ONE MIGHT THINK the ominously titled Charter Storm: Waves of Change Sweeping over Public Education predicts the demise of the chartered schools as an education reform strategy. Far from it: In Charter Storm, veteran educators Mary Bixby and Tom Davis offer a realpolitik summary of the history and current state of chartered schools, combined with clear and unambiguous analysis and advice for practitioners, opponents, and observers.
Bixby and Davis draw from their extensive personal experience as leaders within both the traditional public and chartered systems. Davis is a veteran public school educator with decades of experience in teaching and leading traditional public schools at both the school site and central office levels. More recently, Davis has served as a consultant and executive coach for innovative education organizations, including chartered schools.
Bixby is a twenty-five-year veteran of California’s chartered schools, having founded The Charter School of San Diego in 1994, which later grew into the Altus family of schools. Currently, Altus successfully serves thousands of students in Southern California across multiple districts and counties. With substantial experience working in parochial, traditional public, and chartered schools, Bixby is a keen observer of the sector and has earned and received every award and accolade that a charter school leader can garner in California. Both Bixby and Davis can see the chartered sector through multiple lenses and perspectives as few others can.
More than twenty-five years of helping draft charter school laws in dozens of states and at the federal level has taught this observer that chartered schools are primarily a creature of state law. Key features of state charter school laws vary widely, so cross-state comparisons and analyses are fraught with difficulty. While their expertise is primarily based in California, Bixby and Davis are unique among observers in that they extensively researched both the California and national chartered school scene, comparing their home-state experiences and observations with similarly situated experts across the country. They somehow managed to gain access to a who’s who of chartered school thinkers and leaders in every major charter state, interviewing many repeatedly over a lengthy and thorough research effort.
During the mid- and late 1990s, I had the opportunity to work on and help draft many of the charter school laws in states and localities visited by the authors. It has been fascinating for me to compare notes with Bixby and Davis throughout their past several years of research and drafting. They are among a tiny number of individuals who have built a deep understanding of chartering—both in California and nationally—and they are the only practitioners to have done so. Bixby and Davis’s deep experience base allowed them to see the forest through the trees, boiling down often fraught details to key economic, political, and strategic themes.
Charter Storm traces key elements in the development of the chartered schools concept, from the “originals” who developed the concept and nurtured it to its rapid growth in more recent years. Bixby relates these to her firsthand experiences as one of California’s earliest, most innovative, and most successful chartered school founders. While steadily growing her network of schools for more than twenty-five years, Bixby has been a leader among chartered school leaders in her San Diego–area home base and at a statewide level.
This has given her a deep, firsthand understanding of how school districts, policy makers, the media, and others view and respond to chartered schools. An entire chapter in this book focuses on the many myths that opponents and others have developed to characterize charter schools, including why they persist.
Bixby and Davis offer a tough-love analysis. The burden of dispelling myths, they argue, rests on chartered reform proponents themselves. It’s up to them, not the media or researchers, to “shed light on the shining example[s]” within the chartered schools sector.
Charter Storm places chartering in the larger education reform landscape, categorizing chartered schools among the “Big R” reform efforts, distinguishing it from “Little R” efforts that often appear larger than they are. Chartering is a Big R reform because it fundamentally challenges the sustainability and survival of the traditional public school system. While this Big R status is what gives the chartered schools sector its punch, it’s also what generates resistance and potentially crippling backlash. “Wherever chartered schools are growing, pushback is occurring,” write Bixby and Davis, who use familiar analogies (e.g., David and Goliath) to illustrate the complex political and economic challenges facing the charter sector. Novices will appreciate this clear explanation and unpretentious analysis, while veteran observers will sharpen their understanding through references and analogies to cutting-edge thinkers, including Malcolm Gladwell and Malcolm Baldrige (Bixby’s experience leading a Baldrige Award–winning organization shows here).
The pushback against chartered schools, in turn, “threatens the very strength of the original design of chartered schools: to experiment and develop new ways to operate and inspire students to reach their greatest potential.” The first of two chapters on pushback defines the term in the context of tipping points, offering an insightful explanation of several factors that influence school districts’ individual tipping points. This chapter then explains how these common factors can lead to various forms of pushback from stakeholders and vested interests—largely without regard to the vagaries of state law or local context.
A second chapter on pushback offers concrete examples, challenging both chartered school and traditional public school advocates to question their assumptions. For chartered advocates, it illustrates how hot-button charter issues (such as colocating charter schools on traditional public school campuses, varying approaches to charter authorizing, and funding equity) challenge chartered school proponents. It also challenges proponents of traditional public schools to do the same and offers concrete strategic suggestions for both, including how focusing on student needs and outcomes can benefit all.
The sixth chapter, titled “Observations,” offers strategic analysis of various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTs) facing the charter sector. Some of these are relatively straightforward (e.g., growing public dissatisfaction with traditional public schools), while others are less well understood (e.g., the growth of networked chartered schools and the difficulty that non-networked chartered schools face when combating pushback).
The final chapters build on the SWOT analysis and other key points, offering deeper analyses and specific suggestions to chartered school leaders, chartered school advocates, philanthropists, charter authorizers, and others.
“The jury is no longer out. The debate is moot. Chartered schools are here to stay,” declare the authors in conclusion. Chartered schools will survive the many challenges facing them, but only those schools whose leaders see these challenges and adapt will do so. This optimistic conclusion must be rooted in an equally optimistic belief that chartered school leaders and others will see the challenges that Bixby and Davis identify, unify as a sector to meet the threat of pushback, and lead accordingly within their schools.
ERIC PREMACK is the founding director of CSDC. For over twenty years, Premack has played a leading role in the development and spread of chartered schools, including helping to draft and implement chartered school policy in over twenty-five states, at the federal level, and overseas. He has developed groundbreaking chartered school policy, planning, implementation, oversight, and leadership development practices that have been emulated throughout the United States and internationally.