to help their families during the crisis or cared for younger siblings.

“The mindset of school being a top priority had shifted,” she said.

But there are signs that recovery is now underway. All 74 seniors in last year’s graduating class were accepted to at least one four-year university, and the small network’s two middle schools for growth in reading and math from a national charter school organization. 

As the network prepares to take its next major step, opening an elementary school, Tulsa Honor Academy is “back on an upward trajectory,” Pollock said. “Our goal was to get back to a level of excellence, both in terms of academic growth and school culture.”

The new school will open as a Spanish-English dual language program. It’s something parents have wanted for a long time. Roughly half of the students Tulsa Honor Academy serves are not only first in their families to go to college, they’re also the first to graduate high school. 

That means some students’ “home language skills are not fully developed at home, and our kids also need to learn English,” she said. “By the time they get to middle school, they will be completely fluent in both languages.”

Teachers at the school already use strategies that build fluency and new vocabulary among English learners. On a morning in May, sixth grade science teacher Miguel Ramirez led a lesson on the nervous system. In their matching uniform sweatshirts and khaki pants, students read aloud definitions of terms like nucleus and dendrites and turned to a partner to repeat the material.

“Constantly hearing people say the words gets them to internalize it,” explained Justine McGovern, the school’s development director. 

The academy celebrates Latino culture by being the only one in Oklahoma, as far as Pollock knows, that offers full courses for elective credit in , cultural dances from Mexico. In authentic dresses that represent the regions of Mexico — white for Vera Cruz or vibrant colors for Chihuahua — the students perform all over Tulsa, and many compete nationally.

‘Unapologetically college prep’ 

Inspired by her mother, an engineer who moved from Mexico to Tulsa to pursue a career,  Pollock originally planned to become an immigration lawyer. At a time when there weren’t many Latinos in Tulsa, her mother advocated for a Spanish mass at a local church and started a free GED program.

But Pollock abandoned the idea of pursuing law to join Teach for America, and developed the drive to launch her own school while working in St. Louis and Chicago. 

From the beginning, Tulsa Honor Academy has been what she calls “unapologetically college prep.” College campus visits start as early as fifth grade. Juniors work on personal statements in class. They research different careers and share their insights with sophomores, and because navigating college life can be overwhelming, staff in the school’s college readiness office encourage alumni to return for one-on-one help.

“If we want more Black and brown, first-generation, low-income students to eventually become teachers, lawyers and doctors,” Pollock said, “then we need to make sure that they’re being educated to be able to go to and graduate from college.”

with hospitals, nonprofits and city agencies are another hallmark of the school’s model. After his semester interning with Reading Partners, a tutoring organization, Oscar Gutierrez was convinced that teaching wasn’t for him. 

“I don’t want to work in the education field whatsoever,” said Gutierrez, who graduated this year. 

The experience still gave him a glimpse of behind-the-scenes operations like scheduling and recruiting volunteers. It eased anxiety over finding his way around an unfamiliar place and interacting with people he hasn’t met.

“You had to talk to the kid,” said Gutierrez, who plans to study accounting at Tulsa Community College and then transfer to the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. “It teaches those communication skills and just being confident within yourself.”

Kimberly Perez, part of the first graduating class of 2023, landed an internship at Miller-Tippins, a leading construction firm in Tulsa. She learned how to prepare bids for projects and estimate the cost of materials. Now a rising senior on a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State University, she’s already received job offers from companies in Dallas. 

She still remembers when Pollock visited her home in 2016, sat on the couch and promised her mother that Tulsa Honor Academy was a better option than the district middle school. She was in fifth grade at the charter at the time, but only reading at a first grade level. 

“I would come crying to my mom, like ‘I don’t want to be in that school,’ ” Kim said. Her mother considered pulling her out. “But Elsie said, ‘She just needs extra time.’”

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Those were the years that Pollock was still leading just one school. In 2019, the high school opened, housed in a trailer on the same property. In early 2020, just as schools shut down because of COVID, Tulsa Honor Academy of a building for the high school, an accomplishment in a sector where schools often face challenges securing facilities.

Financing for the project, however, required enrollment to grow, so Pollock and her board fast-tracked the opening of a second middle school in the fall of 2021 — three years early. The expansion to three schools, in some ways, marked a temporary setback. The challenge, Pollock said, was managing a major renovation while also responding to families’ needs in a community by the virus. 

“During the critical years of growth that other schools get to methodically establish network systems and structures,” she said, “we had to pivot and start to focus on surviving the pandemic.”

Student behavior worsened, turnover rates among staff increased, and the principal hired for Flores Middle quit just after the new school opened. 

Brent Bushey, CEO of Fuel OKC, a nonprofit that provides financial support to charter schools, has watched Pollock’s journey from the beginning and recognized where the network stumbled.

“They overextended, and that came through in the academic results,” he said. 

Since 2021-22, the original middle school hasn’t earned higher than a C. Flores, the second middle school, has been stuck at a D since it opened. But those are 2025’s scores, and Pollock is hopeful about where Tulsa Honor Academy is headed. Last year, Flores Middle saw the highest fall-to-spring growth in reading and the third highest in math on NWEA’s MAP assessments among the 60 schools that submitted data to , a national nonprofit formerly known as Building Excellent Schools. Tulsa Honor Academy Middle was second in both reading and math.

Overall, the high school earned a C from the state, but was graded a B for postsecondary opportunities, better than the state average 

Overcoming the pandemic hasn’t been the only crisis Pollock has had to weather. In March, a former middle school teacher following accusations he texted a 12-year-old student and inappropriately touched the child. The school fired him in January and released a of the steps taken to report the situation to police. According to Tulsa police, the investigation into whether other students were affected is ongoing.

‘Tipping point’

As she focuses on Tulsa Honor Academy’s growth, which is expected to reach nearly 1,800 students with the new elementary school, Pollock also has a larger goal of inspiring and supporting more Latino educators to start charter schools. She helped to launch , Latino Educators Advancing Leadership, a word that also means loyal in Spanish. 

She was the first and remains the only Latino charter school leader in the state. It’s both a point of pride and what she calls a “gross disservice” when the majority of students attending brick-and-mortar charter schools are Latino. She’s encouraged that another Latino leader, Robert Ruiz, will open a in Oklahoma City in 2027.

The biggest barrier, she said, is the lack of educational attainment among Latinos in Tulsa. data shows that less than 20% of Latino adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Pollock sees that void in her own work. Two years ago, she knew of four Latino charter school assistant principals in Oklahoma, two of them in her own schools.

“The tipping point is going to be once our scholars graduate from college and we can start hiring them back,” she told The 74. “My biggest dream is for one of our scholars to eventually sit in my seat.”

She got her opportunity four years ago, when a K-8 art teacher position opened up at Dove School of Discovery, at the same time her daughter was preparing to enroll at a school in the network.

Lanning was thrilled that her new curriculum would combine art with STEM. Soon, she was helping students build cars, use a power drill and solder metal.

“I don’t allow the students second grade and under to use the dangerous stuff by themselves, but for third grade and up, once they’ve had safety lessons, they’re able to use those types of things — there is no limit to what they have access to,” Lanning said. “A lot of them are scared, but I walk them through it. I’ve literally held hands. Once they get that experience of trying it, they’re like, ‘Oh, I kind of like this.’ ”

STEM education is one of the of Dove Schools, a with nine campuses in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, plus a statewide virtual program. Educators there credit the presence of STEM in every grade — from computer science in kindergarten to high school career pathways — to the schools’ 100% graduation and college acceptance rates, and other measures of academic success.

“The [students] have grown up with the Dove Schools culture, and in elementary and middle school they already know what the meaning of college is and the importance of college,” said Ibrahim Eskikurt, Dove’s STEM coordinator. “From ninth grade until 12th grade, students already know they have to do something — go to college and graduate — and then they will have more opportunities.”

The first Dove School was founded in 2000 in Tulsa by Oklahoma State University graduates. Since then, the network has grown from roughly 200 students to more than 4,700. 

Last year, 157 Dove seniors each had an average of four college acceptances. Nearly 88% of them were the first in their family to attend college. The average scholarships each received topped $95,000.

Maureen Brown, Dove’s chief outreach and development officer, said she doesn’t know what the district’s “secret sauce” is, but a few main factors contribute to student success. Besides STEM programming and college preparation that begins in kindergarten, Dove Schools offers , a curriculum that teaches skills like critical thinking, kindness and morality. The district also arranges home visits to keep educators and families connected.

“Every teacher and school administrator, at the beginning of the year, wants families to see that the school is there to partner with them, so they make an appointment to go visit families at their homes,” Brown said. “The home visit is not to go check on their house and see their living circumstances — it’s providing information and resources they have at school. It’s really about building a relationship, and that’s been a really, really big deal for us.”

About 80% of Dove Schools students are low-income. Because the charter is tuition-free, a lottery system decides which students are accepted if there are more applications than open spots. 

“Anybody can apply as long as they live in city limits,” Brown said. “If they want to come to Dove Schools, and if there’s a spot available for them, they come in.”

Students who enter Dove Schools as kindergartners will be immersed in STEM through computer science activities on their Chromebooks. In the higher elementary grades, they learn how to code. Middle schoolers explore hands-on STEM projects in robotics or electronics. 

If students want to continue their STEM education in high school, they can enter a pathway to learn computer science, engineering or biomedical science. These also award college credits and offer specific career-focused courses.

After school, the network offers multiple STEM-based extracurricular clubs. The five-year-old drone program is particularly popular.

It began with one small team of students building and flying drones in local and national competitions. Now, Dove Schools has about 25 drone teams from fourth to 12th grade. Each group has roughly three students.

Eskikurt said students can’t earn drone aviation licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration through the program, but that’s something administrators are working to offer in the future. The district also plans to add a high school pathway in aerospace engineering next year, as it’s one of the in Oklahoma.

While the drone club teaches students to build machines that fly the sky, another program is focused on those that operate underwater. Lanning is one of several teachers who manages the Dove Schools club, part of an international program in which students build aquatic robots that can be entered in competitions against other schools. 

“We give them the materials, they do all the work, and we just guide them along as they do the engineering design and the science concepts,” Lanning said. “They have to go through an obstacle course, a mission course and an interview stage.”

Lanning’s program for third through fifth graders used to run for just a semester, but this year she extended the afterschool club to last the entire year. Roughly five students meet for 40 minutes once a week to build their robots. She said her goal for next year is to get 10 students involved at her school. 

The favorite part of Lanning’s day, she said, is watching her elementary students discover STEM for the first time. 

“They see what they can do, because I give them an idea, and the goal is to let them take that idea in any direction they want to,” she said. “Once you give them the materials and guidelines, they take off with it and they have no limits to their imagination.”

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Michael Horn: Governor, Ryan, welcome to The Future of Education. Thanks for being here.

Governor Bush: Good to be at a Primer school.

Michael Horn: Yes, it is indeed. And the history, Governor, of publicly funded widespread universal school choice, educational choice in Florida really gets its start from your time as Governor. You have laws in 1999, 2001, I’d say 2003, with funding following the student to Florida Virtual. You have all these milestones. As you look back now, 2026, at the state of educational choice here, how would you describe where we are in Florida? Where in the movement, if you will, are we right now?

Governor Bush: We’re not completely there, but we certainly got to scale for sure. When we started, I think we had 80 kids in that, parents went to a private school with public money. And that’s expanded over time. One voucher program, another corporate tax scholar program. Today, over 50% of parents in Florida choose where their kids go to school. It could be we have universal public school choice, we have universal Education Savings Accounts. And so we’re, we’re building what I think is the right way to educate our children by empowering parents. It’s really exciting.

Michael Horn: And as you noted, we’re sitting in a , literally one of hundreds of microschools, low-cost private schools throughout the state right now. I’m curious, did you envision this sort of education entrepreneurship that we’ve seen when you were Governor?

Governor Bush: I didn’t envision anything. I hoped that it would happen. My personal belief is that parents deserve to have this power to choose where their kids go to school and if they do that, that there will be schools like Primer, more tools for homeschool kids. Charter schools will emerge. The religious schools that were in decline in terms of providing education to their students would see growth, all of that. I was hopeful it would happen, and I’m proud that Florida has been a leader. But it’s also exciting to see it happen across the country.

Michael Horn: Ryan, you’ve been a direct beneficiary of really the foresight of these policies that I think it’s fair to say. And you also, as I understand it, have quite an intergenerational connection as well when it comes to microschools, educational choice in Florida. What’s your family connection to the story that’s unfolded here that started under Governor Bush?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a very personal connection, but then there’s also this sort of interesting macro connection. And the personal connection is my mom was a public school teacher, so she was very pro-public schools. We were zoned for. She took me to kindergarten orientation at the school that we were zoned for. And she quickly realized that it was a failing school. It wasn’t going to meet, you know, her standards for us. We were living with, in my grandparents house at the time in a low income area outside Orlando.

We didn’t have, you know, any choice to move. We couldn’t afford private school. And so she just took matters into her own hands. And so she ended up starting one of the first kinds of homeschool microschools in Florida. She got me and my siblings and then about a dozen other kids together and she just willed this thing into existence. And what’s interesting, and this is where it kind of connects to the macro. So I, this incredible education that frankly was like, you know, significantly higher quality than, you know, what I would have, you know, deserved, you know, relative to our socioeconomic status or what you would have expected. And what’s interesting is that she started that right before Governor Bush’s first term.

Impact of Governor Bush’s Policies

Ryan Delk: And so, we sort of experienced, you know, what I think of as the before times and it was very contrarian. We got a lot of questions. I think she was frankly judged by a lot of people, you know, for, for doing what she did. And then when Governor Bush took office, he, you know, sort of decided to, to go to the mat for, you know, a lot of these issues and make it a key priority. And so we, we actually sort of experienced the shift where it was, it was you know, not only just normalized but sort of like celebrated and empowered. And so I now feel this frankly like a real weight and responsibility as sort of the first generation to benefit from these policies. And then now, three decades later, you know, getting to spend my life building schools like this that open up those same opportunities to students with the same, you know, structure and work that, that not only, you know, Governor’s administration, but many, many folks since then have carried the torch to unlock these opportunities for kids. And so the weight of that is not lost on me.

And I think it’s quite powerful that we’re sort of seeing the second generation now. The folks that had the, that got these opportunities from, from sort of generation one of these programs now being able to reinvest in the next generation is, is quite exciting.

Michael Horn: Well, and it’s fascinating, right, that narrative of ostracism almost to norm, to expectation, right, for families. And as I understand it, you all at Primer are thinking a lot about the policy and regulatory landscape and some of the critical questions when it comes to things like microschools and the like, zoning, fire safety codes, things of that nature. I know there have been some big developments over the past couple years in Florida around some of those zoning questions. Can you just update us both on what’s happened, but also why it matters so much?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, so we are, we’re one of — there’s a lot of people doing great work on this ExcelinEd. There’s a ton of great, great orgs. And so we are one of many people that are working on this issue. There is one, you know, very narrow and perhaps, I think, very underrated, but maybe, you know, kind of unexciting part of the regulatory landscape that I happen to care a lot about, and that is the regulations around new school supply. So there’s an enormous amount of energy that’s gone into what I would articulate as the demand side, unlocking funding for parents, making sure that the funding follows the student. And that’s, you know, as we discussed, many decades in the making. But now that that exists, the reality is that a lot of the regulations around starting new schools, and I learned this firsthand, like the amount of nights and weekends that I spent early on at Primer staring at zoning maps of cities and counties is far more than I ever anticipated.

