The 1991 Minnesota Law That Gave America the Charter School

A professor of education proposed it. The head of a national teachers' union championed it. A Democratic state senator wrote it into law and a Democratic governor signed it. Then Republicans and Democrats alike carried it across the country. You will not find that biography on a bumper sticker, but it is the real story of the charter school, and one of the strangest in American public policy. It is a reform that today gets hated by one wing of the education establishment and defended by another, even though the founding mothers and fathers did not sort themselves that neatly.

The story deserves to be told in order, because the order explains what a charter school actually is. It is not a private school with a public subsidy. It is not a district school with a fresh coat of paint. It is a public school that exists under a contract.

The idea before the law: 1974 and 1988

Every reform has a pre-history. For charters, the first piece is an essay. In 1974 a professor at the University of Massachusetts named Ray Budde wrote a paper proposing that local school boards could issue "charters" to groups of teachers, who would then be free to develop a program of their own for a period of years. The word charter was borrowed from the old practice of a monarch or a legislature granting a body the right to operate under stated terms. It arrived without fanfare, and for a while nothing came of it.

The second piece came in 1988. Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, picked up Budde's idea and gave a speech to the National Press Club that put it in front of a national audience. Shanker suggested that teachers be allowed to start new schools within the public system, with the approval of their local board and their colleagues. Think about who was talking. This was the leader of a major teachers' union saying that the existing structure of the schools was too rigid, and that teachers themselves should have a chance to design something better.

It matters because it demolishes a lazy version of the story. Charter schools did not begin as a plot by outsiders against teachers. They began, at least in theory, as a way to give teachers professional freedom. The politics changed later. The principle did not.

Minnesota gets ready: the choice laws of the 1980s

Meanwhile, Minnesota was already becoming a laboratory. In the 1980s the state passed a series of laws that loosened the rule that a child's address decides his school. In 1985 it created a program letting high school juniors and seniors take college courses for credit at public expense. In 1987 it adopted open enrollment, which let students apply to attend public schools outside their home districts. Civic groups in the Twin Cities, including a nonpartisan policy organization called the Citizens League, were pushing the notion that the state should be funding results rather than propping up a single delivery system.

The pieces were falling into place. There was a theory (Budde), a prominent endorsement (Shanker), a political climate that liked choice and a state with a tradition of civic experimentation. What the state lacked was a bill.

1991: the law

That bill arrived in 1991, in the form of a charter school law passed by the Minnesota legislature. A Democratic-Farmer-Labor state senator, Ember Reichgott Junge, carried it. The governor was Rudy Perpich, also a DFLer, and he signed it. Minnesota thereby became the first state in the nation with a charter school law.

The 1991 law was modest by later standards. It allowed only a small number of charter schools. Early on, the gatekeeper was largely the local school board, which meant that a district could say yes or no to a group of teachers who wanted to open a school in its territory. The law has been amended repeatedly since then, widening the list of bodies that can authorize charters and tightening the standards for them. But the design principle was there from the start, and it is the key to the whole movement.

A charter school under that law was:

1. Public. It charged no tuition, it was open to all students who wished to attend, and it received public funding.
2. Nonsectarian. It could not be a religious school.
3. Independent in operation. It was run by its own governing board, free from many of the rules that bind a district school.
4. Held to a contract. The charter set out what the school would do and how it would be measured. If it did not meet those terms, the authorizer could decline to renew the charter or close the school.

That fourth feature is the one the opponents tend to forget and the supporters tend to underplay. A charter school is accountable in two directions at once. It has to answer to the state's testing and civil-rights rules, as any public school does. And it has to answer to its authorizer, under a contract whose penalty clause is closure.

1992: City Academy opens in St. Paul

A law on paper does not teach anybody. The first charter school to open under the Minnesota statute was the City Academy in St. Paul, which started operating in the fall of 1992. It was set up to serve students who had struggled in traditional schools, including teenagers who had dropped out or were on the verge of it. It was small, and it did not look like anything in a brochure.

I mention it for two reasons. First, because it shows the original appeal of the idea. The first customers were not the children of the well connected. They were the kids the existing system was most likely to lose. Second, because it reminds you that a charter school is simply a school. It has a building, a faculty, a schedule, and students whose parents did not have to pay a tuition bill to enroll them. Everything else is contract.

The spread: California, then the country

Other states noticed. California passed its charter school law in 1992, and over the next several years Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan and many other states did the same. By the end of the 1990s most states had some version of a charter law, and the federal government joined in. In 1994, as part of the reauthorization of the main federal elementary and secondary education law signed by President Clinton, Congress created a program to help states start charter schools.

Notice who was voting. This was not a partisan victory. A Democratic president signed the federal support. Republicans, who generally liked the market logic of competition and parent choice, supported it too. The split that came later, with charters becoming a symbol in the fight over unions and funding, was a development of the following decades.

