Charter Schools: Structure, Governance, and Funding

Charter schools are built on the premise that the homogenous educational framework that defines the generic traditional public school is too rigid to accommodate all learners.^{Footnote 28} Antithetical to their traditional counterparts, charter schools exist in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes featuring an equally diverse assortment of pedagogical approaches that drive multiple curricular themes. Despite their diverse venues and mandates, however, there are broad structural commonalities that charter schools share. Charter schools are publicly financed institutions that receive significantly less funding per pupil than their traditional public school counterparts. A 2017 study found that, across regional contexts, charter school students receive an average of $5,721 less than students attending traditional public schools, representing a funding gap of 29 percent.^{Footnote 29} In addition to standard public funding, charter schools are also encouraged to seek federal grants and are eligible to receive philanthropic donations. Working within this framework, charter schools are freed from most of the rules and regulations that traditional schools must conform to. Some of the foundational freedoms that charter schools enjoy include autonomy in areas of staffing, curriculum choice, and budget management. Collectively, these freedoms allow for, and in fact encourage, the creation of unique educational landscapes that ideally reflect the preferences and values of participating families, school founders, and the communities within which these schools are nested. In return for these freedoms, charter schools are expected to produce positive academic results.^{Footnote 30}

The autonomy from state regulations that defines the charter school movement aligns closely with popular conceptions of the American founding ethos. This ethos is ensconced in notions of minimal state encroachment that works to maximize individual liberty. The fact that structural elements of what would emerge as the charter school design were not included in the original nineteenth-century vision for compulsory schooling suggests that the creation of the common school was driven by the pragmatic needs of the fledgling Republic. These needs were very different from those that frame the popular mythos of the American creation narrative and its metanarrative(s). This fundamental shift, from a philosophy dedicated to maximizing individual and regional autonomy to one dedicated to a collectivist approach to shaping the transmission of normative values, makes the formative years of the Republic a critical period in locating the moment when the state initiated a vision for compulsory education that chafed against America’s founding ideals. The entrenchment of a state-driven public education system within a highly regionalized libertarian-leaning Republic, worked to make certain that centralized education policy would encounter substantive resistance by various stakeholders looking for increased autonomy in the education of their children.

The Early National Period and the Emergence of the Common School

The unifying theme for the architects of the American Revolution centered on the idea that the power of the state should be viewed as a potential agent of tyranny. With this in mind, when exploring the intellectual roots of the charter school movement, it is important to begin by considering how the classic liberal ideas, which moved the colonists to wage a war for independence, were compromised in favor of a state-centered pragmatism during the early years of the Republic. One salient manifestation of this philosophical shift was the creation of the common school.^{Footnote 31} The creation of a common educational experience was judged necessary in order to compensate for the decentralized architecture of education policy.^{Footnote 32} Wedded to this Tenth Amendment reality, the fidelity of American federalism was jealously guarded by the states, as they firmly adhered to regional sensibilities while remaining suspicious of centralized authority.^{Footnote 33} With regional protections in place, the common school era initiated a period of structural entrenchment that would prove remarkably resistant to innovation.^{Footnote 34}

The American War for Independence left an indelible mark on the development of education. Against the backdrop of a receding British imperial power, the early years of the Republic shaped the development of American education in surprising ways.

In the mythos of the American Revolution, colonial majorities rose in solidarity to resist the tyranny of the British Empire. However, as Wood explains, nearly 20 percent, or half a million of the colonists, remained loyal to the Crown, while another eighty thousand left the colonies for good.^{Footnote 35} By 1786, the jails were overflowing with debtors and former militia members. In this atmosphere, Daniel Shays emerged as the symbol of American unrest. The young soldier-turned-farmer was one of thousands of Massachusetts veterans facing foreclosure on his farm while wealthy landholders profited off the seized lands. Shays and his comrades mobilized to occupy county courts in a futile attempt to prevent the authorities from seizing their property; a militia was dispatched and Shays and his companions were quickly routed.

