This document analyzes charter schools as a potential solution to addressing the perceived failures of American public schools. It summarizes three views on how charter schools could enact reform: 1) As laboratories of innovation; 2) Replacing traditional public schools entirely; 3) Increasing competition through market forces. The author argues that the third option of strategically increasing charter school numbers is currently the most feasible and effective approach to driving system-wide improvement, by enhancing parents' and students' ability to exercise "exit" and "voice". While charter schools have potential, replication of innovative practices is difficult and a charter-only system could fail to serve all students equitably.

1. 1 United States. Department of Education. National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk:
The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington:GPO, 1983. Print.
Jeffrey Silva
A-024 Politics and Policy in the United States
Class 20 Prompt: Analysis Paper Option 2
November 21, 2014
Charter Schools: A Call for Market-based Education
In 1983, A Nation at Risk identified decline in American educational quality, causing among
parents a new round of concerns over public schooling’s inability to “do what is right for their
children.”1
Within the past decade,poor performance on international assessments like the PISAand
TIMMS and the persistence of racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps have perpetuated the
widespread belief thatAmerica’s public schools are failing their students. Calls for reforms have
regularly been made, but, unfortunately, efforts to reverse the downturn have not succeeded,for public
schools in the United States have remained largely resistant to change. Milton Friedman, noted
economist, posited that the monopolistic position of public schools and their democratic governance
have caused the virtual elimination of parents and students’ability to pressure schools to improve.
“Exit,” the ability of consumers to leave one service provider for another, and “voice,” the strength of
consumer’s dissatisfaction in forcing service providers to change their practices have not been reliable
tools for the vast majority of American students (Hirschman, 16).
Within this context, charter schools have emerged as a hopeful solution for many dissatisfied
parents and students. Education pundits have proposed various means through which charter schools
could enact systemic reform. Charters,they say, could act as laboratories of innovation for the
experimentation of new practices or could even wholly replace the system as it stands today. However,
these two ideas are farfetched. When one considers the school governance structures currently in
place, the most feasible utilization of charter schools to improve the quality of American schooling is
to capitalize on their ability to generate market competition within the public education sector.
Locating significant numbers of charter schools within strategically geographic areas would enhance
students and parents’ability to exercise both “exit” and “voice,” therefore forcing continual school
system improvement. This is already occurring. Policy makers simply have to hold the strategy steady.
In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,Albert Hirschman notes that the esteemed political scientist and
economist H.A. Simon once postulated that “firms are normally aiming at no more than a ‘satisfactory’

2. 2 Ravitch, Diane. “Fordham Institute: Ohio Charters Fare Poorly on NAPE.” Web. 20 November 2014.
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/11/19/fordham-institute-ohio-charters-fare-poorly-on-naep/
rather than at the highest rate of profits” (11). By using this lens on the educational sector,it is
apparent that little incentive exists for public schools to pursue “the highest rate” of instructional
quality. According to Simon’s logic, established public schools do not improve because there is little
competitive threat to their market position. Interestingly, Simon’s logic also explains why charter
schools actively seek comparatively higher levels of instructional quality, for their “satisfactory”
levels are ones that validate their positions within the market. Critics like Diane Ravitch often point
out that many charter schools today only perform as well as or worse than traditional public schools
yet still remain operational.2
It is true that there are presently a great number of low-performing
charter schools. However,this fact should not dissuade policymakers from supporting growth in
charter schooling. Current charter school underperformance is the result of charter schools’ relative
newness and limited number. In any enterprise, setbacks will occur, and lessons need to be learned.
The challenges that many charter schools now face will end with some adapting and others closing.
Charter schools that perform poorly remain now because dissatisfaction with the traditional public
schools in proximate areas is so great that the demand to attend any charter schoolis high.
However, if allowed to freely increase in number, charter schools will provide the necessary
competition to improve both themselves and traditional public schools by reinvigorating the potency
of parents and students’“exit” and “voice.” John Chubb and Terry Moe have argued that traditional
public schools are currently not “what parents and students want them to be” but rather are controlled
by “society as a whole” as the result of the democratic process (32). In a scenario in which charters
and traditional schools exist in more approximately equal number, parents and students would wield
more control. Students could “exit” traditional public schools in favor of charters – they could even
switch charter schools if so desired. Even if certain individuals could not gain entrance into the charter
schools of their choice, they would still have strengthened “voice” when complaining to school
officials, boards, or locally elected politicians since the education establishment’s weakened market
position would require it to listen more attentively to the concerns of their consumers or face demise
under free market “natural selection” (Chubb & Moe, 33). The same would hold true for any
underperforming charter school, not to mention the fact that its underperformance would also