And the reason for that is that there’s all these regulations that sort of, you know, take as a sort of starting assumption that every school is still a, you know, 60,000 square foot, $30 million build to serve 2,000 students. And so in that framework where every single school looks like that, of course there’s traffic studies and school bus parking and very intense building regulations, that all makes sense in that context. But now in this world where you have a great educator who wants to open up a school in a church or a community center or, you know, a facility like this, those regulations are quite arduous. And they’re arduous, you know, we’re a fairly sophisticated operation. They’re arduous at times for us, but, but in many ways they’re impossible for like a sort of seasoned educator that wants to go serve their community. And so what I care is the sort of common sense, right sizing of these regulations specifically for small schools.

So for the large schools, a lot of what’s in place is, I think, serving that need really well. It makes a lot of sense. But for small schools, we want to make it much easier for those schools to open up in existing facilities to serve their community. And the reason that I care a lot about this is that I’ve seen firsthand stories of dozens, maybe hundreds of educators who want to start not just primaries, but all sorts of types of schools who reach out to us and say, hey, I got stuck. I have, you know, I’m trying to get this building permit, I’m trying to get this code, I can’t figure out zoning, or I’ve got to do a nine month variance process. All these things that are sort of just, just incredibly arduous for the task at hand. And so we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy from a legislative perspective making sure that we can knock down those barriers.

Michael Horn: Governor, I want to broaden the view now beyond Florida and think about these sorts of questions, supply questions, others, in the context of this sort of nationwide movement right now we’re seeing toward educational choice. And I’m curious both of your takes on a couple of items that we can run down. First, it strikes me just thinking about what you said on the zoning side of it. As an onlooker, there’s a pretty robust demand right now for different options that meet different kids needs. But the supply side that you just described, so you’re taking some significant steps there, but getting a sustainable supply side that’s affordable, low cost, private schools like Primer. What’s holding up the supply side? What else should we be thinking about in terms of that? Or maybe my perspective is wrong on this, but I would love to think about how do we really encourage this robust supply side.

Governor Bush: Ten years ago, the big fight was how do we get charter schools to be able to access, as public schools to access public capital, what we call in Florida pico dollars. And that was a struggle because look, the public schools feel threatened by all these choices. I mean my, my hope and dream is that there’ll be a superintendent in Miami-Dade County or some other place that says every child that goes to school in my county is my responsibility, and I’m going to create a menu of options for parents, and I’m going to try to do everything I can to make sure that every child succeeds.

Michael Horn: So really helping them navigate to the right option.

Funding challenges for private schools

Governor Bush: Yeah, but if you had that attitude, you wouldn’t be, you know, making it impossible for a private school to get a permit or you wouldn’t have, you wouldn’t restrict private capital to come in. I mean, there’s really one institutional source of money for private school capitalists, the Drexel Fund, which is for Catholic schools. The charters have, you know, three or four fundraising operations for their capital growth needs. So that’s part of it is you need to have more private philanthropy come in. But ultimately this should be a state responsibility as well. I mean, do we, do we do this in Medicaid? Do we have government run doctors and government run nurses and government run clinics? Some, but it’s not the dominant way that someone that is qualified for Medicaid gets access to healthcare. We should have the same mindset for education. And I think you would have an acceleration of really interesting options both in terms of hybrid learning, you know, where a parent could choose to take care of many much of their healthcare, their education needs, or they could go to Primer and take some of the money maybe and go to do something that accelerates the learning.

This is where we’re moving and there’s still, it’s work in progress. But I’m really excited that Ryan and others like him, education entrepreneurs, are advancing this at a pace that’s pretty exciting.

Michael Horn: Ryan, what’s your take on this in terms of the sustainable supply? What’s it going to take to get supply to meet the demand that we’re seeing?

Ryan Delk: I think it’s all about cost. And we have this core value that acts as the constraint. And so we start from the place of Primer needs to be accessible to every family, regardless of income. We’ve never turned away a student. And so some of the regulatory work that we’ve discussed that to me is all connected to this idea of how do you get these schools open as efficiently as possible and then how do you get the cost to educate down where parents can attend these schools for ideally nothing. Ideally it’s completely free. They just use their ESA and they can just attend the school. But if there is some out of pocket, it’s 50 bucks a month or 75 bucks a month.

And to me that is the key thing to unlock because then these scholarships are accessible or they’re unlocking opportunities for the families that need it most. The families that can afford a $15, $20,000 a year school, they don’t necessarily need these options as desperately as the families that are trapped in schools that are not serving their needs. And so that’s what we’re obsessed with. And I think there’s a kind of growing coalition that’s really focused on this low cost, high quality private school.

Michael Horn: Second thing I’m curious about, and we’ll go to my inner wonk here, your inner wonk here, which is there’s been a big proliferation of Education Savings Accounts across the country right now. But there are subtleties in the policies in different states, and I’ll just name a few of them because I’m curious what you all think about the impact of these differences. I’m thinking of the increasing number of states with accreditation requirements for example. Florida, you know, does not. You have some states that require external assessments of students in these low cost private schools. Some don’t. Some states are tuition first ESAs and some are not. Some allow you to roll over dollars even for post secondary education.

So it really creates a savings and value ethos as opposed to others that are not. We in the media often call these all ESA states. Are we sort of masking over these subtleties? Do they matter, the variants? Are we lumping them sort of at expense of understanding what we’re really trying to create here? What’s your perspective on these differences?

Importance of State Flexibility

Governor Bush: My perspective is that’s all good. You know, if we had one size fits all, it’d probably be driven out of Washington and that would be. It wouldn’t happen. It would be an unmitigated disaster. So having states have the ability to implement as best they can a version of ESA and then modify it as they go along because someone from another state’s done something interesting like the Education Savings Account where you can reinvest it if you didn’t spend the whole amount. I mean that’s an interesting idea that may catch on for all the states that don’t have it now. To me, I think the baseline should be there’s a financial responsibility that if you’re taking taxpayers money directly or indirectly, you should be a good steward of that money. And there’s health and safety issues that are really important, particularly for young kids. Beyond that, let’s let a thousand flowers bloom and come up with the best approach.

The important thing is that we get to scale so that parents demand that no one tries to take it away. That’s the first mission and that’s happening. You know, if 50% of all kids in Florida parents choose, it’s going to be hard to imagine if someone wants to come and try to re regulate this and have it just be traditional schools being the only option. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Texas, you know, having a hundred thousand kids to start with and over time that growing is going to create another kind of scalable moment for that state. And so if you try to impose a bunch of rules on top of that, it’s not going to grow at the speed that I think will make it more effective.

Michael Horn: Ryan, what’s your take on the variance?

Ryan Delk: I mean, I’m a personal big fan of federalism so I just have a personal bias towards that. But I think what I’m encouraged by is the movement is coalescing around the right things. And so when you look at the programs that have launched recently, they have measures to make sure that the providers are delivering for students, they’re fiscally responsible, the dollars are flowing to low-income, working-class, middle-class families that need them. And so I’m really encouraged by the way, I think the last four programs that have launched at scale have all had versions of that in place. And I think if that’s taking the best practices from other states, implementing them into new programs, and if that continues then I’m quite optimistic.

Improving financial accountability systems

Governor Bush: You know, one of the things that could be done in a federal system, and it’s happening right now, and ExcelinEd is working on this is to create a coding project because right now the technology isn’t the same as it would be for a health savings account, for example, or think about your MasterCard or Visa. All this stuff is done, you know, we have no clue how it, at least I don’t have any clue how it works, but it works really well. Whereas if you think about all the coding that could happen to make sure that there’s financial accountability and also that parents aren’t out of pocket making these commitments that they don’t have the resources to do because of some bureaucratic snafu at the state level. So there are things that could be done, but those are more like private sector enhancements that will make this more effective.

Michael Horn: And I guess it also helps the supply side so that those dollars actually reach the operators. Right. Ryan, you’re not sitting there waiting for it. Let me ask, Governor Bush, if we zoom out, what do you see as the big flashpoints to come in educational choice? It could be Florida, but also nationwide.

Governor Bush: Well, you can see it happen if there is, I’ll use Florida as an example. We have several hundred thousand, we have half of all the ESA kids are in our state. So you could have 1/10 of 1% of those transactions take place in a way that is inappropriate as they’re trying to sort out. You know, you’re dealing with scale, it’s hard to do all that. And so then you know, Senator Schmidlap will want to say well we need to like regulate this and regulate that. That’s the biggest danger is Washington getting involved or states trying to re regulate to deal with the tiny fraction of problems that impacts 99.9% of families. So regulate in terms of testing. We should trust parents to make these decisions and then give them the tools to be informed consumers and give them an array of choices.

And we need to protect that. That to me, you can see this happening at the state level. New governor comes in, they feel compelled to do something. And I’m very fearful of Washington getting involved. I’m excited about the tax credit program, but I haven’t seen the rules. And, you know, I’m paranoid about this stuff because I’ve seen there’s too many examples of Washington with good intentions getting things wrong.

Michael Horn: Ryan, I’d love to hear your reflections on the big flashpoints of the moment and both to comment around what the Governor just named, because you’re operating not just in Florida. So what are you seeing as those big questions or big issues that the field’s going to really have to think about or protect against in the years to come?

Focus on quality in education

Ryan Delk: I mean, I think a lot of people care a lot about education in this country, and that’s a good thing overall. And so there’s, you know, people with strong perspectives on both sides. A lot is changing. The world is changing really quickly. And my view on this is there will continue to be flashpoints, there’s going to continue to be contentious policy debates and accreditation and testing and all these things. But I really believe, I have deep conviction that if we stay focused on delivering high-quality academic outcomes in a way that’s accessible for every family, that is the winning strategy. And if we can stay laser focused on that and all the inputs to that, from, you know, great rigorous academics to unlocking the regulatory environment for new schools to open, to empowering educators to serve their communities, if we stay just maniacally focused on that, I think everything else falls into place. Because when you unlock those opportunities for those kids, and it’s not just that family that becomes a huge advocate for this movement, it’s their city council member, their city commissioner, all these people start to see, wow, this is transforming this community.

And when you do that, I think that is the winning focus. And so I hope that that can be the thing that we all rally around. And obviously these flashpoints will continue to happen. But that’s what we’re focused on. We’re going to stay maniacally focused on that. And I think a lot of other folks will too.

Michael Horn: I was curious about the assessment piece of this.

It seems this is much more of a trust the parents accountability model model that you’d sign up for as opposed to with traditional public schools. Let’s test. Is that accurate?

Governor Bush: It’s accurate, but I think parents — most states do have norm reference tests as a measurement of how kids are doing. And if you want parents to be empowered to make these choices, they need to be informed about the caliber of the education. So I personally support the idea of norm reference tests, and that’s the norm across the country. But I’m respectful of places like Arizona that, you know, want to have a little more libertarian approach. It seems to work well there, and maybe it’s part of their culture, a little bit more of their culture than it is in another place in the country.

Michael Horn: Final word. Governor, as you reflect over a quarter century of publicly funded choice in Florida, and we sit in a school that probably could not have existed, serving the students, you know, that could not have been in such an environment before if it weren’t for these policies that you started to put in place. What are your final reflections?

Governor Bush: Look, when you get a chance to serve, it’s really cool over the long haul to see successive legislatures and Governors embrace this idea and build on it. And I’m proud that our political leadership over the last 25 years has accelerated this. And my hope is that it stays the course. Look, big ideas take a long time. You could be patient. You got to be stubborn. In some cases you can. You just, you gotta, you know, stick with it.

Parental involvement in education

Governor Bush: And in Florida, that’s the case, I don’t think. And I would say there are external issues as well. If we didn’t have COVID, which allowed parents to really realize that maybe their kids weren’t getting the education that they thought they were getting because they became the teachers of their kids and they saw the slop that many of them sadly had to deal with, that accelerated it even more. So I’m excited about this. I think it’s really important that we stay the course because the world we’re moving toward at warp speed is exciting, but it’s also really scary. And you want to make sure that kids can read at the end of third grade in a capable way so that they can learn in a dramatic way, and that parents know what’s best for their kids to make the right choices. And there’s an array of them. That’s the mission, and it seems to be doing quite well right now.

Michael Horn: Governor, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation.

What can the state do? One step might be to continue expanding its charter school sector, especially the brick-and-mortar schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students.

Oklahoma’s declining NAEP scores represent a sample of students across both traditional and charter schools, but Oklahoma has been fortunate to have a relatively successful charter sector. For example, using data through 2019, a Harvard found that Oklahoma had the sixth-highest-performing charter sector in the country.

A from the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board allows for a deeper, more up-to-date analysis. The biggest takeaways focus on size, performance and cost.

Both brick-and-mortar and virtual charters have grown in Oklahoma, collectively increasing from about 51,000 students in the 2022-23 school year to 55,000 last year. In the 2024-25 school year, 35,831 students attended a virtual charter and 19,190 were enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools. All told, charters serve about 8% of all public school students in the state.

A of student performance found 31 of 49 brick-and-mortar charter schools outperformed their neighboring traditional schools last year. For example, students at Stanley Hupfield Academy and John W. Rex Charter Elementary School outperformed the Oklahoma City average by 21 and 20 percentage points, respectively. The Dove and Santa Fe charter networks each had several standout schools, including Dove Science Academy, where students outscored nearby traditional schools by 34 points and which we named a Bright Spot for its third grade reading proficiency. The largest outperformance was notched by a standalone charter called Deborah Brown elementary school in Tulsa, where students scored 59 points higher than peers in the neighboring district. 

As for virtual charters, the analysis found that only one — the Oklahoma Connection Academy High School — outperformed the statewide average, while 15 did not.

Note: Brick-and-mortar charter schools are compared to the traditional public schools in their physical districts. Virtual charters are compared to all traditional schools in the state.

A new from Adam Tyner at the University of Oklahoma made similar comparisons for high schools. At that level, students attending brick-and-mortar charters had slightly lower ACT scores than peers attending traditional public schools, but they had higher graduation rates — especially the low-income students. Meanwhile, the virtual charters had significantly worse outcomes. 

Notably, Oklahoma’s charters are getting these results with significantly less money. According to the state charter board, traditional public schools received $10,643 per student in state and local funding last year, compared with $9,684 for brick-and-mortar charters. This disparity of almost $1,000 per student has widened over time and is largely due to the fact that charters do not have the same access to money for facilities and do not receive the same share of local revenues that traditional district schools do.

Closing this funding disparity would likely boost outcomes for charter students even further.

While it is impossible to know for sure whether Oklahoma’s charter schools are getting their results by cherry-picking the best students, or even whether the rise of charters may have contributed to stagnation on the part of traditional public schools, suggests that’s not the case. If anything, traditional schools tend to get higher scores when they face increased competition in the form of charter schools.

For instance, Tulane University researchers Feng Chen and Doug Harris found that the effects from this type of competition tend to materialize when charter schools a 10% market share in a given district. The new charter found that Oklahoma now has six communities where charters have surpassed this threshold, led by Oklahoma City at 23%.

When I spoke with Rebecca Wilkinson and Shelly Hickman from the Oklahoma Charter Schools Board, they said they wanted to create an annual report that was comparative and meaningful, and to dispel myths about what charters are and are not. They are optimistic about increasing market share in more communities, and they hope that success can generate even more momentum across the state. 

Indiana’s charter school students have experienced greater academic growth in the years following the pandemic than their peers in traditional public schools, according to a new preliminary analysis.