Shays’s Rebellion, along with lesser-known uprisings, such as the Whisky Rebellion, and other minor skirmishes along the Western frontier, are more notable for the response they engendered than for any real threat they posed to the Union. They convinced the founders that the threat of a domestic uprising was a real possibility; furthermore, officials became increasingly concerned that European powers, notably Spain, France, and a wounded Britain, were waiting to ally themselves with disaffected former colonials.^{Footnote 36} These fears moved policymakers to rework the framework of the federal government to allow for greater centralized control and a more coherent national mandate. Central to this task was the question of how best to instill a fierce patriotism in future generations that would work to protect the integrity of the Republic.

The task of instilling a sense of civic fidelity in a fragmented and restless population resulted in an atmosphere conducive to the emergence of a statist common school system.^{Footnote 37} The educational structures that emerged were developed from a pragmatic perspective that implicitly swept aside the Revolutionary idea that Americans were a unified people who, if left to their own sensibilities, would produce a coherent republic. To this end, Benjamin Rush argued that American prosperity was predicated on the ability of education to “convert men into republican machines,” which, Rush continued, would “allow them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state.”^{Footnote 38} As Tyack explains, policymakers struggled with the task of “balancing order and liberty,”^{Footnote 39} and, in doing so, settled on the idea that American social and economic challenges required a form of didactic social engineering. In other words, the new republic required an education system that would mold a particular type of citizen, one who would ideally perpetuate republican ideals of civic virtue. The development of a common education system was a crucial element in sustaining a stable democracy dedicated to the perpetuation of a uniquely American ideology. Early American policymakers viewed factionalism, regionalism, and ignorance as existential threats to the longevity of the American union. In Federalist 10, Madison warned that popular governments must be prepared to “break and control the violence of faction,” which could be accomplished “by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” In order to achieve these ends, Reinier argues that it was considered “imperative to give republican stability to the character of the rising generation.”^{Footnote 40} This critical transmission of “character” would lean heavily on schooling for transmission, which, in turn, would require minimizing the transmission of values not endorsed by the state. This mandate is clearly articulated in Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson justified his bill on the grounds that common education would provide the “key-stone of the arch” of the American government by “raising the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability.”^{Footnote 41} For Jefferson, every individual had a role to play in the maintenance of the Republic. The nature of an individual’s specific contribution would be dictated by his intellectual gifts. Jefferson wrote that the ultimate purpose of the bill was to lay “the foundations of future order” by “raking from the rubbish the best geniuses” of the general population. Jefferson’s plan required dividing counties into sections called hundreds. Each hundred would contain a school that children would attend for three years. At the end of every year, “the tutor would select the boy of best genius, and send him forward to one of the grammar schools of which twenty would be erected.”^{Footnote 42} This selection process would continue after the grammar school years, with the top half of the students continuing their education at Jefferson’s alma mater, the College of William and Mary, while the bottom half would be returned to the grammar schools to be employed as tutors. As Hellenbrand argues, Jefferson’s educational philosophy was nested in a nationalistic paternalism.^{Footnote 43} This paternalistic streak was borne of Jefferson’s lack of faith in the innate propensity of individuals to embrace republicanism. To render the people safe from themselves, Jefferson wrote that the “people’s minds must be improved to a certain degree.”^{Footnote 44} To achieve this goal, he sought to insulate Americans from vice and those social influences that failed to promote civic virtue. Jefferson’s legislation was never passed; however, Horace Mann, the architect of the common school movement, embraced Jefferson’s beliefs regarding the role of education in providing a conduit to instill core republican values and beliefs.

As a result, in the interest of national stability, a centralized influence would displace revolutionary notions of autonomy. The nineteenth century finally brought to fruition what Rush, Jefferson, and others had advocated for since the early years of the Republic: formalized education.^{Footnote 45} Commensurate with this, a competitive tension surfaced between the home and the school, characterized, as Cutler explains, by “blurred boundaries and shared functions.”^{Footnote 46} For generations, this tension would remain largely subterranean; as will be seen, however, it would resurface as a key driver in moving conservative activists to lobby for increased autonomy in making educational choices for their children.