3. 3 U.S. News & World Report. “Best High Schools.” U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News & World Report LP.
Web. 20 November 2014. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/national
rankings/charterschool-rankings
4 United States. 107th Congress.“H.R. 1 — 107th Congress: No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” 2001.
jeopardize its reauthorization under current accountability systems.
Some have argued that, given the flexibility enjoyed by charter schools under their
agreements with charter authorizers, charter schools should serve as laboratories of innovation, from
which new and effective practices could emerge. However,the unusual autonomy given to charter
schools by their authorizers makes replication of many of their practices unfeasible in traditional
schools. Agood example of this is many charters’freedom to staff nonunionized teachers. Since these
teachers do not have tenure rights under collective bargaining agreements,charter school
administrators, unlike those at traditional schools, can maintain greater control over the quality of
their instructional staff by dismissing incapable teachers when needed. Another reason charter schools
should not act as laboratories of innovation is that most that outperform traditional schools do not do
so in novel ways. A quick perusal of U.S. News & World Report’slist of the nation’s best charter
schools reveals that AP and IB curriculum-centered schools dominate the top rankings.3
This fact
illustrates an interesting irony which demonstrates why charters as places for experimentation is
unfeasible under current governance structures. Charter authorizations allow for flexibility, but at the
same time, because of strict accountability measures for reauthorization, successfulcharter schools
are risk averse to experiment, and as a result, default to the tried and true.
One last view of charter schools’ solving the widespread academic failings of public
schooling is for charter schools to replace all traditional public schools. The resulting charter-only
system would then, hypothetically, be varied enough to fit the needs of a wide spectrum of students
and parents, thus providing the maximum amount of school choice possible. The most likely lever to
accomplish this vision is rooted in No Child Left Behind’s provision for an education authority to
restructure a public school not satisfying “adequate yearly progress” by “Entering into a contract with
an entity, such as a private management company, with a demonstrated record of effectiveness,to
operate the public school.”4
This vision is not rooted in how charter schools currently function. Chubb
and Moe point out that “…it should be apparent that schools have no immutable or transcendent
purpose. What they are supposed to be doing depends on who controls them and what those

4. 5 Bachofer, Sally. “How Charter Schools Can Help Districts and Change the Debate.” CUNY Institute for
Education Policy. Web. 18 November 2014. http://ciep.hunter.cuny.edu/how-charter-schools-can-help
districts-and-change-the-debate/
6 DeArmond, Michael, Ashley Jochim, and Robin Lake. “Making School Choice Work.” Center on Reinventing
Public Education, July 2014. Print.
controllers want them to do” (30). Sally Bachofer at the CUNY Institute for Education Policy
elaborates in detail, “charter school boards are wary of the dismal accountability status of the
chronically failing schools and the threat this can pose to their charter renewals in the future.”5
Consequently, for a system wholly reliant on charter schools to succeed,authorization contracts will
have to inevitably include more and more conditions (e.g.,forcing charters to takeover failing schools
or obligating them to have admissions quotas), lest large swaths of traditionally neglected groups such
as special education students, limited English proficiency students, and remedial students be again
disenfranchised. Ultimately, a system built solely on charter schools would resemble the system that it
once replaced.
Although the path of least resistance is not always the path we should tread, in the case of
charter schools, the status quo of strategically increasing their numbers for the purpose of driving
competition between them and traditional public schools is currently our best bet to better overall
schooling. By placing greater power in parents and students’ ability to exercise “exit” and “voice,” we
capitalize on free market forces to improve quality of instruction systemwide. The two other options
outlined above do not fully account for how existing authorization contracts hamper their
effectiveness. Parents and students will never directly control schools; the best we can do for them is
bolster their influence. “The key question facing civic and education leaders, then, isn’t whether
school choice will shape city school systems, but how. If leaders want to make school choice work for
all families, they need more than just studies of whether charter or voucher programs are
outperforming district schools; they need to know whether their city’s overall supply of schools is
getting better quickly, and whether parents are happy with their choices and can navigate them
easily.”6

5. References
Chubb, John, and Moe, Terry. Politics, Markets,and America’s Schools. Brookings Institute Press,
1990. Print.
Hirschman, Albert. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty:Response to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.
Harvard University Press,1970. Print.