The also found that the gains were particularly pronounced for Black and Hispanic students, and for those who were among the lowest-performing and economically disadvantaged.

The findings could hold important lessons for how schools can recover from learning loss and have sparked researcher interest in what tactics charter leaders adopted to do that. While there are many studies examining the impact of charter schools on student outcomes, the authors note that there has been almost no research on charter school performance since the pandemic.

The findings tracked students from 2017-18 to 2023-24, focusing on how ILEARN test scores improved from their baseline levels during the pandemic in 2020-21. They have prompted researchers to examine how certain schools responded in the years immediately following the 2020-21 school year.

“What really matters is, what is it that these schools were doing?” said Joseph Waddington of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame, one of eight authors of the study. “We’re not so much interested in telling a story of how did this sector (perform) versus the other sector — we want to understand why. We want to understand the variation.”

The analysis, which is undergoing peer review, examined students who stayed in brick-and-mortar charter schools and in traditional public schools throughout the entire study period.

Charter students were matched with traditional public school peers who most closely resembled them based on a variety of factors, including their socioeconomic status, geographic location, and their 2021 ILEARN test score.

Most of the state’s charter schools are in Indianapolis, but the study also examined all counties in which charter schools are present. The analysis included few rural students, Waddington said, because of the lack of charters in those areas.

During the 2020-21 school year, charter students performed the same as their traditional public school peers in math and modestly outperformed them in English, according to the study. But after 2020-21, charter students outperformed traditional public students in all years in English, and nearly all years in math.

The difference was modest in 2021-22, but grew in 2022-23 and 2023-24, according to the study.

“The findings in this analysis suggest a shift occurred during the pandemic and its aftermath,” the study concludes. “Not only are students in Indiana’s charter schools experiencing more accelerated test score gains than their (traditional public school) peers, but these impacts appear to be growing over time in the post-pandemic period.”

Chronic absenteeism and instructional delivery — whether in-person or virtual — did not account for the differences in achievement, the study found. Charter schools were more likely to offer virtual learning for more of the 2020-21 school year than traditional public schools.

In Indianapolis, charter schools as a whole have posted higher rates of Black and Hispanic students reaching proficiency in both math and English, compared with those run by Indianapolis Public Schools, according to a .

The study’s authors are examining what could contribute to the differences in outcomes between charters and traditional public schools by surveying school leaders in both sectors across Indiana, Waddington said.

The changes could be attributed to additional instructional time or differences in instructional type, such as having students spend more time in smaller pull-out groups, he said. He also said some schools may have added certain types of staff, or utilized certain partnerships to bring in tutors.

The study’s findings mirror broader research on charter school students’ performance that finds positive impacts for Black students, those from lower-income households, and the lowest-performing students, Waddington said.

But the researchers are hoping to learn more details from survey results about how schools responded to COVID learning loss.

“There may be something in the story about differences in how the sectors responded to the pandemic that can actually be illustrative for all sectors going forward in terms of best practices associated with learning loss recovery,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

OKLAHOMA CITY — After hours of witness testimony and pages of evidence, a struggling Oklahoma City charter school still has not convinced a state board that it should be allowed to stay open for another year.

The Statewide Charter School Board on Monday made the rare vote to terminate the founding charter contract for Proud To Partner Leadership Academy. The board first voted 9-1 to declare there is “clear and convincing evidence” the school violated that contract before agreeing unanimously to proceed toward canceling it.

Board members made their decision after a lengthy and uncommon termination hearing that began April 29 and continued on Monday. A few more procedural steps remain before the school’s charter contract could be canceled officially, after which point its state funding would be cut off.

If the southwest Oklahoma City high school closes, its 100 students will have to return to their home districts or find another educational option for the next academic year.

The only way to avoid a shutdown is if the school makes “significant changes structurally” in the coming days, said Brian Shellem, who leads the statewide board. He said the board would “extend a hand” to the school and its attorneys to explore options.

Proud To Partner’s superintendent, Dawn Bowles, said the school’s leaders will wait to hear from the state board about what alternatives are available. In the meantime, students are “in limbo of knowing where they will actually be next year,” she said.

“We are still devoted and committed to doing what’s best on behalf of the families that we serve,” Bowles said after the vote.

Throughout the termination hearing, state officials described Proud to Partner, known as PTPLA, as a school in financial and operational disarray since it opened in July 2024.

Attorneys representing PTPLA said the school was unfairly targeted in a “rush to judgment” and wasn’t given proper due process to address concerns.

“The evidence here will show there’s been a sort of fearmongering, a sort of hysteria, a flame of emotions that were overblown and overindulged,” the school’s attorney, Kwame Mumina, said during the first day of the hearing.

Members of the statewide board’s staff testified that they came away with grave concerns about the school’s academic quality after visiting it.

Statewide Charter School Board executive director Rebecca Wilkinson, who visited PTPLA at least 15 times, said she saw signs of poor engagement of students. She reported seeing students sleeping or sitting in front of computers while not logged into classwork.

“I was concerned that too often students were not able to even tell me the course that they were working in, much less what they were doing,” she said.

Wilkinson said she had further concerns over whether the school’s special education and child nutrition services complied with law and the charter contract.

PTPLA finances also raised red flags when the school finished its first year with a $250,000 deficit. This school year, three teachers were laid off from the small teaching staff because of a lack of funds.

“This school is spending money it doesn’t have, and that is an issue,” said Thomas Schneider, the board’s attorney and deputy general counsel at the Attorney General’s Office.

Wilkinson initially reported seeing only during a site visit this fall. PTPLA leaders said the report was false and the three laid-off teachers continued working as volunteers. Those teachers have since been rehired on part-time pay.

Multiple members of the board’s staff and Oklahoma State Department of Education officials testified to having difficulty getting PTPLA administrators to respond to issues and to file financial reports on time.

School officials acknowledged they struggled with financial and operational difficulties, but they said it never compromised student learning. They said they were caught off-guard when the statewide board placed PTPLA on a November meeting agenda to discuss deficiencies at the school.

The statewide board in that November meeting ultimately .

Sharri Coleman, PTPLA’s school board president, said the state was too quick to punish rather than offer support.

“If we’re all for students, then you as a board, as my authorizer, would help my board to make sure that we are getting the supports that we need so that we can help those students,” Coleman said on the witness stand.

After being placed on probation, PTPLA’s board from the state and contended there was “nothing to fix.”

Statewide board members over the following months, contending school leaders refused to cooperate fully with state oversight. They finally ran out of patience in January, when they .

Bowles, PTPLA’s superintendent, warned that closing the school would harm the underprivileged students it was designed to serve.

“Most importantly, it will take away an opportunity to provide an education that is aligned to the needs of our Black and brown families in Oklahoma City,” she said during the hearing.

For the charter contract to be canceled, the statewide board must vote again to approve findings of fact from the termination hearing. That vote could take place as soon as next week, Shellem said.

PTPLA then would have 10 days to file an appeal with the board and, if rejected, to take the matter to district court.

Bowles didn’t confirm or reject the idea of challenging the state board in court.

“Right now, we’ll wait to hear from them as to what those next steps are,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

There are several answers to that question. I think one at the top of the list is figuring out how to use the tools that chartering developed, like performance contracting, authorizing, school-level autonomy, mission-driven governance and better measures of student success, to modernize all of U.S. public education for a changing economy and society.

No doubt, some of this has already occurred, as the charter idea has increasingly shaped mainstream expectations about how public schools should operate. — for example, and management. The challenge now is to ensure that chartering becomes a quality-and-opportunity strategy for all of K-12 public education.

The original charter idea was straightforward: a new type of public school that has the operational independence to design and run its own education program in exchange for being accountable for improved student results. Do this by allowing an organization called a to approve and oversee the schools. Over time, that approach expanded into a broader argument about flexibility, innovation, parent choice and pluralism in public education.

The growth of this new sector of public schools is substantial. , more than 3.7 million students attend 8,150 charter schools staffed by more than 251,000 teachers in states across the country, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.

Research from Stanford University’s found that charter students gain the equivalent of 16 additional days of learning in reading and six additional days in math compared with peers in traditional public schools. The researchers also documented substantial variation in school quality.

That variation is one reason the next phase of implementing the charter idea should focus less on sector growth alone and more on building stronger K-12 public education systems with many different types of independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.

Here are five priorities that policymakers, community leaders and K-12 stakeholders can use to guide that effort.

First, use the charter authorizing process to learn how to renew faltering district schools. Good charter authorizers close persistently weak schools, replicate strong schools and maintain public trust. Expand this approach to all public schools, including strengthening current authorizing standards, improving transparency and making it easier for effective public charter and district schools to grow, while closing persistently ineffective schools.

Second, expand how school success is measured. Effective charters have proven that they can improve test scores. Many also have shown that this isn’t enough. Schools should also be judged by whether students succeed after graduation according to different measures, including employment, earnings, college persistence, military service, apprenticeship completion and civic participation. The next generation of K-12 accountability systems should focus more directly on using multiple measures to track student success in pursuing long-term opportunity.

Third, create more career-connected schools. Charters have shown how operational autonomy can make it easier for educators to design schools around real-world learning. For example, in the Los Angeles area project-based learning, college partnerships, industry alliances, work-based learning and career-connected education, making these opportunities central to students’ experience. Other charter models — including schools with early-college, apprenticeship and schools workforce-partnerships programs — show how high schools can better connect learning to work, further education and civic life. The educators and community partners who build these models can help the broader K-12 system understand what it takes to redesign schedules, create employer and college partnerships, and respond quickly to changing workforce and community needs. 

Fourth, learn from charters how to think differently about building and using school facilities. Many charter schools lack equitable access to buildings and capital financing, diverting classroom dollars to rent and construction costs. This shortcoming has unleashed innovative models like the , , and . Lessons learned from this process should spur districts to think differently about their approach to school construction and use.

Fifth, focus on a “more good public schools” strategy. Bridge the divide between charters and district schools by that replicates effective charter models within districts, which creates more good public schools. This can be done in many ways, including , charter-district , by charters, district schools, and community organizations, and .

All these efforts reflect a broader idea, which I call . A healthy and effective K-12 public education system should offer multiple high-quality pathways for young people with different goals, interests and talents. Charter schools are not the only way to create those pathways. But they remain one of the most flexible tools available for helping states and communities rethink how public education connects to opportunity.

The next phase of the charter school idea should not be about relitigating old ideological battles over public school choice. It should be about building a more flexible, accountable and opportunity-rich K-12 public education system inspired by the charter idea.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, created by the state legislature this spring, will help pay for charter and district school buildings, create a busing system that includes charter students and take over from the city’s elected school board the ability to ask voters for tax increases. 

Indianapolis is already one of Experts predict charter schools could become even more popular in Indianapolis under IPEC, despite some community opposition that the new board strips power from the city’s elected school board and may drain money and resources from district schools.

Indianapolis won’t likely jump from the 51% of students attending charter schools today to the 99% in New Orleans, charter advocates say. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most schools there in 2005, prompting the dramatic shift from district schools to charter schools as the city rebuilt. Indiana faces no such crisis, but the state’s push to treat charter schools as equal to district schools makes the city nearly as charter-friendly. 

“This is going to be a game changing model for charter schools,” said Cara Candal, vice president of policy for ExcelinEd, the education advocacy group of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

“It’s going to compare, at the very least, incredibly favorably [to New Orleans],” Candal added. “This might…might…actually put it over the top.”

The new nine-person board, appointed by Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, includes members of the Indianapolis Public Schools’ board, but leans heavily pro-charter. A majority of its members have worked for or served on boards of charter schools. Its chairman, David Harris is founder of several charter schools and led the Mind Trust, a local advocate of charter schools, until 2018.

The plan was opposed by the local NAACP and the National School Boards Association, which objected to the legislature making “a shift from normal practice” by creating the new board.

“Having layers of governance can create unnecessary disruption,” said the association’s CEO, Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs.“Who’s going to suffer from that? It’s going to be the community, parents and students.”

Resident Megan Alderman, co-chair of Progressive Democrats of America, told the state senate at a February hearing the power shift “undermines democracy.”

“It strips core powers from our democratically elected school board, which is by definition, taxation without representation,” she said.

IPEC’s superseding the school board breaks the pattern of other pro-charter cities including Denver and Baltimore, where the local school board keeps some control over planning and oversight of charters, while also helping pay for them and letting them use former schools.

Mike Petrilli, president of the pro-charter Fordham Institute, called the new board and sharing of assets “very different than what we’ve seen anywhere else, maybe with the exception of New Orleans.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University professor and expert on charter schools in New Orleans and nationally, said he could think of no other city, besides New Orleans, where a central board stepped in to oversee district and charter schools, other than state takeovers of districts because of bankruptcy or academic failure.

The first big step in the power shift will begin by Aug. 1 when the new board starts flexing its taxing authority. The board is expected to ask voters to approve a ballot measure for a tax that would provide more money for both district and charter schools.  

The new board will also research how to take the district’s busing plan and expand it to include charter school students by the 2028-29 school year, as the legislature requires.

And it will wade into a complicated tangle of property law and finance to merge district-owned schools and charter school buildings into one portfolio of properties for the new board to manage and maintain.

That will be a challenge experts believe no other city has faced on this scale. Managing school buildings centrally is simpler where districts share properties with charter schools and keep control of them. If a charter wants to build its own school, the district and charter can sort out who controls and pays for a building right from the start.

But Indianapolis is trying to create central control after-the-fact, with more than 60 charter schools, all with different building arrangements. Some use district buildings. Some lease old church schools. Others have purchased and rehabilitated old church schools. Some have built new facilities. And others have partnered with donors or community groups to rehabilitate old industrial buildings.

All of which have different financing and debt, or shared ownership with other nonprofits or companies, that block any easy merger of schools into a collective portfolio.

That’s partly why the legislature gave IPEC until the 2028-29 school year to take over buildings. 

The legislature also allowed the district and charters to choose whether they want to put each building under IPEC control, or not – with millions of tax dollars riding on that choice.

The state now gives charters $1,400 per student for facilities costs, but that money will shift to IPEC and only go to participating buildings. Charters can also receive a share of local property taxes designated for buildings, but only those that join the portfolio.

Charters lose out on both sources of money if they don’t join, said State Sen. Bob Behning, the Senate Education Committee chair who authored the bill.

“There’s a distinct disadvantage for a charter to opt out because they’re going to lose their [money],” Behning said. “They’ll have no capital projects or no dollars for facilities.”

Charters are researching how, and whether, they should have their buildings included.

“Some of the facilities that we have ownership in, if we have full site control and full ownership, we’re happy to leverage that ownership through IPEC and see how that plays out,” said Tommy Reddicks, founder of the Paramount charter school network. “But we have some debt holders on some of our buildings, so it’s really not up to us whether or not we can give ownership away or share ownership. Because they’re the ones holding the note, they would have to approve anything like that.”

Charter experts could not point to any other districts which had to sort out these issues at this scale. Even in New Orleans, where charter schools were still so new when Katrina hit, experts said, only one school at the time was privately-owned. After Katrina, that school and the state-created recovery school district shared insurance and federal Katrina relief aid to build a new building the district owns.

Behning said that so many details need to be researched and ironed out that he expects the legislature to change state law several times over the next few years. 

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

A report released last month makes this even harder to ignore: New York State ranks among the most segregated in the entire country. That finding builds on a showing that deep school segregation in New York City has been the status quo since at least 2009. In some districts, the racial divide looks no different than it did in the 1930s.