The formation of publicly funded, compulsory education was a pragmatic policy response to significant challenges; overcoming these challenges required the creation of a unified republic populated by individuals dedicated to the advancement of American republicanism. From inception, however, there was a fundamental paradox imbedded in collecting taxes to fund a common education system dedicated to schooling children for the purpose of guarding liberty against the potential tyranny of the state.^{Footnote 47} In part, this inherent contradiction welling up from the American founding provided fertile ground to cultivate future resistance to the traditional public school experience.^{Footnote 48} In the coming decades, the Civil War years would initiate—albeit slowly—an era of resistance to traditional American society and the school system that perpetuated it. The end of the Civil War era guaranteed that American policymakers would have to contend with an added layer of societal complexity: the transition of African Americans from bondage to citizenship. While constitutionally this transition was achieved through the ratification of the Civil War Amendments, the equitable access and benefits commensurate with such a transition represent an ongoing process. This process has run the gauntlet of failed policies from Reconstruction to the underwhelming impact of the Brown ruling. ^{Footnote 49} In the wake of Brown, the African American community waited for the ruling’s decision to deliver increased educational opportunities for their children. As the decades passed, a growing number of families began losing faith in state-mandated education, controlled, as they saw it, by gatekeepers drawn from the reservoir of white privilege.^{Footnote 50} The educational aspirations of marginalized communities would continue to be undermined by the intransience of traditional education; this contributed significantly to the rise of the charter school movement as a growing number of African Americans began exploring alternative ways of accessing equitable public education.

In exploring this shift from a historical perspective, it is important to trace the African American experience at the hands of the dominant white culture from the antebellum period to the ascension of modern school choice. This is critical for two related reasons: first, the catalysts that moved African American families to the forefront of the school-choice movement are cumulative and intergenerational, as opposed to a monolithic reaction to twentieth-century conditions. Second, one of the most profound criticisms of the charter school movement is its propensity to resegregate student populations.^{Footnote 51} Indeed, as I will show, the rationale for the first school voucher program in Wisconsin suggests a regretful but purposeful disengagement from traditional public education, as African American families sought equitable treatment within the public education system. It is important to recognize that I am not arguing for direct causation between the nineteenth-century experiences of African Americans and the rise of the charter school movement. However, the African American narrative has been shaped by cycles of rejection and cruelty that have worked to create an atmosphere that both initiated the erosion of the monopoly of traditional public schools and instilled a readiness to embrace alternative modes of education.^{Footnote 52}

From Antebellum to Brown

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the rise of the common school attempted to fulfill the eighteenth-century dictum of engineering citizens who would embrace the principles of American republicanism. Common schools provided an institution within which all children could feel part of a cohesive society; however, these schools reinforced a conception of citizenship anchored in whiteness.^{Footnote 53} For white children, school reformers accelerated the momentum of the common school through the idea that, in Moss’s words, “regardless of their birthplace or social standing [children] could enter as individuals and exit as Americans.”^{Footnote 54} As James Anderson explains, “Just as popular education for free people began to flourish . . . the successful campaign to contain and repress literacy among enslaved Americans triumphed.”^{Footnote 55} Historical events prior to African American emancipation, combined with the holistic impact of slavery, worked to initiate a salient and enduring alienation from the dominant culture that would be fortified after the Civil War. As this narrative played out over time, the cumulative impact of intergenerational cycles of rejection would contribute to African Americans embracing an isolated education dynamic. For example, during the years between the various antebellum compromises and the Dred Scott decision, ideas surrounding African American citizenship were regional and ill defined. Moreover, even when African Americans were integrated into society, it was done piecemeal and entrenched in caveats meant to position them as a permanent underclass. One of the more provocative episodes of the period involved the sudden popularity of African repatriation organizations. Made up of affluent white Americans, groups such as the African Improvement Society, promoted the education of African Americans, not to ease their transition into society but to facilitate a successful program of repatriation back to Africa. Despite the best efforts of these societies, African Americans, while taking advantage of educational opportunities, showed little interest in returning to Africa, choosing instead to seek recognition within the American polity.^{Footnote 56}

