By Richard D. Kahlenberg The Century Foundation
Published: 04-14-08
A History of Evolution & Role Reversals
Twenty years ago this month in a landmark address to the National Press Club in Washington American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker first proposed the creation of “charter schools” — publicly funded institutions that would be given greater flexibility to experiment with new ways of educating students.
At the time some conservative education reformers opposed the idea saying we already knew what worked in education. Today the positions are reversed: Conservatives largely embrace charters while teachers’ unions are mostly opposed.
How did the notion of charter schools evolve over 20 years? And might a return to Al Shanker’s original idea improve the educational and political fortunes of the charter school movement?
In Shanker’s vision small groups of teachers and parents would submit research-based proposals outlining plans to educate kids in innovative ways. A panel consisting of the local school board and teachers’ union officials would review proposals.
Once given a “charter” a term first used by the Massachusetts educator Ray Budde a school would be left alone for a period of five to 10 years.
Schools would be freed from certain collective bargaining provisions; for example class-size limitations might be waived to merge two classes and allow team-teaching.
Shanker’s core notion was to tap into teacher expertise to try new things. Building on the practices at the Saturn auto plant in Nashville Tenn. he envisioned teams of teachers making suggestions on how best to accomplish the job at hand.
Part of the appeal of charter schools to Shanker and many Democrats was that they offered a publicly run alternative to private-school-voucher proposals which they feared would undermine teacher collective bargaining rights and Balkanize students by race religion and economic status.
A charter school Shanker said “would not be a school where all the advantaged kids or all the white kids or any other group is segregated.”
Might a return to Al Shanker’s original idea improve the educational and political fortunes of the charter school movement?
In the early 1990s Minnesota legislators working with Shanker adopted the nation’s first charter school legislation. However as the idea spread (eventually to 40 states and the District of Columbia) the father of charter schools expressed increasing alarm that his idea of teacher-led institutions had morphed into something quite different.
Many conservative advocates saw charters as a way to make an end run around teachers’ unions and the vast majority of charter schools today lack collective bargaining agreements.
Likewise states disregarded Shanker’s admonition that charter schools should be diverse as individual charter schools often appealed to specialized ethnic religious or racial groups raising the very concerns Shanker had about private school vouchers.
Shanker argued that in charter schools rigid collective bargaining rules could be bent but that teachers still needed union representation. Only when teachers felt secure could they take risks he said. “You don’t see these creative things happening where teachers don’t have voice or power or influence.”
Not surprisingly lacking a collective voice teachers in charter schools turn over at almost twice the rate of public school teachers. And while right-wingers assumed that eliminating union influence would make test scores skyrocket a number of independent studies have found that charter schools do no better than unionized public schools.
Moreover as a practical political matter as charter schools became a vehicle for anti-union activists powerful education unions naturally opposed their expansion and effectively limited the ultimate growth of the experiment.
Likewise instead of drawing diverse student populations charter schools often explicitly appealed to particular groups with Afrocentric or other ethnocentric curricula or in other cases effectively “creamed” students by requiring parents to sign contracts committing them to volunteer a certain number of hours or be subject to fines. Shanker noted that “children whose parents are scared off by the contract’s tone or don’t have the time to volunteer or can’t read or don’t understand what is being asked won’t be enrolling in one of these schools.”
According to a 2003 report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University charter schools tend to be even more racially segregated than regular public schools.
There is still an opportunity to create teacher-led “Saturn” schools for the 21st century that enhance teachers’ collective voice help integrate students and improve student learning.
Many charter schools also fail to address a third form of segregation: by income. Charter schools as schools of choice have the potential to attack what many educators regard as the fountainhead of educational inequality: the concentration of poor kids.
While a small number of highly publicized charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program academies have done well despite concentrations of poverty the vast majority have not. Most high-poverty charter schools like most high-poverty regular public schools fail to produce high levels of academic performance.
Can Albert Shanker’s original vision — charter schools that are teacher-led and integrate students of different racial ethnic economic and religious backgrounds — replace anti-union charters that segregate?
Of course it can.
The successful Green Dot charter schools in California are unionized as are two charter schools started by the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. In Milwaukee eight teacher-cooperative schools have been established in which teachers are part of the public school collective bargaining agreement but also have the authority to run the schools as worker cooperatives.
Similarly charter schools like magnet schools clearly have the potential to overcome the segregation that afflicts many schools that have students assigned based on residence.
In June of last year the U.S. Supreme Court limited the extent to which districts can use race in student assignment but officials remain perfectly free to consider the economic status of students which will usually translate into racial integration. Moreover by creating a good economic mix charter schools can provide a favorable learning environment with positive peer influences active parents and great teachers.
Returning to Shanker’s vision would jump-start the charter school movement and remove the two major impediments to success it faces in the coming decades. By allowing unions to represent teachers charter schools would eliminate the chief political obstacle to expansion.
Moreover by more effectively tapping into teacher expertise and putting measures in place to reduce economic segregation of students charters would have a fighting chance to significantly increase academic achievement.
Two decades after Albert Shanker’s vision was unveiled there is still an opportunity to create teacher-led “Saturn” schools for the 21st century that enhance teachers’ collective voice help integrate students and improve student learning.
Richard D. Kahlenberg a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington is the author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools Unions Race and Democracy.