Why have the state and the city failed to live up to the promise of excellent schools for all? Because a misconception persists: that building racially and economically diverse schools means lower quality and less academic rigor. Prospect Schools, a K-12 network of intentionally diverse charter schools in Brooklyn, was founded to challenge this notion, and I’m proud to have served as CEO since 2021. 

Brooklyn Prospect, our first campus, was the city’s first public charter school designed intentionally to be integrated along racial and socio-economic lines. Today, Prospect Schools serves almost 3,000 students across seven campuses, and is one of the few open enrollment public charter school networks offering the International Baccalaureate program to all high school students. Integrated schools benefit all students and raise performance across the board by spreading out resources and opportunity, expanding access to the best teachers and facilities, and preparing learners to thrive in a diverse world. 

The recent appointment of New York City Public Schools’ Chancellor Kamar Samuels and his policy agenda underscore that equity and excellence are not at odds. He garnered community support during previous leadership roles while  pursuing integration, an approach usually too controversial to touch. As superintendent of District 13 here in Brooklyn, he made the bold decision to replace exclusionary programs with school-wide IB enrichment. He understood that true equity isn’t about picking winners and losers; it’s about raising the ceiling for every child. 

Since taking office, Chancellor Samuels has signaled he is ready to hold this entire city accountable to a vision of education that is both radically inclusive and relentlessly rigorous. This is the right move for New York City. It also validates the approach to integrated education we rely on at Prospect Schools, where nearly two decades of work demonstrate that this vision can deliver meaningful results for students. 

We operate with a conviction that Samuels shares: that students learn best alongside peers who do not look, pray or live like them. At Prospect, we are “diverse by design,” which means we ensure that all of our classrooms reflect the vibrant diversity of the city through strategic recruitment, a weighted lottery, provision in our charter and a program that is inclusive and affirming. The result is a student body that is 29% White, 29% Black, 27% Hispanic and 10% multi-racial;  currently 44% of our students qualify for free and reduced-priced meals. 

We ensure all of our students have access to excellent teachers and rigorous academic curriculum which we model on the renowned IB Program. Through this globally recognized program, we raise the level of academic responsibility for all our students by cultivating curiosity, academic confidence, empowerment, global mindedness, community stewardship and life readiness. Further, we have proven that when you combine this intentional diversity with the high bar of the IB curriculum, the results are transformative.

Our students excel on state English language and math exams, most recently outperforming their city and district peers by 23 and 18 percentage points, respectively. This past year, over 80% of our graduating class was IB Diploma eligible, the highest in our history, and 100% of graduates were accepted into college. 

In Chancellor Samuels, I see a kindred spirit: a leader who understands that equity and excellence are not zero-sum competitors but twin pillars of a functioning democracy. Like Chancellor Samuels, I am the proud daughter of West Indian immigrants. I attended school in the Bronx and navigated the complexities of being a first-generation college student. Those experiences taught me early on that talent is distributed equally, but opportunity is not.

When I discovered the IB program, I saw a framework that didn’t just teach students what to think, but how to think. I knew then that this opportunity shouldn’t be reserved for private schools or select tracks of students — it belonged in every neighborhood and should be accessible to every child. 

We need this focus now more than ever. We are living in a time of deep polarization across our country, where echo chambers are solidifying into concrete walls. If NYC schools continue to remain segregated by race, class or academic tracking, we are merely preparing the next generation to perpetuate this divide. By championing integrated schools, academic excellence for all and global-mindedness of the IB, Chancellor Samuels is offering an antidote to this fragmentation. 

We’ve worked in education long enough to know that idea is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. And if educators let it guide the future of schooling, we’ll hurt the very children we say we’re trying to serve.

For more than two decades, we have led , an Indigenous, community-based public charter school in Northeast Los Angeles. We started this school because we believe education is not just a service — it’s a sacred responsibility that communities carry together. It is how communities sustain themselves, how culture is carried forward and how children learn to protect the world they will inherit. It was never meant to be a marketplace.

Yet the U.S. educational system increasingly treats it as one.

Schools are pressured to compete for students, buy pre-packaged curricula from multibillion-dollar publishing companies and outsource major decisions to consultants with a focus on standardization. Anyone who has sat through those meetings knows how quickly the conversation shifts from students to numbers. We’ve seen teachers, parents and even children reduced to data points.

These aren’t random shifts. They are all part of a growing push to marketize education.

You can see this trend in national politics as well. Recently, President Trump highlighted a meant to set up trust funds for children to invest in the stock market. It was framed as an investment in their future. But it also sends a message: that children’s opportunities will depend not on the strength of their education or the support of their communities, but on their relationship to speculative financial markets.

At the same time, efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education would place schools even more at the mercy of market forces. Yes, schools need funding. Yes, a functioning economy matters. But if schools teach children that their futures begin and end with the stock market, they are failing them. Their creativity, their relationships, their roots in community and their future—those are the things that actually carry them through life.

We know this because we’ve watched it happen at our school.

For 23 years, Anahuacalmecac has drawn from Indigenous knowledge systems, systems that kept communities alive on this land long before California was called California. Our students learn Nahuatl, English and Spanish. They plant gardens and learn where their water comes from. They study their own histories, including the parts of California’s story that don’t make it into mainstream textbooks. They participate in cultural protocols. They learn that they belong to a community and that their choices matter.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s preparation for the world they’re inheriting.

In parts of Los Angeles, kids grow up breathing unhealthy air and drinking water that isn’t always safe. Their families struggle with rent. Parks and open land disappear to development. The effects of climate change show up in severe weather and devastating wildfires, in asthma rates and in the daily lives of students. These crises aren’t limited to L.A., or even California. This is the reality for many children across the country — and the globe.

Schools can’t pretend these conditions don’t exist. Our job is not simply to help young people navigate crises; it’s to give them the tools and imagination to change them.

That requires something beyond training students for the workforce. It means teaching resilience, curiosity, cultural memory and responsibility to the places they come from. It means helping them recognize that their value is not determined by an economy, but by their ability to strengthen their communities and repair what has been harmed.

This approach isn’t just Indigenous. Denmark’s education system — a model U.S. policymakers often praise — focuses on creativity, collaboration and student well-being. Danish children aren’t pushed into competition at every turn or told that their future hinges on financial speculation. They are taught to think, to create and to care for the world they live in. The U.S. could learn from that.

At our school, we’ve seen firsthand that when students understand who they are and what they carry from previous generations, they don’t run from hard problems. They move toward them with confidence.

So we have to ask: What if our public education system centered on children’s well-being instead of the demands of the market? What if schools invested as much in belonging and culture as they do in standardized tests and outside consultants? What if they trusted communities — and children — to shape solutions that actually address the problems they face?

The crisis in public education isn’t because families or teachers failed. It’s because its roots in colonial missions to civilize our ancestors, factory models of training wage laborers and Native American boarding schools committed to destroying culture and language still embody the illusion of democracy through government schooling.

Educators can choose to transform this reality.

When we all create schools grounded in dignity, culture, connection and care, we prepare young people not just to face the future but to shape it. And if we want a healthy society — one capable of meeting climate, social and economic challenges — there is no better investment than that.

These changes led to exceptional improvements in academic outcomes, as researcher Doug Harris has thoroughly . In the two decades since, however, no city has attempted such an ambitious structural reform.

Until now.

The Indiana General Assembly on Wednesday passed , a dramatic restructuring of public education within the boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools. The bill was a direct result of recommendations made by the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, of local education and civic leaders. Chaired by Mayor Joe Hogsett, the alliance voted 8 to 1 in December to support a that proposed, among other things, revamping facility and transportation management for public schools within IPS boundaries.

Indiana legislators used these recommendations to craft HEA 1423, and The Mind Trust advocated for the bill because it presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a school system that serves all students well. The legislation establishes the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, which will have a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. Board members will include representatives from IPS and charter schools, as well as facilities and transportation experts with extensive knowledge of sound business practices. This new entity will be tasked with several key activities, among them:

• Creating a unified transportation plan to ensure that all public school students have access to safe, quality and efficient transportation.
• Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, buildings for all schools that choose to opt in.
• Levying property taxes for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally.
• Establishing a unified performance framework, including the default closure of persistently low-performing schools, that charter authorizers and IPS would be tasked with implementing.

The changes will effectively put charters and traditional public schools on the same footing — both in terms of the money spent per student and the consequences for poor performance.

All of this comes at a critical time for IPS. Today, a clear majority of public-school students within IPS boundaries attend charter schools, not IPS-managed schools. IPS has struggled to adjust to this new reality and, as a result, is running a $44 million structural deficit this school year, which is projected to grow significantly in the coming years. Without significant changes, the district will exhaust its rainy-day fund next year, risking insolvency and state takeover. 

Underutilized buildings and inefficient operations are key drivers to the district’s financial woes. An independently governed authority has the potential to both significantly downsize the district’s facility footprint and ensure the efficient provision of transportation. This structure also benefits charter schools by ensuring universal access to transportation and fully eliminating over time the funding disparity that currently leaves charter schools with about $8,000 less per student than traditional public schools.

While hard decisions remain for IPS, the legislation creates the opportunity for a reimagined school system, acknowledging that the status quo is no longer acceptable. The revolutionary component of the bill is simple but powerful: Separating the education of children from the management of operations. This approach allows educators to focus more time on what’s happening in the classroom. IPS will now become another school operator alongside charter schools, and district schools will compete on the same playing field and be held to the same accountability standards.

Critically, HEA 1423 allows for greater efficiency and coordination at the system level while safeguarding school autonomy and the ability to innovate at the school level. The new corporation’s role is well defined and limited to facilities, transportation and the creation of a new performance framework. Schools will be in charge of what happens inside classrooms and will even have the option to continue owning their buildings — and foregoing local debt service funds — if they feel the facilities plan does not meet their unique needs. A collaborative, multi-year planning process will ensure thoughtful implementation and the ability to identify future legislative tweaks.

Unlike New Orleans, where a hurricane forced leaders to quickly rebuild a school system, Indianapolis’ approach is a product of decades of methodical reforms and, more recently, a diverse group of local leaders coming together to reimagine what’s possible. And unlike more recent attempts at reform like Houston’s state takeover, this legislation activates a form of local mayoral control that has never before been tried: one that respects school autonomy while providing a single point of accountability for the financial and operational health of public education.

Indianapolis has been a national leader in education innovation since the 2001 passage of the state’s charter school law. Through three different mayors of both political parties, strong mayoral and civic leadership have been the cornerstone of that progress. A growing body of research shows that the growth of charter schools in Indianapolis has led students to significantly more academic progress, closed achievement gaps and helped usher in key system-level reforms.

This legislation is the culmination of 25 years of concerted effort. Now the hardest work begins, implementing this system in a way that significantly improves student achievement and forever breaks the connection between socioeconomic background, student success and long-term life outcomes.

As districts across the country struggle to deal with declining birthrates, universal school choice and lagging student achievement, Indianapolis provides a potential model for cities looking to create a modernized school system built for the future – not for a world that no longer exists. If this new structure is implemented well in Indianapolis, it won’t take another two decades for other major American cities to replicate that success. A little bit of courage today will go a long way toward securing a bright future for our children.

Indianapolis — flyover country to some — might just have the roadmap to get there.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

And while just 19 states now offer taxpayer-supported , which allow families to spend public funds on the school or program of their choice, the policy has a growing constituency: Nearly half of parents strongly support it. 

Meanwhile, the constituency for annual testing is withering, with just 29% of parents saying they strongly support it.

The new revelations come from the second edition of , conducted by the policy group 50CAN, which operates chapters in 12 states. It surveyed parents in 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found small but significant improvements across five key educational areas, including satisfaction with school quality and student mental health support. 

The findings paint a slightly different picture than the one we’re accustomed to seeing in accounts of crowding into school board meetings: 47% of parents now say they’re very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 45% in 2024. Satisfaction by low-income parents jumped five points, from 41% to 46%. 

Likewise, 41% are very satisfied with the kind of emotional and mental health support their children get at school, up four points from last year, with significant gains in critical transition grades such as sixth and ninth grade, both up about five percentage points. 

“Overall, my takeaway is we shouldn’t get distracted by all the headlines, all the crazy stuff going on in the world,” said Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN’s founder. “We have a very reasonable shot at making education better in ways that will meaningfully improve kids’ lives. We’re generally heading in the right direction.”

Among the findings: 

• Participation in tutoring rose from 19% to 24%, with the income gap nearly cut in half, from nine percentage points to five, but low-income families still struggle to get their kids tutoring, largely because of cost and transportation;
• 86% of parents now favor free tutoring, while 80% support free summer camps; 77% back open enrollment and universal ESAs;
• 49% of parents want their children to get a four-year degree, but only 38% believe it’ll happen, with college affordability a huge sticking point; 
• While more high-income children participated in summer camp, overall participation dropped two percentage points; among low-income kids, it dropped three points; kids from high-income families are now twice as likely to attend, 61% vs 27%.

On the summer camp statistics, Porter Magee said, “My takeaway from that is there’s still a need, and high-income families are really leaning into that. But low-income families are getting hit with affordability.”

Responding to the findings, Keri Rodrigues, president of the , said, “Parents are fighting for a school that works for their kid, but when higher-income families can buy tutoring and summer learning while everyone else gets waitlists and paperwork, that’s not choice, it’s rationing.”

She noted that the union’s polling shows that just 48% of public school parents say their child is “definitely academically prepared for next year”; 31% say schools didn’t even tell them what skills their child needs.

As for satisfaction with mental health support, a 2024 found that 65% give schools an “A” or “B,” but that 31% give schools a “C” or worse. 

She said her group’s findings on parents’ priorities are clear: “Make tutoring, mental health supports, and quality learning time universal and easy to access, especially for low-income families. If we’re serious about outcomes, we have to be serious about access.”

ESA support rising across political lines

Among the most significant findings, parents across the political spectrum are now increasingly interested in ESAs — 46% of Republicans, 49% of Democrats and 43% of Libertarians and Independents say they “strongly support” the idea, and among self-described members of the Green Party or , support climbs higher, to 57%. In most state-level debates on ESAs, political conservatives are their biggest supporters.

ESAs, as well as open-enrollment policies, which allows students to attend the public school of their choice, now command more support than charter schools, and by a wide margin: 46% to 36%.

Porter Magee said ESAs merit attention as an “anti-majoritarian” school choice policy that appeals to many different kinds of parents, for different reasons.

“If you’re on the far left, you probably don’t feel like your traditional public school and school district represents you and your values perfectly,” he said. “And it’s the same when you’re on the far right. A lot of times, the people who are most attached to traditional school districts are moderates — wealthy, suburban moderates. So it kind of does make sense.” 

Porter Magee said he knows of no other parent polls that break out political beliefs like this, suggesting that conservative policymakers who favor ESAs and other school choice proposals should consider “a strange-bedfellow strategy” that invites Green and DSA-aligned parents. “Maybe they are better allies on some of these issues than we think.”

More broadly, he said, “We should not be writing off the left or the right when we’re trying to figure out the coalition that would actually pass these things.”

Kids who are ‘just not doing a lot’

The survey also broke out responses by about 1,000 parents who are K-12 teachers. It found that they’re significantly more likely to be very satisfied with their children’s school, and that their kids participate in summer programs, sports, community service, dual enrollment, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses at higher rates. “They’re just more engaged,” Porter Magee said. “They’re getting more out of their time as students.”