The thought of an educated black population remaining in the United States resulted in the rise of an existential fear among white Americans. Moss captures the city of New Haven’s unease quoting Jonathon Wainwright, an affluent socialite and active supporter of the African Mission School Society, who, writing in the New Haven Chronicle in 1828, warned that the rise of black emancipation would result in the “immediate destruction of the white population.”^{Footnote 57} When not concentrating on repatriation, many whites were preoccupied with keeping the distinction between the races monolithic. The historical record is dotted with examples of cold indifference to supporting African American educational aspirations. For example, in 1825, Rhode Island’s Providence Journal reported that a black schoolteacher, having exhausted her own funds in keeping a school open for poor “colored” children, was denied minimal assistance and was instead chastised because “no one wished her to educate [Rhode Island’s] black population.” The council feared that encouraging access to schooling would “offer . . . inducements to call them [blacks] within our boundaries.” The reaction of white policymakers in Providence is consistent in spirit, if not in tone, with the resistance that African Americans would continue to encounter well into the twentieth century as they attempted to secure equitable educational opportunities for their children.^{Footnote 58}

By the eve of the Civil War, anxieties surrounding the impact of educating African Americans had evolved to overt opposition, thus forcing African Americans to cultivate educational opportunities within their own communities. The venue of choice for creating these opportunities was the church; the church served as an oasis for African American families. Billingsley and Caldwell chronicle decades of research illustrating the important historical role the church played in providing a place to promote the liberating possibilities of education for African American communities.^{Footnote 59} The era of Reconstruction produced a series of contradictory policy initiatives that left African Americans in limbo. Despite glimpses of slowly evolving equity during the period of Radical Reconstruction, such as the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the establishment of the U.S. Bureau of Education in 1867, the nineteenth century would end with the imposition of an apartheid existence via the Plessy decision. In the midst of the immediate chaos that followed the end of the Civil War, black Americans set about “reconstituting families, building churches, and, most notably, demanding access to literacy.”^{Footnote 60} During the first decade of African American freedom, churches doubled as schools and teachers taught classes as large as one hundred students.^{Footnote 61} The vitriolic reaction of white Americans moved many black Americans to embrace a garrisoned social dynamic. This reality, while discriminatory and devastating, also worked to strengthen relationships within segments of the African American community. The legacy of this dynamic would prove foundational in encouraging African Americans to embrace school choice over a century later.

Against this backdrop of vicious persecution, a unique communal pedagogy was forged in many African American communities. Within this dynamic, each individual was accountable to the next. Jones found that many of those who were educated during the American apartheid era recounted that not learning was “unacceptable to teachers, family, peers and the community. The choice was how much one would learn, and what subjects would be mastered.”^{Footnote 62} In the wake of the Brown decision, one African American scholar noted that “there is a nexus between families, neighborhoods and schools . . . restructuring of the schools brought about an imbalance in the Black community.”^{Footnote 63} Existing in an empathetic environment among students, families, and teachers fostered an intimate understanding of the reality of the world and the unique challenges that African American children would face as adults.^{Footnote 64} To be clear, the post–Civil War reality for African American families does not represent the halcyon days of black education and achievement. The entire doctrine of “separate but equal” was driven by a post–Civil War reality that sought to maintain African Americans as a permanent underclass. The 1954 Brown decision, in outlawing state-sponsored segregation, was crucial in breaking down du jure social barriers for African American children, adults, and families. However, given that more than sixty years later Brown has failed to achieve substantive educational equity for marginalized minority students,^{Footnote 65} its most salient legacy may be its catalytic role in moving significant factions of African Americans toward embracing the charter school movement. A historical analysis of the lived experiences of generations of African Americans suggests that, in the wake of Brown’s failure to offer meaningful integration, these traditionally marginalized communities reached a tipping point, making them receptive to alternative forms of public education divorced from concerns over racial integration.^{Footnote 66}

Brown as a Counterintuitive Driver for School Choice

Decades before Brown v. Board of Education, as some northern states were experimenting with integrated schools, W. E. B. Du Bois pondered the necessity of separate schools for “negro” children. Du Bois concluded that such schools were needed “so far as they are necessary for the proper education of the negro race,” because, Du Bois argued, “perfect social equality [between student and teacher] is essential to induct the child into life.”^{Footnote 67} Although Du Bois was a key player in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), his arguments in support of the regrettable need for separate education venues for black Americans would prove anathema to the organization and many of its allies. Moreover, it would be pivotal in the years following the Brown decision in providing a gateway to charter school legislation.