What is an authorizer, and why does it matter?

If you want to understand charter schools in your own state, learn the word authorizer. The authorizer is the body that grants the charter, monitors the school, and decides whether to renew it. Depending on the state, an authorizer might be a local school district, a state charter board, a public university or a nonprofit organization approved by the state.

The authorizer system is the heart of the accountability argument. A district school that performs badly can limp along for years because closing a neighborhood school is politically explosive. A charter school that performs badly is, at least in theory, up against a deadline written in its own contract. The quality of that oversight varies enormously. States with strong, independent authorizers that close failing schools tend to have stronger sectors. States where authorizing is lax or politically captured have more trouble. If you are looking for the most important variable in any charter state, look at how seriously the authorizer takes the contract.

The objections, answered one at a time

I like the charter model, but I have no interest in pretending it has no critics. Here are the three standard objections, and my answers.

"Charters take money away from district schools." The mechanism is that public funding follows the child. When a student moves from a district school to a charter, the per-pupil funding that attached to that student generally moves with him, in whole or in part, depending on the state's formula. The district loses revenue, and it also loses the cost of educating that child. How well that nets out in the short run depends on how many of the district's costs are fixed, which is a real argument and not a trivial one. I walk through it with numbers, for the voucher version of the same question, in Vouchers Drain the Public Schools, and the Answer Is in the Arithmetic. Notice, though, that the objection is really about funding formulas. A state can fix a formula. It cannot fix an argument that is aimed at the child.

"Charters lack accountability." This is backwards in an important respect. A charter school has more explicit accountability than a typical district school, because it is on a clock. The authorizer can decline to renew it. The honest version of the objection is that the quality of authorizing differs by state, and that some authorizers have been too slow to close weak schools. That is a good reason to demand better authorizing, not a reason to abolish the model. When a district school fails, the usual consequence is a task force. When a charter fails, the consequence is supposed to be a funeral.

"Charters cherry-pick their students." A public charter school must generally admit students by open application, and when applications exceed seats it must use a lottery. That is the law in most states. Whether the practices of particular schools match the law is something to verify, and complaints about pushing out difficult students deserve investigation wherever they arise. But the lottery requirement is the answer to the structural version of the complaint. And the lottery has an extra benefit for researchers: when there are more applicants than seats, the students who win and the ones who lose can be compared, which is the closest thing to a controlled experiment that education research gets.

What do those comparisons show? The honest answer is that the results are mixed. Large studies, including those produced by Stanford University's CREDO center, have found a range of outcomes: some charter sectors and some kinds of schools doing better than comparable district schools, others no better and some worse. Anyone who tells you that the evidence uniformly proves charters are miracles, or uniformly proves they are failures, is selling something. The sensible reading is that a charter is a structure, not a guarantee. Structure plus strong authorizing, good leadership and families who choose it tends to work. Without those things it does not.

What the history teaches

Three lessons fall out of the Minnesota story.

First, the best school reforms often begin with the people closest to the classroom. Budde was a professor, Shanker led teachers, and the first Minnesota charters were started by educators who wanted room to work.

Second, bipartisan origins are a feature, not an accident. Any reform that survives a change of governor has to appeal to more than one set of voters, and the charter idea did, because it promised accountability to the right and flexibility and opportunity to the left.

Third, a contract is a stronger instrument than a mandate. A district school faces a thousand rules from above. A charter faces one document and a deadline. Whether that trade works in a given case depends on the people involved, but it is a trade worth offering to parents.

If you want the larger picture of how charters fit with vouchers, accounts and tax-credit scholarships, my side-by-side comparison is at Vouchers, ESAs, Tax Credits and Charters Sorted Out in One Table. For a test of the common claims against the record, see Seven School Choice Myths Your Neighbor Believes and What the Record Shows. And if you are curious how Washington came to be involved in your child's school in the first place, From Title I to ESSA, Fifty Years of Washington Meddling in Your Schools tells that tale.

The bottom line

• A charter school is a public school run under a contract. It charges no tuition, admits by application or lottery, and can be closed if it fails to meet its terms.
• The charter idea was bipartisan from the start: Ray Budde's 1974 paper, Albert Shanker's 1988 endorsement, Minnesota's 1991 law carried by a Democratic senator and signed by a Democratic governor, and a 1994 federal program signed by a Democratic president.
• The most important word in any charter debate is authorizer. Find out who authorizes charters in your state and how many weak schools they have actually closed.
• The evidence on results is mixed, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Judge a charter the way you judge any school: visit it, ask for its record, and talk to the parents.
• If you want charters to work, press your legislator for strong authorizing and fair funding, not for slogans.