Asked about their children’s grades, parents with kids who get mostly A’s reported that their children were more likely to do 30 minutes or more of homework, spend time with friends in person and read for fun — “all the things we want them to do,” Porter Magee said. D and F students were more likely to play video games, scroll on their phones and access social media, their parents say. 

They also drop out of sports at higher rates, he said. “They’re just not doing a lot.” 

The difference between how “A” and “D” students spend their time isn’t generally addressed in public policy, he said, “partially because we haven’t had the data, partially because we don’t know what to do about it. But I do think it’s an issue, and I think parents see it as an issue.” 

Overall, Porter Magee said, the main finding from the survey is one of slow, incremental progress for kids, whose parents now feel that they have greater access to different kinds of opportunities. But the fact that much of that progress is largely enjoyed by high- and middle-income parents, he said, is problematic.

“How would you create the public systems to make a more equal world, where all of those opportunities are available to everyone?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, and [what] the survey is helping us track.”

That feeling increased after the club, known as the O.C. Carmichael Youth Center, was used as an all-day learning pod during the pandemic for kids that needed help taking classes online, a role clubs in many cities took on.

“This building sits empty,” Wilson, now CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Northern Indiana Corridor, remembers thinking at the time. “We want every inch of this space to be utilized as much as possible for kids.”

So Wilson found an unusual way to get more use out of the building. 

After first considering loaning the 15,000 square foot space to a preschool, Wilson struck a deal with a charter school that builds many of its lessons around projects or field trips. The Career Academy Network of Public Schools, which has four other schools in the area, opened a K-5 elementary school with just over 110 students in the club at the start of the 2023-24 school year.

The partnership gives the Success Academy at Boys and Girls Club — which is not affiliated with the New York-based Success Academy charter schools — use of the building until 3 p.m. when the doors open to kids from other schools for the afternoon. Many of the school’s students stay for sports, crafts, and extra academic help with the same club aides that were in their classrooms.

“They stay with the cohort that they’re with during the day,” said Wilson. “That’s the whole idea, so that they can have that continuity of care. They know the strengths of the students that they’ve been working with all day.”

Career Academies Superintendent Candida Van Buskirk called the afterschool lessons “an additional power punch of literacy.”

“There’s no acclimation of a new leader,” said Van Buskirk. “There’s no acclimation of a new curriculum. This is the work that we do all day long, and we’re just getting an extra dose after school.”

Partnerships with schools are common for Boys and Girls Clubs, who run before and after-school programs across the country. Clubs are usually separate sites, but are often located at schools that have extra space.

But clubs hosting schools are rare. Van Buskirk said club leaders looked for clubs with similar arrangements when negotiating the partnership, but had no luck.

“We were unable to find one where it was fully enmeshed like this,” she said. 

The partnership helps the charter school in several ways. The school and Boys and Girls Club have jointly applied for grants together, which they say has helped win some. 

In addition, the Boys and Girls Clubs nationally include teaching about careers a priority of their afterschool programs, which matches a focus of the Career Academies charter chain. As part of the partnership, Katie Rodriguez, the regional workforce development coordinator for the Boys and Girls Clubs, works with the school to arrange field trips that teach students about careers.

Those trips also fit the school’s experiential learning model. Students have visited community organizations like the local food bank, local colleges, the local library so students could take home their first library cards and a theater so students could see a play and learn about all the jobs there, from actors to lighting technicians to ticket sales. 

The school also invited a judge to preside over a mock trial of the Big Bad Wolf for blowing down houses of the Three Little Pigs.

One week last fall, students visited the meteorologist at a local television station after learning about weather and how meteorology works in class.

Teaonna Miller, a school employee who works with Rodriguez to set up visits, said the hope is that students connect what they learn in class to the rest of the world.

“If they’re learning about weather inside the classroom, we find destinations that we can take them to that would relate to and correlate with the weather,” she said.

Mary Donlon, the school’s literacy coach, said the trips give students perspectives they otherwise miss out on.

“They don’t go out of their neighborhoods very often,” Donlon said. “They don’t go to museums. They don’t go to zoos on a regular basis. Generally, those experiences only happen in the school setting, and connecting it to academic things is really powerful.”

How well the school is doing is hard to say, since it is only in its third year and draws students from a low-income part of the city. School officials are proud of its giant leap from 2024 to 2025 in third grade reading proficiency from 33% of students to 70% on state tests, after participating in a state literacy effort credited with boosting scores statewide.

New tests this spring will show if gains continue.

But Wilson said he tells other club officials to consider placing schools in their clubs. He said contributing to any gains by students just furthers goals of the clubs.

“We want what’s best for kids,” Wilson said. “So it’s well worth it.”

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board voted unanimously against an application Monday for a virtual Jewish charter school, citing the state supreme court’s 2024 ruling that public funding for a religious school would violate state law. As expected, some board members voiced support for Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation.

“I think our hands are tied,” said Board Member Damon Gardenhire, who said he didn’t see much difference between Ben Gamla’s application and a now-closed Native American charter school that featured a “spiritual component.” 

In a statement responding to the vote, Brett Farley, a member of the proposed school’s board, said organizers plan to challenge the decision in federal court. “Oklahoma families should have the freedom to choose schools that best meet their children’s needs — without losing strong options simply because they are faith-based,” he said.

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board is expected to deny an application for a Jewish charter school Monday, but will likely welcome organizers of the school to take them to court.

Peter Deutsch, founder of the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, and a former Democratic congressman, made his pitch for the school in January, saying that he aims to bring “a rigorous, values-driven education” to Jewish parents in Oklahoma.

“I anticipate that our board would like to grant them the application,” Brian Shellem, the board chair, told The 74. “But we can’t snub our nose at the court either.”

He means the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which ruled against the nation’s first Catholic charter school in 2024. That decision still stands after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked over that case last year. The charter board’s likely denial of Ben Gamla’s application is expected to spark another lawsuit, pitting against those who say it would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on establishing a religion. With a case over a proposed Christian charter in Tennessee already in federal court and another religious school in Colorado founded to test the same legal question, there’s little doubt that the nation’s highest court will eventually settle the debate.

“It is hard for me to imagine the court doesn’t take the issue again when it comes to it,” said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. But after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, resulting in the 4-4 tie, the justices likely in favor of religious charters, he said, “would want a case that was very strong.”

‘Pray and hear Scripture’

So far, the only case to watch is in Tennessee. Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, a nonprofit that wants to open a K-8 Christian charter school, sued the Knox County school board because the district wouldn’t accept its letter of intent to apply. State law prohibits charter schools from being religious. 

“Students will begin to develop biblical literacy in kindergarten and begin taking catechism lessons by third grade,” according to Wilberforce Academy’s request for a quick ruling in the case. “And they will pray and hear Scripture together in a school assembly every morning.”

As St. Isidore did before them, Wilberforce argues that the nonprofit is a “private actor” and that approving its charter application would not turn it into a government entity.

The Knox County board told the court that it will “most likely” not take a position on the legality of Wilberforce’s argument. On Thursday, the board rejected asking state education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds to consider granting Wilberforce Academy a waiver so they can open the Christian school.

The Knox board, however, also said the issue of religious charter schools “deserves a thorough examination by the federal courts.” 

Judge Charles Atchley Jr, for the Eastern District of Tennessee, thinks so, too. Last week, he allowed a group of Knox County parents and religious leaders, who oppose Wilberforce’s application, . 

The case, he wrote, has the “potential to reshape First Amendment jurisprudence in the educational context” and it wouldn’t serve the court or parties involved to not have “vigorous advocacy on both sides.”

Amanda Collins, a retired Knox County school psychologist, is among those who have signed up to fight against Wilberforce Academy. She has two children still in the district and one who graduated in 2024. She grew concerned about Wilberforce Academy when she learned the organization didn’t have a history of operating charter schools in the state and feels its attorneys are using the district to “merely force an issue up the ladder to the Supreme Court.”

“In Tennessee, we have plenty of things that are underfunded,” she said. “We don’t need to be wasting our local Knox County taxpayer money on somebody’s agenda that is not intended to promote the education safety and wellness of our public school students.” 

‘The clear constitutional boundary’

Another school that could spark a lawsuit over public funds for religious schools is Colorado’s , which advertises that it offers students a “Christian foundation.” 

The school operates “pretty much just like a charter school” said Ken Witt, executive director of Education reEnvisioned, the board of cooperative educational services, or BOCES, that contracted with the school. 

As , emails between the attorney for the Pueblo County district, which allowed the school to open within its boundaries, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm, suggest the school was intentionally founded to test the legal argument over whether public schools can practice religion. 

After threatening to withhold state funds because of the school’s religious mission, the Colorado Department of Education funded Riverstone’s 31 students. But the state is also conducting a , which could take another year, before deciding whether it can legally provide money to the school. In the meantime, Riverstone had to close its building last week because of health and safety violations. It’s unclear whether students are learning remotely or in another facility in the meantime.

For now, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat running for governor, hasn’t issued an opinion on Riverstone, but his views on St. Isidore, the Oklahoma school, were clear. Last year, he in opposing state funding for the school.

In , he urged the Supreme Court “to preserve the clear constitutional boundary that protects both religious liberty and the integrity of our public education system.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican who is also running for governor, made a similar argument about St. Isidore before both the Oklahoma and U.S. supreme courts. 

But that’s where both he and Weiser split with the Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. In his , Skrmetti states that categorically excluding faith-based schools from public charter programs violates parents’ rights to freely exercise their religion.

To Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute, it’s a matter of equity. Higher-income families can move into wealthier neighborhoods or pay private school tuition, he wrote in a on the Wilberforce case. The state, he added, already funds religious schools through education savings accounts. 

“But families who rely on charter schools are told that their options must be secular,” he wrote. 

Black, with the University of South Carolina, said the issue comes down to who authorized the school to begin with. In both Oklahoma and Tennessee, either local or state boards approve charter applications.

“That explicit state involvement, to me, makes it clear that state action is involved,” he said, “and thus the Establishment Clause applies.”

New Jersey’s education department approved the renewal of five charter schools in Newark and the expansion of two schools, but denied an enrollment expansion for KIPP TEAM Academy in the South Ward after the city’s public school district raised objections.

Kevin Dehmer, the state’s education commissioner, renewed Great Oaks Legacy, LEAD, Robert Treat Academy, North Star Academy, and TEAM Academy charter schools to operate for the next five years, through Jan. 30, 2031, according to charter school decision letters obtained by Chalkbeat from the state education department.

Robert Treat Academy, with campuses in the North and Central wards, and North Star Academy, part of the Uncommon Schools network across Newark, received approval to boost their enrollment by the 2030-31 school year, but the state blocked TEAM Academy’s request to add just over 1,000 seats by 2030-31.

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Kevin Dehmer, the state’s education commissioner, sent charter school decision letters on Jan. 16, before Gov. Mikie Sherrill was sworn in. The letters were sent to schools statewide that sought renewals or amendments to their charter agreements, including requests to renew charter applications, add a grade level, or increase seats. The education department evaluates requests by reviewing a charter school’s academic, operational, and fiscal standing, outlined by state guidelines.

State laws allow charter schools to be renewed for a maximum of five years, but signed this month, the education commissioner can grant 10-year renewals to charter schools that meet high-performing standards.

This year, 22 charter school requests were approved statewide, including the five in Newark. New Jersey renewed charter agreements for schools in Jersey City, Paterson, Hoboken, and Camden, and denied the expansion of Thomas Edison EnergySmart School in Somerset. Overall, nine charter school enrollment expansions were approved across the state.

The decisions charter school determinations made under former Gov. Phil Murphy to approve charter schools and deny expansions. Sherrill has not explicitly stated her plans for charter schools in New Jersey, but during , she generally opposed expanding school choice through vouchers or new charter schools. She has said she would support expanding the state’s program.

Newark Public Schools Superintendent Roger Leon asked the state to renew TEAM Academy’s charter without an enrollment expansion, citing the “fiscal impact” on the district, according to the state letter. Leon alleged that “the school does not enroll a proportional share of multilingual learners and students with disabilities,” according to a letter he submitted.

Leon also opposed expansions for North Star Academy and Robert Treat Academy, citing the same reasons.

The charter school decisions come as Leon continues to reclaim Newark public school buildings lost under the state’s 25-year takeover of the district. He has vowed to slow the spread of charter schools in the city. In 2024, the district that forced People’s Preparatory Charter School out of the Bard Early College High School. with Achieve Community Charter School to create a new K-12 school called BRICK Gateway Academy.

Newark Public Schools opposes charter school expansion

Founded in 2002, TEAM Academy was the first school operated by KIPP, a national charter network, in Newark. The school enrolls grades five through eight and requested to expand enrollment from 7,920 seats to 9,010 seats by the 2030-31 school year, according to its state decision letter this year.

After reviewing the school’s academic, organizational, and financial performance, the state found that TEAM Academy partially met standards in board capacity, school climate and culture, and access and equity. According to annual reports submitted to the state, the charter school board had not conducted formal evaluations. The board is expected to complete them during the next five years, according to the state letter.

The school also reported a 17% out-of-school suspension rate for school years 2021-22 through 2023-24, during which several kindergarten through second grade students received out-of-school suspension each year, the state letter read.

State officials said the high number of suspensions created “significant concerns” in the school’s ability to adhere to state law, which restricts out-of-school suspensions for those grade levels, TEAM Academy’s decision letter stated.

But the state found the charter school met standards in educating students with disabilities and multilingual learners, contradicting Leon’s allegations. TEAM Academy has roughly 939 students with Individualized Education Programs, with an average of 80 to 90 students with existing IEPs or Section 504 Plans enrolled annually, according to the state letter.

John Abeigon, the president of the Newark Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the City Association of Supervisors and Administrators, among other unions and groups, also submitted comments opposing TEAM Academy’s enrollment expansion.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, along with council members Patrick Council and Anibal Ramos, submitted comments in support of TEAM Academy, expressing support for the charter renewal due to the school’s “strong academic record and the educational choice it provides to the Newark community,” according to the state letter.

By the 2030-31 school year, Robert Treat Academy will expand from 860 seats to 1,620 seats, while North Star Academy, with schools in the Central and West Wards, will boost enrollment from 7,792 seats to 8,556 seats after receiving approval this year.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Correction appended Jan. 29

When The 74 started looking for Bright Spots — public schools that are beating the odds  helping low-income students learn to read — it was hard to miss how well charter schools performed. Charters made up 7% of the elementary schools in our national sample but 11% of those that we identified as delivering exceptional results, with reading scores that far exceed what might be expected given the poverty rates of the populations they serve.

Charters were even more overrepresented in New York. There, charter schools made up 9.5% of the state sample, but they earned 38.5% of the spots on our list of exemplars. 

By our metric, the 10 highest-scoring schools in the state were all in New York City — and seven of them were charter schools located in the Bronx. Another was a charter school in Harlem, and the other two were traditional public schools in Brooklyn.

Click on the yellow dots to see the details for each Bright Spot school. Click anywhere in the map to close the data box. (Map: Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The74)

All serve a high concentration of low-income students, with 66% to 92% of children qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch. And yet, 90% to 97% of their third graders were proficient readers in 2024, the year of our analysis. In comparison, the proficiency rate for all third graders across the state was just 43%. 

The highest-scoring school by our metric was the Success Academy Bronx 5 Upper Elementary School. In 2024, despite a 90% poverty rate, 94% of its students scored proficient in third grade reading. In , its students did even better, with 96% scoring proficient in reading and 100% doing so in math.