Despite the prominence of the Brown ruling, it has failed to reconcile its desegregation mandate with its aspirations for educational equity.^{Footnote 68} Regarding the tangible educational benefits for minority students in general and African American students in particular, Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most divisive cases in the history of American jurisprudence.^{Footnote 69} Harvard law professor and civil rights activist Derek Bell argued that the Brown decision was a “magnificent mirage.”^{Footnote 70} To Bell’s point, the law was passed without any serious thought as to how its goals of racial equality would be attained, while Jacoby concludes that “the law was an incredibly weak attempt at achieving this goal.”^{Footnote 71} The Brown ruling, having found state-mandated segregation to be unconstitutional, was nested in the promise of equal opportunity to realize human potential; it was not predicated on a semantic rendering of the Constitution. Brown took a broader, more nuanced view: the promise of Brown is steeped in equality of opportunity, as opposed to the application of a concrete legal principle. Lacking a substantive enforcement mechanism, the Brown decision required a seismic shift in societal norms to realize the ruling’s promise. In 1954, the vitriolic reaction to school desegregation was not encouraging, and, instead, helped move African Americans toward reimagining an educational covenant that would best facilitate the realization of the promise of Brown. This departure was not leveraged solely by white America’s reaction to Brown v. Board of Education.

In brief, the fracture would occur throughout further legal action, failed policy mandates, and legal decisions that directly worked against the realization of the promise of Brown. The lofty aspirations of Brown, while laudable, also made it vulnerable to noncompliance. Therefore, when the initial ruling failed to result in meaningful desegregation, a second Supreme Court ruling, Brown II, directed schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” as local conditions and sensibilities allowed. As Jim Chen observes, this “formula enabled public school districts in the South to delay school desegregation for more than a decade.”^{Footnote 72} It would require the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to catalyze states into complying with the nation’s desegregationist mandate. By the early 1970s, however, the promise of the Brown era was stymied by the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision; the ruling decimated the promise envisioned by the Brown decision by halting a desegregation remedy in the city of Detroit.^{Footnote 73} The justices found that while the Detroit school district was indeed segregated, the desegregation remedy lay beyond the powers permitted by the Constitution. With the justices concurring that indeed segregation was a salient problem in the city of Detroit, but refusing to act in concert with the promise of Brown I, the Supreme Court all but guaranteed that historically marginalized communities would require an alternative strategy to realize educational equity.

The reception of the initial Brown decision offers a glimpse into the cycle of du jure acceptance and de facto rejection experienced by black individuals and families as they worked to achieve and maintain meaningful integration into American society. As Brown was making its way through the judicial process, the Mississippi state senate came within two votes of abolishing public schools. Anticipating the end of the Plessy era, state Senator Earl Evans prophesized that “if white and colored children went to school together for 12 years you would mongrelize the white race.”^{Footnote 74} This fear of the existential other permeated the atmosphere of Brown, serving to further the sense of alienation felt by African Americans. In 1956, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Herbert Sass echoed the concerns of Senator Evans when, in the wake of the Brown decision, he warned his readers that while “most persons find the idea of mixed mating disagreeable or even repugnant[,] this would not be true of the new generations brought up in mixed schools.”^{Footnote 75} These reactions provided a point of departure for many African Americans, for whom the anti-Brown backlash confirmed that the dominant white culture would never accept meaningful, robust integration. Although the first charter school opened its doors in the state of Minnesota, the gateway policy for the charter movement took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the form of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The program itself came into being because of historical frustrations finding expression through a diverse confluence of educational stakeholders balking at an ossified policy environment that had resisted impactful educational reform.

