Charter Schools

This paper will consider a sad phenomenon in American history—19th-century nativism and in particular, anti-Catholic prejudice—and its lingering and deleterious effects on American primary and secondary education.

The school choice movement has suffered a number of severe setbacks during the last decade. California and Michigan voters rejected school voucher ballot initiatives in 2000, state courts in Colorado and Florida ruled that their voucher programs were unconstitutional, and during negotiations over the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush abandoned provisions that would allow students in failing public schools to switch to private schools. Fifteen years after Milwaukee instituted the nation’s first voucher program, fewer than 35,000 non-special education students receive publicly funded school vouchers nationwide.

This paper applies the charter school idea to public higher education. It makes the case that deregulation coupled with a charter or agreement with the state will enable institutions to operate more efficiently and will produce higher quality educational results. The argument is based on research comparing highly regulated institutions with more independent colleges across the country, as well as interviews with a number of educational, public policy, and political leaders in Massachusetts. The authors draw on the history of Michigan as well as the more recent experience in New Jersey.

This study updates the work done by Armor and Peiser. The author gathered data for two additional years of the interdistrict choice program and similar data for the state’s charter school program as well. This update, for the most part, confirms the demographic findings of the initial study with regard to interdistrict choice. The racial impact on sending districts continues to be negligible. The impact on some of the receiving districts was to increase racial diversity; this positive effect continues and is increasing. Clearly, more minority students are taking advantage of the interdistrict choice program.

Increasing the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth was provided in April 1999.