In fact, Success Academy has 21 of its schools on our Bright Spots list. The Icahn charter network has five, South Bronx Classical has three and the KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy networks have two each.

But even beyond charters, it is clear that families with young children in New York City in particular are blessed with a variety of good options. Of the 143 exceptional schools across the state, 97% — 138 — are in the city, and 84 of those are traditional district schools. 

As one example, in 2024, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis elementary (PS 66) had 81% of its students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, yet 84% of its third graders read proficiently. It also did even better in , with 71% of students with disabilities, 84% of Hispanic students and 87% of all students scoring proficiently. These rates all far surpassed the statewide average.

These stats may be heartening, but New York City might soon be able to provide even better options for families.

As a district, the city is in the midst of sweeping changes to how literacy is taught. That initiative, called , requires schools to use one of three phonics-based reading programs with a track record of producing student gains. As that program continues to roll out, participating schools saw last year, and incoming Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to double down and make teaching vulnerable students how to read his “No. 1 goal.”

These are promising signs of progress. On the charter school front, it bears noting that there’s a on how many can operate in New York City, and as the maximum has already been reached, no new ones can open until that cap is lifted. According to the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY, New York City students are on charter wait lists. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani has charter schools’ expansion in the past, but he may need to reconsider, given their prominence among the ranks of Bright Spot schools.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the charter school networks with schools on our Bright Spots list. The networks are Success Academy, Icahn, South Bronx Classical, KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy.

The , published Jan. 13 from the , analyzed records from more than 1.7 million Michigan K-8 students who switched from a district to a charter school between 2013 and 2018. 

The nonprofit concluded that while students with disabilities spent more time in general-education classrooms and received less intensive services than their peers in traditional public schools, their standardized test scores increased along with those of their classmates who didn’t qualify for special ed.

Charter enrollment for students with disabilities has historically trailed behind that of public schools. While parents sometimes charter schools after poor experiences with traditional districts, charters also have a regarding special education. One found that charter schools may discourage parents from enrolling their children with disabilities because of concerns about how special education students impact overall academic performance and budgets.

But the results in Michigan show that children who receive special education services do well academically with fewer supports when they enter charter schools, “suggesting charters may have adopted, identified and developed approaches to teaching students with disabilities that warrant further study,” the research says.

“Charter schools can be a useful educational tool for parents with students with disabilities,” said Scott Imberman, one of the study’s authors. “They shouldn’t be quick to rule it out, because it does seem that, for at least a substantial segment of disabled students, charter schools are helpful for them — at least for their academic performance.”

The study found that math and reading test scores improved for both special education and general education students for at least two years after they enrolled in a charter school. Absence rates also decreased.

These findings match a in Boston, which revealed that children with disabilities who were accepted at a charter school through a lottery system were more likely to meet college-ready benchmarks than special education students in traditional public schools.

Imberman said that because children with complicated special education needs tend not to enroll in charter schools, the study’s results suggest students with less severe disabilities can thrive alongside the general-education population.

The study used students’ individualized education plans to see how special education services changed after enrollment in a charter school. Before switching, all students spent an average of 2.3% of their school day in a special education setting. The rate dropped to 1.2% immediately after entering a charter school but rebounded to pre-charter levels by the third year of enrollment.

Identification rates for special education students also mostly stayed the same — around 14.5% — when students switched, but then gradually increased. Two to three years after charter school enrollment, special education identification rates increased 1 to 2 percentage points.

The study also analyzed the use of resource and cognitive programs, two areas of special education services that are tailored to specific student needs. Resource programs often provide services to students who spend most of their school day in a general education classroom, while cognitive programs include more costly and intensive therapies, and students usually work with a designated special education instructor, according to the study. 

Once Michigan students with IEPs switched from a traditional public school to a charter, participation in resource programs increased by 4 percentage points, while cognitive programming decreased by 5 points.

A key limitation of the study is that the research only shows what was written in students’ IEPs and what changed post-enrollment in a charter. It does not reveal whether the school actually followed through with required services. 

“Our data also does not reflect the perspectives of students and families,” the study said. “It is essential that students with disabilities are included in future research on school choice to understand whether their needs are being met in different choice contexts.”

Recently, charter schools in and were found to have violated special education laws, and one in suspended students with disabilities at three times the state average.

Imberman said many charter schools aren’t set up to effectively serve some special education students, especially those with severe disabilities that require costly therapies and assistance.

“This is a large concern in the back and forth with traditional schools and charter schools, particularly when it comes to students with disabilities — that even if students with disabilities are entering charters, the ones who are most expensive are the ones who remain in the traditional public schools,” he said. “That creates a disproportionate burden on the traditional public schools.”

Rather than treating district buildings as contested territory, communities, districts and charter operators should view underused public space as an opportunity to expand access for students and make better use of the public’s investment in education infrastructure.

Experience from across the country shows that, even in a state at the forefront of education choice like Florida, legal frameworks aren’t enough to guarantee the equitable use of public resources. Charters’ access to public facilities also depends on local solutions and genuine collaboration between districts and charters.

In a co-authored by our organizations, the Florida Charter Institute and Momentum Strategy & Research, we analyzed 20 Florida counties that contain 90% of the state’s charter schools. Our findings show that enrollment in traditional district schools has steadily declined throughout the past decade, leaving over 645,000 seats available in district facilities. Charter school enrollment, meanwhile, has grown by more than 136,000 students over the same period. 

We estimate that 12% of all district facilities currently have the space available to house an average-sized Florida charter school. In fact, while falling student enrollment is a growing financial problem for Florida’s school districts, our research shows that the number of district-operated buildings slightly increased across the state during this period. 

Publicly available data shows that newly opened charter schools in Florida spend nearly one-quarter of their annual budget acquiring and maintaining suitable facilities. The state provides limited facility funding to defray capital expenses, but that covers only a portion of what charters pay toward their buildings. As a result, Florida charter schools rely on an industry of building developers, landlords and lenders, often placing them in commercial spaces that don’t meet students’ needs — even as hundreds of district facilities operate under capacity. 

We recently surveyed over 100 charter school leaders in Florida. Their responses indicate a growing need for solutions to the state’s facilities problem: 76% said their school was at or near enrollment capacity, and 52% responded they are exploring or planning to grow beyond their current facility. “Facility issues are the number one issue facing our ability to maintain or expand,” said one charter school leader in Naples, while an Orlando-based charter school referred to facilities funding as its “main source of concern.”

However, charters don’t appear to view district space as an option, as only 18% of survey respondents reported ever exploring the availability of underutilized district space. Those who do are met with resistance: The same Naples-based school noted that there was available capacity in nearby district schools but that “district leadership seems closed to the idea.” A charter leader in Miami commented that the district is “very averse” to facilities arrangements with charters. In fact, while Florida’s charter schools account for 14% of all public school enrollment in the state, only 4% operate in district-owned buildings.

Florida law lacks enforcement mechanisms that would obligate districts to share space with charter schools, instead provide “surplus” or “unused” facility space for charters “on the same basis as it is made available to other public schools in the district.” Research shows that, across the country, laws intended to expand charter access to district facilities often due to similarly vague language.

This year, Florida’s legislature partially addressed the issue through a measure that allows specially designated, high-performing charter schools to . However, the new law provides virtually no incentives for districts and no process to resolve disputes with charters or among competing charter operators. Districts are as the law goes into effect. 

Shared facilities arrangements between districts and charters require more than legal nudges from the state. Several cities, in fact, have demonstrated that such partnerships can effectively support resource-starved public schools. In New York City, for example, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his first chancellor, Joel Klein, promoted co-location to encourage charter growth, guided by the premise that available public school space should . Close to half of New York City charters now operate out of district buildings, and suggests that these arrangements have not negatively impacted student performance. 

In San Diego, the citywide school district established a to support the planning and placement of charters in district facilities. In Washington, D.C., the city developed a successful to house new charters. In Indiana, the 2014 establishment of allowed districts to attract independently run schools, including charters, and promoted facilities sharing. More recently, the Indiana state legislature has pushed Indianapolis to share facilities and buses among charter and district schools. 

Starting in 2008, Denver Public Schools leadership pursued a strategy that encouraged charter growth by sharing the district’s underutilized facilities. By 2017, the district had more charter and “innovation” schools — district-run schools that are afforded increased autonomy —, a strategy that led to “significant, sustained, systemwide improvements in learning.”

While our research revealed untapped opportunity in sharing school facilities, public data does not tell the whole story of whether a given building is suitable for a specific charter — making local agency even more necessary for working out where these opportunities lie.National charter leader Nelson Smith once school districts’ “monopoly” over public school facilities as “an accident of history.” In states like Florida, where charter schools are an enduring part of public education, sharing unused district space with charters is an untapped opportunity, but weak laws and local obstinacy remain obstacles. Stronger legal mechanisms from the state can open the door for change, but it is up to local leadership to implement those changes and, ultimately, rethink how we manage the public schoolhouse.

In 1971, Derrick Bell became the first Black man to be awarded tenure at Harvard Law School. As part of his teaching load, he developed a civil rights course that focused on race. In order to meet its topical requirements, Bell wrote an accompanying textbook, , which is foundational in critical race theory. It holds that racism is an ordinary and permanent feature of American society. His claim was viewed by many colleagues at the time as a radical statement, and it remains so for many today. Yet, it carries forward a certain truth that the history of school choice persuasively illustrates.

Having served as a federal attorney litigating desegregation cases, Bell had grown skeptical about forced racial integration and whether it would actually improve student learning. The original edition of his 1973 textbook included a chapter outlining “Alternatives to Integrated Schools” by which “black children might receive the long-promised equal educational opportunity — in predominantly black schools.” The chapter included a discussion of tuition vouchers.

Bell argued that for vouchers to work, poor families would need to receive substantially larger grants than the more fortunate. He also mentioned “free schools.” These were small, private institutions in poor areas supported by foundation grants, fundraising and, sometimes, public dollars. Tuition was charged on a sliding scale, and students whose parents could not pay attended for free. Many of these schools began “deep in the black community.” For example, Bell mentioned a system of schools operated by the Black Muslims that emphasized racial pride, self-discipline and self–sufficiency. He explained that such virtues are not commonly celebrated in the neighborhood public schools Black students attended. He pointed out that students at the Muslim schools performed several grade levels above most Black teenagers who attended public schools. 

Bell saw school choice as the culmination of a series of disappointments in the fight for educational equality. He understood it as a dramatic manifestation of the ways the Black community was losing confidence in its public schools. After numerous false starts to achieve desegregation and equalized funding, many Black activists turned to demands for community control. In 1968, a group of local parents and residents in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood wrested local control of their school board. When a similar eruption took place in Milwaukee in 1988, those involved issued a call to action — commonly referred to as the — demanding that the state allow them to establish an independent school district. 

To lend a helping hand, Bell traveled to Milwaukee and wrote an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal. Published under the headline “Control Not Color: The Real Issue in the Milwaukee Manifesto,” it took issue with the better-off liberal activists who condemned the plan. “Can we whose children are not required to attend the inner-city schools honestly condemn the Manifesto writers and their supporters?” Bell wrote. “After all, when middle-class parents — black and white — lose faith in the administration of a public school, we move to another school district or place our children in private schools. Inner-city black parents who can’t afford our options seek as a group a legislative remedy that may after a long struggle enable them to do what we achieve independently by virtue of our higher economic status.” 

Soon after, in 1990, the same Black activists in Milwaukee joined forces with their white Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, and his conservative legislative colleagues to pass the nation’s first school voucher law. The original Wisconsin vouchers were targeted at low-income students stuck in chronically failing public schools. Five years later, Wisconsin became the first state to expand its voucher program to include religious schools.

Bell revisited the topic of school choice in (2004). By then, vouchers had been adopted in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., among other places. He acknowledged that vouchers were “probably the most controversial of educational alternatives to emerge in the last decade,” but that they were also growing in popularity. He understood that many opponents were liberal Democrats with long histories of civil rights activism. These critics alleged that minority parents were being duped, that the real beneficiaries of such programs were private religious schools gaining enrollment. 

Bell recognized these criticisms but was also sympathetic to arguments by free-market advocates who believed that the competition fostered by choice would incentivize floundering public schools in Black communities to improve. He did not deny that the Catholic Church had become a major player in the choice movement to address its own declining school enrollments. But Bell was more impressed with how many Black and Hispanic parents chose Catholic schools over public schools because of their more disciplined learning environments and better academic outcomes. He cited one particular Catholic school in Milwaukee, where 80% of the students were not Catholic and the voucher covered most of the tuition.

Silent Covenants also delves into the topic of charter schools. Bell lauded them as innovative institutions that give options to all students, not just the wealthy who can afford private school tuition. He rejected claims by liberals that the institutions would become bastions for middle-class families who were better prepared to work the system, citing evidence that two-thirds of charter students nationwide were nonwhite and more than half were from low-income families. Critics had also raised concerns that charter schools would discriminate, become racially isolated and drain resources from regular public schools. Bell, unmoved by these claims, was more concerned that charters were receiving 15% less funding than other public schools.

Now, 30 years after the Milwaukee breakthrough, the school choice movement has taken off in a new direction. Republicans who once allied with Black advocates to demand better options for low-income students now rally behind appeals for universal choice, which provides such benefits to all students regardless of family income. Eighteen states have enacted such programs. When awards do not cover the entire cost of tuition, they end up subsidizing better-off families and neglecting those unable to make up the difference. As demands for private and religious schools grow, so does the competition for seats and the incentive to raise tuition. Yielding larger numbers of applications from a stronger pool of students, these initiatives can function more to enhance the choices available to school admissions officers than the most needy students.

A that President Donald Trump signed this year allows a tax deduction of up to $1,700 for anyone who donates to an organization that gives scholarships for students to attend private or religious schools. Like the state-level universal choice programs, the federal initiative does not target low-income students. Assistance will be available to any family whose income is below 300% of the average for their area.

Here is the underlying political irony to the choice debate: For years, when programs were designed to help the most vulnerable students, the major opponents were activists who historically have identified with progressive causes. Now, conservatives are spending with abandon — in many cases, with limited public accountability — on programs that can create opportunities for students who need them the least. In either case, those who get hurt remain the same, and they are disproportionately under-resourced students of color. Derrick Bell would not be surprised. 

In 1980, Bell wrote an for the Harvard Law Review advancing a concept referred to in the scholarly literature as the “interest convergence dilemma” that is fundamental to critical race theory. It holds, “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.” Not very trusting of white collaborators hailing from either the left or right, it deems political alliances temporary and subject to the competing priorities of all pertinent parties, anticipating eventual abandonment. 

And so, that’s the way it is.

Those classes included three players who would shape the future of District of Columbia schools: Michelle Rhee (future D.C. chancellor), Kaya Henderson (Rhee’s successor) and, perhaps most importantly, Susan Schaeffler, 55, who is retiring after 25 years as the founder of the KIPP DC Public Schools charter network.

It was Schaeffler (pronounced SHEFF-ler) who proved with her 2001 launch of KIPP KEY Academy that hiring highly motivated and skilled teachers could make academic success stories out of high-poverty children with multiple at-risk flags. Six years later, standardized math and reading tests in grades 5-8 would show KIPP students outscoring their D.C. Public School peers, particularly in eighth grade and most strongly in math.

In a few years, Rhee would choose the same strategy, pushing hard on teacher quality. And Henderson would do the same.