Beyond Brown: The Path to Charter School Reform

In the United States, the charter school movement is unique in that it has emerged from and thrived in a divisive ideological atmosphere.^{Footnote 76} In a nation often stymied by the intransigence of its policy process, the charter school movement has achieved dynamic legislation, at both the state and federal levels. This legislation is often driven by unique—if fragile—bipartisan coalitions. In the realm of education policy, these political alliances originally formed in the push for school vouchers when homogenous communities, defined largely by race and differentiated access to economic resources, concluded that existing educational structures were failing to provide adequate educational opportunities for American families. As a result, communities compromised their traditional ideological alliances and sought out unconventional and untried partnerships in an effort to launch a series of school-choice reforms that fractured the exclusive franchise of the state in matters of public education.

This new coalition featured black civil rights advocates who were disappointed in the failure of the Brown decision to bring about educational equity, combined with, largely, white conservatives who were alarmed by the Reagan administration’s policy report, A Nation at Risk (ANAR). For their part, black activists were bitterly disappointed that, by the 1980s, Brown had not translated into impactful integration or an increase in educational attainment for African Americans. In fact, from the 1970s onward, in both the academic and mainstream press, it was evident that African Americans were increasingly looking to move on from the empty promises of educational equity.^{Footnote 77} At the same time, many conservatives believed that American public education had become entrenched in mediocrity; they associated the “anemic” state of American education with what they considered a bloated government-run school system that failed to promote or incentivize excellence. Moreover, conservatives became fixated on the internationally competitive dynamics of a Cold War world, in which the United States was increasingly portrayed to be “losing.” The atmosphere surrounding this hardening attitude toward state run schools stemmed directly from conclusions drawn from A Nation at Risk. As such, the prominence of ANAR as a catalyst in the formation of this unlikely policy coalition is critical and deserves dedicated historical analysis.

ANAR was not the first time the Cold War had been invoked to leverage educational reform. In 1957, President Eisenhower reacted to the Sputnik “Crisis” by initiating educational reforms aimed at increasing American investment in science education. ANAR, however, was different. While the reaction to both Sputnik and ANAR was driven by the fear of communist advances, the reaction to Sputnik involved an empirical reexamination of school curriculum and pedagogy, carried out within traditional educational structures, resulting, most notably, in the creation of the 1958 National Defense Education Act.^{Footnote 78} ANAR, however, was framed to awaken the American public’s sense of moral exceptionalism. The document’s influence flows from its tone and its textured, forthright message. Unlike other policy documents that relay quantified results, ANAR invited citizens to rediscover America’s founding mythos; to contemplate present challenges and consider what steps are required for a course correction. These messages portrayed these steps as central to victory in the Cold War. From ANAR’s opening paragraph, citizens were reminded that the United States is the land of opportunity: if the Protestant work ethic is faithfully adhered to, Americans will be successful in securing “gainful employment [and] thereby serve not only their own interests but also the progress of society itself.” Contemporary America is in danger of being “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens [America’s] future as a nation and a people.” These wounds, the authors tell us, are self-inflicted: had a foreign power imposed the current American education system on the nation, Americans “would likely consider it an act of war”; as it is, however, the United States has been committing an “act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”^{Footnote 79}

A Nation at Risk firmly concludes that the collapse of the education system has resulted in the United States being economically surpassed by other nations. As McGuinn points out, for Republicans, “this was an indictment of past federal programs and mandates . . . and called for eliminating federal influence” in public education.^{Footnote 80} The historical timing of ANAR, combined with the surgical condemnation of public education, created a powerful—albeit implicit—argument for innovative solutions to educational challenges devoid of federal mandates.

Understanding the inherent stressors of the predominately white conservative and African American communities’ coming together for a common legislative purpose is important in assessing how the charter school movement emerged as a vehicle to further the educational goals of particularistic communities. From a political and policy perspective, the ascendancy of the charter school movement cannot be divorced from the general concept of school choice. The role of the educational voucher as antecedent to the charter school movement is important. Having agreed that public education was failing the children of Wisconsin, black liberals, driven by a desire to infuse public education with meaningful equity, and white conservatives, determined to reform the American education system, ushered in an era of ideological détente, and in doing so formed a unique, albeit fragile, political alliance.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Birth of the Public School