It was Schaeffler who showed that her one school was not a fluke. By 2006, she ran three successful middle schools with long waiting lists: Today, there are 20 KIPP schools in D.C. that educate roughly 7,300 students, of whom nearly 70% meet the at-risk definition (students with families on income or food support and those who are wards of the state, homeless or overage in high school).

In the early KIPP years, veteran education reform expert Andrew Rotherham recalls leading a tour of mostly charter skeptics when they visited one of her schools. “Susan was giving a talk on how they do things and one guy thought he was really going to dunk on her, so he said: ‘I heard you talking about performance, fundraising and management, but I haven’t heard you talking about loving children.’”

That was a mistake. 

Schaeffler paused, looked at the guy, and as Rotherham recalls, firmly responded: “Let me tell you something. The way you show you love children isn’t talking about it. It’s building effective places for them to be and that means knowing how to raise money, deploy money, manage people, all of it. Doing things really well for them is how you show children you love them.”  

Don’t be thrown off by Schaeffler’s blonde suburban look: She’s got a very sharp edge, world-beating relentlessness and a mind that doesn’t shy away from the unconventional.

Shannon Hodge, who is taking over at KIPP DC’s helm, said before she met Schaeffler she asked around about her and was told: “You’ll be in a meeting discussing something and Susan will have five ideas. Two of them will be illegal, two of them will be impossible — but the last one will be the visionary thing no one ever thought of.”

Finally, it was Schaeffler and other charter operators. working with first Rhee and then Henderson, who forged the crucial compete-but-play-nice stance in D.C. that’s missing between charter and district schools in most cities.

All the experts agree: That competitive cooperation and the unwavering focus on teacher quality on both sides are the biggest reasons why D.C., across multiple school-quality measures, from the percentage of 3- and 4-years-olds enrolled in pre-K to fourth- and eighth-grade scores on the highly watched National Assessment of Educational Progress, shot  

“Part of D.C.’s story is that it is one of the few places where the charter sector and the district came together and created a culture of putting kids first,” KIPP national co-founder Dave Levin told me last week. “Susan modeled that from the start, pushing for things that were good for D.C. as a whole.”

This strategy could have happened in other cities. But for the most part, it hasn’t.

Teachers with ‘the whatever-it-takes mindset’

That Baltimore TFA experience was wild: Rhee and Schaeffler slamming into the brutal realities of urban teaching in Baltimore. It was from that time that I got the title for my book about Rhee, , after she swatted and swallowed a bee her kids were crazily chasing around the classroom.

After Baltimore, Schaeffler gave teaching in a traditional D.C. elementary school a try, but her desire to give her students the option of staying longer than the dismissal bell to allow them to catch up ran into a stone wall. It worked for a bit, but not for long. We just don’t do that here, she was told.

“I got to the point where the system was preventing me from doing what I knew needed to happen to make sure our kids are ready for college, or ready for the next grade,” Schaeffler told me in a recent interview.

The KIPP founders in Texas heard about her, sent plane tickets to come to Houston and convinced her to start a KIPP school. Their preference, Atlanta, got rejected by Schaeffler. D.C. is home, she said, and being able to tap into the talent network she knew there was crucial.

The founders relented, and soon Schaeffler was recruiting the handful of teachers who would launch KEY Academy. “I definitely wanted to recruit teachers who had the whatever-it-takes mindset. We were going to be creating and implementing and revising all at the same time.”

Schaeffler looked to the Teach for America network and then expanded by interviewing friends of friends. ”You would say, ‘I need a teacher who can work long hours, has great classroom management and gets results.” Before hiring anyone, she observed them in the classroom.

It would appear Schaeffer recruited well. Among that first small group of hires for KIPP KEY were several who in the future would launch their own new KIPP schools. 

‘The school down the street is outperforming us’

Now entering the D.C. picture in 2007 was newly appointed Chancellor Rhee, who took note of the rising quality challenge presented by Schaeffler’s KIPP network and other charter operators and stomped the accelerator on school improvement. And by school improvement I mean teacher/principal quality.

Rhee took over a bona fide mess of a school district, one that regularly was described – — unchallenged — as the worst (and most expensive) in the nation. In my book, the chapter where I recite the dismal outcome data for D.C. students is titled, “Welcome to the Nation’s Education Superfund Site.”

The city’s corrupt mayor, Marion Barry, used the district to stash political buddies. The former teachers union president got sent to jail for embezzlement. Even simple tasks such as delivering textbooks didn’t happen. There was no curriculum. In comparison to other urban districts, D.C. lagged far behind. 

Rhee moved into her role as chancellor with a bullrush, much to the distaste of many in Washington, especially teachers who preferred the status quo. Rhee told everyone that she wanted teachers with “snap.” Teachers soon learned what that meant: a mashup of energy and effectiveness that creates classroom magic.

That didn’t always go over well.

I accompanied Rhee on many school visits, and while sitting in the back of the room watched teachers dramatically roll their eyes in protest. Many teachers appeared to see their role as more social workers than academic instructors, which probably explained the abysmal test scores.

One elementary school had this sign posted: “We’re doing the best we can with the children sent our way.”

But Rhee’s vision was made easier to explain to others by the example Schaeffler set. “In community meetings,” Schaeffler told me, “I heard Rhee say that the school down the street is outperforming us.” And “that school” was KEY Academy. 

In 2007, when Rhee arrived, 100% of KEY eighth graders scored proficient on D.C.’s standardized math test, compared to 34% of district students.

There’s another aspect to KEY’s success: When researching my book , I searched nationally for schools where boys were succeeding at the same rate as girls, and KEY turned up as one of the few where that happened. I approached Schaeffler in 2006 for permission to observe, and she gave me full access to KEY. In short, teacher quality (and a relentless push on literacy skills) explains the gender equality.

Thus began Rhee’s own full-on press for principal and teacher quality, a process that would lead to several hundred teachers getting fired along with lots of principals. Those firings, however, were accompanied by the newly designed IMPACT teacher evaluation system, a first-in-the-nation attempt to define, measure and boost teacher quality — a plan that handed out bonuses to the highest-performing teachers.

The reforms began to take hold, but Rhee’s fierceness why Adrian Fenty, the mayor who appointed her, lost reelection in 2010. The new mayor, Vincent Gray, quickly fired Rhee. 

But then something interesting happened: Not only did Gray promote Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s deputy, as the new chancellor, but IMPACT survived, despite intense teacher opposition (The American Federation of Teachers to ensure Rhee and IMPACT would disappear.)

Why did the new mayor allow Rhee’s reforms to survive? When the chancellor got fired, IMPACT was only about a year old, and thus too young to measure its effectiveness. But its potential was clear to everyone.

“My last major public event before I left DCPS was “Standing Ovation” which we held at the Kennedy Center to honor the highly effective teachers in the district,” Rhee told me in a recent interview, referring to the first group of top teachers identified by the evaluations. “Watching a bevy of teachers dressed to the nines, giddy at the recognition they were receiving, made me know what we put in place with IMPACT was working and made everything worthwhile.”

That meant that the twinned philosophies of pushing teacher quality and collaborating with the charters, pioneered by Schaeffler, became permanent fixtures in D.C. One prominent example: , launched in 2017, an application/lottery system shared by parents seeking seats in either system.

There was also the leadership training program for both charter and district teachers at Georgetown University. Schaeffler’s top example: During the pandemic, everyone on both sides held hands to figure out how to teach remotely and when to return to school.

Finally, the D.C. mayors have a great incentive to make sure the two sides work together. “We can’t have half the kids not be successful,” says Schaeffler.

Two leaders who quickly bonded

Fervent D.C. school advocates at the polar opposites hate the suggestion that D.C. charters and district schools get along. They see great injustices aimed at their side. What they miss, however, is that their quibbles pale compared to the destructive hatred between the two sectors in other cities. 

Boston has some of the highest-performing charters in the country (see Edward Brooke Charter Schools), and yet the state’s powerful teachers unions ensure that those charters can’t expand to take in more students. In Los Angeles, charter leaders and district leaders talk to one another mostly through lawyers in courtrooms. 

New York City and Newark are home to what may be the nation’s most successful charter network, Uncommon Schools, that pulls disadvantaged minority students into its classrooms, who then experience college acceptance and college graduation rates close to well-off white students.

How could any district not want to tap into that expertise?

Years ago, I sat through some small-scale Uncommon collaborations in New York and Newark, which seemed promising. But those have disappeared — no teaching collaborations in New York since 2020. 

There is no way Rhee and Schaeffler would have let that opportunity slide by.

When Rhee arrived in D.C., the two leaders bonded quickly. Rhee told me she had been on the job only a couple of days when she took an urgent call from Schaeffler: “We’re starting a summer school (in a district building) and it’s 90 degrees and we have no air conditioning!”

Rhee immediately called maintenance, sent them hustling over to the summer school site and got the AC working. The next day Schaeffler called back incredulously. “Holy crap, they came out and fixed it.”

Rhee knew KIPP ran quality schools, so she never fought against them.

 “I was open to giving charters our buildings,” Rhee said. “Why would we deny families of Wards 7 and 8 (D.C. ‘s highest-poverty) schools like [the ones] KIPP runs? Everyone would want to send their kids there.”

Rhee’s memories of Schaeffler? “Throughout the time she was so helpful, so supportive.”

School choice now part of D.C.’s DNA

Today, D.C., parents embrace school choice as an unquestioned right, whether it’s choosing a charter or a non-neighborhood district school. Only about a third of D.C. parents select their neighborhood school. What that means is that choice is embedded, with schools vying to outperform and, therefore, attract students. 

In the mostly white, highly affluent 3rd Ward, there are no charters and parents send their kids either to local elementary schools, where they are surrounded by other children from well-off families, or private schools. In the 7th and 8th Wards, charters are the go-to places. Where it gets interesting are the rapidly gentrifying in-between wards, where charters often get selected by well-off “progressive” families, many of whom may frown upon charters as a concept, but love having a close-by high-quality school.

Overall, s, or about 48% of all D.C. students, attend its 133 public charter schools. D.C’s gentrification may explain why district students now outperform charter students in both math and reading (45% of district students are at-risk, compared to 69% of charter students).

“Competition between sectors is healthy,” said Schaeffer. “It pushes both sectors to get better for students. Over the last two and a half decades, that dynamic has raised the bar across the city. As the city has changed, so have the needs of our students.”

KIPP and other charters are still struggling to raise scores, she said. “At the same time, the long-term outcomes tell an important story and remain strong. Year after year, our graduates enroll in and complete college at higher rates than the city … The forward momentum between the traditional and charter schools is promising and should be celebrated. Both sides are seeking the best ways to educate and prepare our students for success.”

Where next for Schaeffler?

 “I haven’t looked around in 25 years to see what’s out there for me. I am energized to find my next thing but my priority is a successful transition. I will be transitioning from CEO in February to a special advisor role. I will always be a cheerleader for the amazing staff and students at KIPP DC.”

The bottom line remains: worst to most improved. Twenty years ago, no one could have foreseen this outcome. This could have happened in cities such as L.A., but it hasn’t — and doesn’t appear to be in their future.

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When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. charter board in 2011, and became KIPP’s overseer, he recalls visiting Schaeffler at her office and finding her and KIPP DC President Allison Fansler sharing an office.

 “Many great charters are like great British rock and roll bands. They always had two key people, and it was the genius between the two that made the band great,” he said. “Here you had the CEO of a multimillion-dollar organization and she shared an office. It wasn’t five minutes that went by that they didn’t talk to one another. Constant interaction.”

Fansler shared an office with Schaeffler for 16 years. Whenever a call came in about a problem at a school site, Fansler said Schaeffler would immediately grab her coat and head out. The two of them, no matter which bolted for the door, shared a text code for that: Imonmyway.

Deputy Mayor Paul Kihn said when he sees his cell phone light up with Schaeffler’s name, “I know I am going to get an earful on behalf of her students. She is going to tell me the real story about how something is working and what I need to do to fix it. I am incredibly sorry to see her go.”

Of all the reformers who helped with D.C.’s recovery, Rhee and Schaeffler probably qualify as the fiercest. As Kihn puts it, “Susan is a force of nature.”

All you need is the patience to wait for that fifth idea to pop up.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham sits on The 74’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

A panel ordered by the state legislature is hurrying to recommend by the end of December how the Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools could work together to make busing and unused school space open to charters.

It’s the latest battleground in the decades-long fight between charter schools and school districts nationally over who has control of schools and the tax money that supports them. In Indiana, where state leaders strongly support school choice, power has shifted more and more to charters, which now educate more than half of Indianapolis students.

The panel won’t make its final recommendations until Dec. 17, but is leaning toward creating a new governing body to oversee sharing of schools and buses. Last week the panel narrowed its debate to two approaches, both of which give more power to charters and take it from the district’s elected school board.

The first would create a “collaborative compact advisory board” of appointees from the district, mayor and charter schools. The second would create an Indianapolis Education Authority with a mayor-appointed board and new city secretary of education.

The panel’s vote to focus on these two options, rather than letting the district take the lead, drew boos from residents who want an elected board to make decisions, not an appointed one.

Despite the boos, there’s strong support for expanded busing for charter school students in the city, where charters are not required to pay for buses, and usually don’t, to save money for teachers and books. The panel, however, has already rejected offering buses to every student to attend any school, anywhere in the district they want, as too expensive, so there will be limits.

How many students will be affected also depends on another key issue to be resolved — whether all Indianapolis charters would have to opt into the new collective plan. Some of the proposals require participation and others don’t, which looms as a potential fight as the plan is finalized. The Indianapolis Local Education Alliance will make final recommendations Dec. 17. 

Any new plan will likely need approval from a heavily Republican and pro-charter state legislature, whose leanings are a backdrop to the debate.

But though some shift of assets to charters is now all but certain, gains for those schools won’t come without strings. District schools and charter schools will have to give up some autonomy in return for a piece of the collective pie.

Scott Bess, founder of the successful Purdue Polytechnic charter high schools and of the Charter Innovation Center advocacy group, called that tradeoff a “grand bargain.”

“You’re going to have to have some standardization,” said Bess, who’s watching the panel closely. “That’s the bargain.”

Charter schools’ will likely have to adjust their daily schedules and yearly calendars to fit a broader busing plan that aligns vacation days and school opening and closing times so buses can take more than one load of students to school each day.

And charters that have built their own schools or leased them for years may have to turn those buildings and leases over to the new body, which could then decide to close a school and give the building to another operator.

There’s also debate whether charter schools in the city should even have a choice to be part of a collective plan. Early indications are that the state legislature would not back requiring charter schools to join.

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Aleesia Johnson told the panel last month that if the goal is to make sure all students have transportation, then schools shouldn’t be allowed to opt out.

“If schools are given the option not to participate, and enough schools don’t, then you don’t have a system anymore,” she said.

Angela Smith-Jones, Indiana University’s associate vice president for state relations and a member of the panel, also called for mandatory participation for all charter schools.

“Then it’s really solving the problem,” Smith-Jones said at the same meeting. “All schools are actually getting the exact same thing. Seems fair and equitable.”

Bess,who’s also a member of the Indiana state school board and of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, wants the panel and state to give schools a choice. He said school leaders are weighing, even as the plans are being developed, whether giving up control for more resources makes sense for them.

“The devil is clearly in the details,” said Bess. With school buildings, Bess said, schools have to weigh their own budgets, building debt and repair needs against giving an asset to an outside authority that could delay building upgrades or even shut a school down.