As the Milwaukee program was being ushered through the Wisconsin legislature, expressions of frustration by African Americans concerned with education policy were being expressed across the country. Writing in the Atlanta Daily World, economist Walter Williams, using language analogous to that deployed by the authors of A Nation at Risk, argued that “if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to sabotage black Academic excellence . . . he couldn’t find a better weapon than our current public education system.”^{Footnote 81} The Los Angeles Times described the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program as involving an “alliance of blacks and conservative whites” that was “igniting bitter racial political battles.”^{Footnote 82} While the state of Minnesota enacted the first charter school law in 1991, the evolution of that state’s path to charter school reform was paved through the state of Wisconsin in 1990. In that year, Wisconsin passed the nation’s first education voucher program, ushered through by a unique coalition of conservatives and African American liberals. The legislative process in Wisconsin demonstrates a clear example of the powerful synergy of building new political coalitions, the irrelevancy of holistic ideological harmony between coalition partners, and, most important for the purposes of this work, the historical relationship between the voucher and the charter school. The Milwaukee program became the first voucher plan to be passed targeting “at-risk” minority students. The plan was implemented after voluntary desegregation efforts that looked to entice suburban students to transfer to city schools failed, and African Americans encouraged their state representatives to seek radical solutions to the abysmal state of inner-city schools.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program emerged from Democratic state legislator Polly Williams’s original voucher plan, which was designed exclusively to serve low-income, largely urban, African American students. The plan failed after critics railed that it would create an “urban apartheid,”^{Footnote 83} and was attacked in the state legislature for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.^{Footnote 84} The Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, did not openly support the Williams proposal; however, he did not actively campaign against it. In the aftermath of this defeat, Williams repackaged her plan; this time she presented a bill that was open to all low-income students, and proposed that the state, instead of particular districts, administer the program, thus opening up the process up to a degree of transparency not offered in the original proposal.

The proposed law mandated that only students whose family income did not exceed 1.75 times the federal poverty level would be eligible for the state to pay up to $2,570 per pupil to a nonsectarian private school. This amount equaled the sum that the state contributed to the Milwaukee school system per child. The actual number of students who could participate in the program was capped at 1 percent, or 933 students.^{Footnote 85} Almost immediately, Governor Thompson and other like-minded conservatives rallied behind the measure as a conduit to further school privatization, while the African American community embraced the proposal as a vehicle toward securing educational equity. This legislative moment signaled the fracturing of old alliances. Immediately, the NAACP attacked the black liberal communities’ alliance with Governor Thompson. Director of the Milwaukee NAACP, Felmers O. Chaney, asserted that he “distrusted whites who supported the choice plan,” since the plan reminded him of “the old freedom of choice plans in the south” designed to segregate African Americans.^{Footnote 86} The NAACP, in conjunction with the Wisconsin teachers and principal unions, quickly filed suit to halt the law from going into effect.

Williams, an outspoken African American civil rights activist, bluntly clarified the nature of the policy coalition. In response to criticism from the NAACP and the Superintendent of Wisconsin schools, Herbert Grover, claiming that school choice would irreparably balkanize American society, the state senator retorted that “I am not an integrationist . . . if public schools can’t do any better, we don’t need them.” When accused of being used as a pawn by conservative Republicans, Williams retorted that it was irrelevant that “conservative racists and bigots have the same idea.” The problem, Williams continued, was not that a coalition had come together out of political expediency, but that the public school system “was not meeting the cultural needs and values of black children.” To remedy this, Williams asserted that “it was time black people started looking out for themselves.”^{Footnote 87} Williams was supported by Mikel Holt, a voucher advocate and editor of the Milwaukee Community Journal; in retrospect, Holt reflected that vouchers worked to provide an educational vehicle for African Americans to regain a sense of community and economic self-sufficiency; moreover, he viewed integration as having “destroyed Black communities” while rendering them “educationally impotent.”^{Footnote 88} The Milwaukee policy brought to the surface the historic tension between the state and the individual. The common school ethos predicated in large part on the desirability of social engineering was being challenged from the seemingly antithetical nexus of the traditionally marginalized African American community and libertarian leaning conservatives.