“Local property taxes (could pay) for all those improvements and maintenance and all the things that go with it,” Bess said. “But with that comes this grand bargain that we have to perform academically to a standard that is accepted across the city.”

“As I talk to a lot of charter school leaders, they’re looking at this saying, ‘Man, I don’t know that. I want to give up my full autonomy,'” he said.

Schools are also weighing whether a central, but more standardized busing schedule for all schools might mean giving up early dismissal days or other schedule differences.

“Some schools that I’ve talked to said ‘That’s not worth it to me,’ like ‘I’ll walk away from the money, because my schedule and my autonomy on how I operate is really important to me’,” Bess said. “Other schools said, ‘Oh, wow, you mean I could actually provide more transportation for more kids, and all I’ve got to do is give up a little bit of my quirky schedule.’”

Tommy Reddicks, CEO of the successful Paramount charter school chain, has opposed any changes to charter school autonomy, including demands from some residents that the state block new charters. He told the panel last week he also opposes forcing charters to be part of a transportation authority.

“Requiring districts or agents to control charter transportation in any mandated form, strips operational independence,” said Reddicks, whose schools do not provide buses to save money. “Mandates that limit charter autonomy violate the very reason the (panel) was created.”

But there’s a big financial incentive to join – a share of tax dollars the state legislature has already voted to give charters. The legislature voted this spring to give charter schools a share of local property taxes that have traditionally gone to districts starting in 2028, but some state officials have slated that money to go to the new collective busing and building effort — not to individual schools in addition to it.

That legislation, Senate Bill 1, would give charter schools $2,050 per student in local property taxes in 2028, rising to $3,750 per student by 2031.

“In Indianapolis, instead of having (property tax) transfers from IPS (the district) to the charters, that transfer is going to happen through the authority,” said Indiana House Education Committee Chairman Robert Behning.

“(If) you want to have access to that funding, then you need to participate in the authority,” he added.

Behning said one limit the school district and some other advocacy groups have sought — limiting the number of authorizers that can approve new charter schools in the city — is unlikely to win support from the legislature.

Behning said he would never want only the city mayor’s office to authorize new schools because that would make the ability of new schools to open dependent on who wins the latest mayoral election. 

“Whatever happens, we have to make sure that it can’t be changed by the next election,” he said.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially the school as Christian. But it in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. 

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide.

“Unless and until the U.S. Supreme Court takes up a future case and rules otherwise, we advise all charter school associations and public charter schools to adhere to the letter and spirit of the law in their respective states,” Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement.

‘Not on our watch’

When the Supreme Court considered St. Isidore, Deutsch, was prepared to advocate for Jewish congregations to open schools that not only teach their language, but also their faith. He called the case “a historic opportunity” to bring Jewish education to thousands of children.

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release.

The legal fight over religious charter schools began in 2023, when the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve a charter for St. Isidore, setting off a closely watched case that spanned two years. At the time, the Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City, a nonreligious group, called the charter board’s decision unconstitutional. Rachel Johnson, the group’s executive director, didn’t return calls or emails requesting a comment on Ben Gamla’s proposal.

None of the members who originally voted on St. Isidore serves on the state’s new Oklahoma Charter School Board. But for one person involved with Ben Gamla’s application, this is familiar territory. Brett Farley is on the proposed school’s board, according to a letter of intent the foundation submitted to the charter board in November.

Farley once held a top position with the and is also executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which focuses on public policy issues involving the church. While preparing the St. Isidore application, with Notre Dame law Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, whose scholarly work formed the basis of the legal argument for the school.

�Ҳ����Ա�ٳ�’s is that nonprofits running charter schools are like private contractors, and as with other publicly funded programs, can’t be excluded just because they are religious. She’s also close friends with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who recused herself from the St. Isidore case. Experts speculated that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberals on the court, resulting in the 4-4 tie.

‘Passion for religious freedom’

The virtual school, the intent letter says, would initially enroll about 40 students, focusing on “college readiness, while developing deep Jewish knowledge, faith and values within a supportive learning community.”

But some are surprised Deutsch isn’t making his bid for a Jewish charter school in Florida, where his existing, non-religious charter schools have thrived.

“I think Florida could be a good option given the new attorney general’s passion for ,” said Daniel Aqua, the director of special projects at Teach Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for Jewish education

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Charter founders in Florida submit their applications to local school districts first. The state recently added as authorizers, but Oklahoma, where organizers directly with the state charter board, offers a more streamlined process. 

‘Public Christian school’

But efforts to create publicly-funded religious schools are not limited to the charter sector. A new school in Colorado, Riverstone Academy, calls itself the state’s “first public Christian school.” Now serving 30 students in Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs, Riverstone is what is sometimes referred to as a “contract” school because districts sign agreements with private organizations to provide education services. In this case, Education reEnvisioned, one of the state’s 21 boards of cooperative educational services, or BOCES, authorized the school. 

In October, the Colorado Department of Education warned Ken Witt, the BOCES’ executive director, that the school’s per-student funding is at risk because it is “not operating in a nonsectarian nature.” The letter also went to District 49, near Colorado Springs, one of Education reEnvisioned’s member districts. 

In a response, Witt wrote that he was “alarmed at the threat” that the school might not receive funding. “We did not and legally cannot discriminate against this school on account of its religious affiliation,” he wrote. Examining Riverstone’s curriculum to determine if the school is truly sectarian, he said, would be “unconstitutionally entangling and discriminatory against different forms of religion.”

Witt told The 74 that funding usually doesn’t flow from the state to a new school until January, so it’s too soon to know whether officials will withhold funds.

‘Keep coming back’ 

“You’re going to see those within the charter sector and outside of it basically taking the same approach” — arguing that private groups delivering religious instruction can’t be denied public funds, said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. 

To Green, Riverstone’s identity as a “contract” school calls to mind a 1982 case, one that Garnett and other proponents of religious charter schools often highlight when they say that charters are not “state actors.” In , the Supreme Court said a Massachusetts private school that received public funds for educating teens with behavior problems did not act under the “color of state law” when it fired six employees. 

The question, experts say, is not if, but when the Supreme Court will eventually see another case about religious public schools Justice Barrett won’t have the same reason to recuse herself, Green said, and he’s not convinced that Roberts would side with the liberals a second time.

The advocates, he said, “keep coming back at this because they think that they’ll get the votes.”

Seldom listed among the nation’s top K–12 performers or its most aggressive reformers, the Ocean State was nevertheless home to a relatively powerful school choice sector. According to the study, students at Rhode Island charters gained the equivalent of 90 extra days of learning in English, and 88 extra days in math, per year.

With the U.S. still groping its way back from massive pandemic-related learning loss, the New England-specific finding generated little focused attention either locally or nationally. But in October, CREDO released that suggests the impressive results may be rooted in the state’s approach to opening and evaluating charters.

Rhode Island’s charter regulations are “instrumental in driving” student success, CREDO argues, pointing to a 2017 overhaul of accountability procedures that simplified the conditions for schools to be rated and renewed. According to interviews with over a dozen key figures from the charter world, the Rhode Island Department of Education, and the governor’s office, the change in law improved relationships between schools and state authorities and reduced uncertainty in how schools were assessed.

“There has been a change from chaotic beginnings to more structured, standardized practices,” said Marzena Sasnal, the lead author of the report and a senior research associate at Stanford. “Participants see this as an improvement.”

Yet the local debate around school choice remains fractious, with charters often seen as competing with districts for students and education funding. Within the last few years, lawmakers considered enacting a moratorium on further charter growth, while leaders of the state’s largest district skeptical of charter expansion.

Justine Oliva, the director of research and policy at the nonpartisan , called the matter of charter schools in the state “contentious,” particularly given in K–12 enrollment since the disruptions of COVID-19.

“With declining enrollment, I do think it’s likely that the issue continues to be a live one, particularly with the proposal for new charters moving forward.”

Charter leaders ‘in the dark’

Rather than directly addressing the often-frayed politics of school choice, or even the inner workings of charters themselves, the CREDO report focuses on the more technical subject of charter school authorization — the process by which new schools are approved, kept open, or, if necessary, shuttered completely.

The state, which legalized charter schools in 1995, established a formal framework for evaluating them 15 years later. But according to the educators and bureaucrats who spoke with Sasnal, the flaws in that review mechanism led to low trust on both sides and a degree of unpredictability when the time came to decide whether schools would be allowed to continue operating. 

With renewal decisions spaced at intervals of five years, charter leaders told CREDO they often felt as though they were acting “in the dark,” without receiving timely feedback on their academic performance or organizational health. Even annual data from standardized tests didn’t give a clear picture of how schools would be judged, some complained.

“The criteria for renewal were so ambiguous and complicated,” said Macke Raymond, CREDO’s director and a co-author of the report. “It didn’t even matter what your state test scores were because you didn’t know what the authorizer’s standards of evaluation were going to be when you came up for renewal.”

The atmosphere was clouded further by political and legal pressure that sometimes developed when regulators made their decisions. When Blackstone Valley Prep, one of the top-performing charter organizations in the state, was greenlit for renewal in 2011, several members of the Rhode Island Board of Education with connections to teachers’ unions . A few years later, three districts the opening of a new school, alleging that community opposition to the move had been ignored.

Following the 2017 reforms to the performance review system, however, CREDO’s interview subjects agreed that the steps to approval and renewal are more legible both to schools and community members. Charter applications are published online, and in communities from which students would likely be drawn. School officials said they had a clearer understanding of the outcomes they would be held responsible for, including both academic performance as well as financial and managerial indicators. One leader said his charter school had been able to identify problem areas early and “put in place a corrective action plan.”

Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University, said the updated framework played “a key role” in stoking improvement in the state charter sector.

“The review system integrates national standards, such as standards established by the , to sharpen the focus on performance-based accountability, data transparency, and quality monitoring.”

Tensions remain

Still, whatever tensions have been alleviated by the revamped system of charter regulations have not dissipated completely.

Elections last year in Providence — by far the largest city and school district in the state — elevated three candidates endorsed by local teachers’ unions to the newly re-established school board; just one charter advocate won election. This summer, the city council appeared poised to permit the Excel Academy charter organization to obtain a lease on a shuttered district school, in the face of public outcry. It was the second year in a row that a version of the deal, brokered by Providence’s mayor, .

The back-and-forth follows a legislative push for a statewide moratorium on new charter growth that stalled in 2021. The state’s governor, Democrat Dan McKee, is a noted supporter of school choice currently seeking reelection. But , and the future direction of policy in the state is unclear. 

Representatives from both of Rhode Island’s major teachers’ unions declined to comment for this story.

Total charter enrollment in the state is comparatively high, with roughly 10 percent of all K–12 students attending a charter school. Even beyond that figure, however, much of the demand from families is unmet: Nearly 30,000 students submitted applications for in the 2023–24 school year. 

RIPEC’s Justine Oliva, pointing to on overall charter enrollment and performance in Rhode Island, called the schools “a bright spot” in the state education mix, overwhelmingly attracting students from disadvantaged communities and delivering significantly better academic results than the school districts they would otherwise attend. Children attending Achievement First charters — currently enrolling over 20 percent of all charter students in the state — were twice as likely to score proficient on state reading exams, and three times as likely on math exams, as those in their sending districts. 

“Not all charters have great outcomes,” Oliva said. “They may still have a lot more applicants than get in, but they don’t all have great outcomes. However, our largest charters have outcomes that outperform the sending districts, as does the charter sector overall.” 

For , Lower Lab, an Upper East Side Gifted & Talented school was ranked number one by US News. Also in the top 10 were four citywide G&T programs. Each school exclusively accepts students who have been designated as “gifted.”

Rounding out the top 10, however, are Success Academy – Bushwick and Success Academy – Bensonhurst, public charter schools that accept students by lottery, while also prioritizing English Language Learners (ELL).

On the surface, these schools couldn’t be more different. Number one, , has only 13% of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Price Lunch (FRL), and 1% ELLs. Number 10, , conversely,  has 65% of its students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, and 26% who are English language learners. 

But the selective G&T schools and the unscreened charter schools have one characteristic in common: An expectation that their students can succeed.

The book, describes an experiment where “researchers falsely told teachers some of their students had been identified as potential high achievers. The students were in fact chosen at random.”

At the end of the year, the “students that were chosen were more likely to make larger gains in their academic performance,” with those “7-8 years old gaining an average of 10 verbal IQ points.”

This study concluded that “when teachers expected certain children would show greater intellectual development, those children did show greater intellectual development.”

At the G&T schools, teachers have every reason to believe their students are capable of performing at the highest levels.

Parents have seen this firsthand.

“I strongly believe that when teachers are told their students are gifted, they begin to treat them as gifted — and this changes everything,” asserts mom Natalya Tseytlin. “In a gifted classroom, if a student struggles, teachers don’t assume it’s because of laziness or inability; they respond with patience and extra attention. In a regular class, that student might not receive the same support or challenge, because the teacher sees the child as average. 

Tseytlin said her son started his first grade gifted and talented program with limited English skills. But because his teacher offered consistent support and believed in him, he excelled. 

“Today he is performing at the same level as his peers,” she said.

“I don’t think the expectations at (my child’s) G&T school are so high that only gifted kids can meet them,” another parent, who only asked to be identified as M.K. opined. “Regular schools don’t ‘push’ kids enough to reach their potential. Those G&T schools that do push, get results because most kids are capable of this level of learning without being ‘gifted.’ If teachers treat students as capable, students will indeed meet expectations.”

The belief that all students can perform at a “gifted” level is sacrosanct at Success Academy.

“Success Academy is Gifted for All,” CEO Eva Moskowitz affirms. “When adult expectations are high, our scholars — mostly low-income, Black and Hispanic — can meet the highest academic standards.”

The same is true at Harlem Academy, a kindergarten through 8th grade private school for students whose potential might otherwise go unrealized. 

“It’s tough to decouple the influence of high-quality programming from high expectations,” concedes Head of School Vinny Dotoli, “but authentically challenging students is central to the ethos of our school. When great teachers set ambitious goals and provide the structure and support to reach them, it almost always makes a lasting difference in student achievement.”

Parents with children in schools where high expectations aren’t the norm would love to see changes. 

“I have a daughter in a dual language program in East Harlem,” Maria McCune relates. “A neighbor who used to attend our school changed his daughter to a G&T program at another school in East Harlem. He immediately noticed a difference in the quality of instruction and in his daughter’s performance (MUCH improved). I participate in my daughter’s School Leadership Team and I have seen the apathy teachers there exhibit. It is concerning. When I tried to provide feedback about improving the educational experience, teachers/staff often became defensive. It is this that leads me to want to pursue G&T for my daughter.”

For Tiffany Ma, the solution is obvious. “Our second grader that transferred into G&T writes much neater and does her homework much more happily since she’s in an environment where academics and homework is valued by other classmates and parents. We should expand G&T programs. It’s regular programming that shouldn’t exist.”

Yet New York City seems headed in the opposite direction. Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to get rid of elementary school G&T programs  that begin in kindergarten. He would wait until students enter third grade, even though the research referenced above specifically mentioned children 7 and 8 years of age( i.e. second graders), as being the biggest beneficiaries of high expectations. , as well. 

This move would lower the academic standards and expectations of all schools, which deeply concerns parents like McCune. She fears “Children like my daughter may be left as collateral damage of an educational experience that falls short of setting them up for significant academic success.”

The top schools in NYC have repeatedly demonstrated that high expectations are key to helping all students reach their full potential.

We need more such schools, be they public G&T, charter, or private. And more teachers who believe in all our kids.