In 1992, the Washington Post, characterizing the ongoing legal showdown over the Milwaukee program, couched the mission of school choice in the language of “class struggle,” asserting that it was undeniable that America’s public schools “in the inner cities are separate and unequal places.”^{Footnote 89} The ongoing litigation morphed into a zero-sum game; potentially, the program could be proved unconstitutional, resulting in the entire choice movement being designated unlawful. However, as victories mounted in favor of school choice, the position of the NAACP and the teachers’ unions were weakened and, consequently, the school-choice movement became more deeply entrenched in the nation’s evolving policy narrative. It is important to remember, as Williams and Holt remind us, that the communal motivation to enhance the success of African American students, and, by extension, strengthen the African American community, speaks to the rapidly evolving realization by black Americans that it was in their best interest to reform their interdependent educational covenants. This tendency to look inward to one’s own family and community is, of course, a hallmark of the charter school design. Furthermore, this shift in thinking regarding the form of public education speaks to the reemergence of the saliency of individual stakeholders in making school-based decisions, while offering a sharp rebuke to state-mandated education choices.

Finally, in 1992, the Milwaukee program made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where it was “narrowly upheld on procedural grounds.” The victory was, as the Washington Post reported, “a wider affirmation for choice and voucher programs.” This, the Post continued, was “the test for the state and to a lesser extent the country.”^{Footnote 90} Following on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision, the Milwaukee program became a gateway initiative for the innovative policy hybrid from Minnesota: the charter school. Moreover, a 1992 report generated by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found that the majority of participants had judged the Milwaukee program to be successful, and found that “parent satisfaction was high.” In totality, the report made significant recommendations that inched it philosophically closer to the charter school design being implemented in neighboring Minnesota, such as “repealing the law that schools may not enroll more than 49% of their students through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program” and working to “remove arbitrary administrative and statutory limits” on low-income children participating in the program. The consistent strain of criticism that runs through the institute’s report is squarely aimed at the superintendent of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Herbert Grover. Grover is accused of “failing to separate his personal disapproval from his sworn responsibility to implement the program effectively.”^{Footnote 91} While it is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that the animus between the entrenched representatives and interests of traditional public education and school-choice advocates and practitioners represents a consistent theme of high tension between the two educational camps.

Nationally, the path to charter school legislation was initiated by the voucher experience in Wisconsin. Ted Kolderie, a key architect of Minnesota’s inaugural 1990 charter school policy, expressed the linkage between these two radical education reforms when he observed that “public education cannot easily resist a Polly Williams.” To do so, Kolderie continued, would represent a “profound political miscalculation.”^{Footnote 92} Thus, assessing the charter narrative in a policy vacuum removed from the role of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is problematic. Anti- school-choice groups, having been forced to concede legal ground on the issue of educational vouchers, proved much less anxious to attempt litigation against this compromise position between free-market vouchers and traditional public schools controlled exclusively by the state.^{Footnote 93} Charter schools, while granting unprecedented latitude in matters of staffing and curriculum, allowed a measure of structural control to remain with the state. As one researcher commented, charter schools can be best described as “half a loaf” in the movement to grant parents and families unfettered autonomy in matters of public education.^{Footnote 94} Furthermore, educators who abhorred the idea of choice in general were motivated to accept the charter movement out of fear that voucher programs could become the law of the land and thus open public education to the full force of privatization. The synergy that the combined forces of African American activists and primarily white conservatives generated through the 1990 coalition that produced the Milwaukee voucher program represents a microcosm of the larger bipartisan détente in matters of education policy that has led to the charter school model being embraced by diverse groups of stakeholders. Minnesota offered an atmosphere featuring a strong tradition of grassroots educational interest groups, a political respect for the autonomy of district-level decision making, and a receptive policy environment.^{Footnote 95} At the close of the twentieth century, these factors created an environment conducive to radical educational reform.

Minnesota’s 1991 charter legislation represented a significant realignment in the relationship between the state and the family in matters of public education policy. The precedent in Minnesota initiated the rapid expansion of the charter school model across the country, and was warmly received by states such as Massachusetts, California, and Arizona. These regions are home to large tight-knit populations historically underserved by traditional American education.^{Footnote 96} Arguably, these communities were taking their cue from segments of the African American population that had embraced the charter school model as a means of achieving substantive educational equity.