From Colonies to Nation: Locating the Historical Legitimacy of the American Charter School Movement
by
Shane Michael Goodridge B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1997
M.A., University of London, 2006
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction
© Shane Goodridge, 2013 University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author
Supervisory Committee
From Colonies to Nation: Locating the Historical Legitimacy of the American Charter School Movement
by
Shane Michael Goodridge B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1997
M.A., University of London, 2006
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Roy Graham, (Department of Curriculum and Instruction)
Supervisor
Dr. Graham McDonough, (Department of Curriculum and Instruction)
Departmental Member
Dr. Carolyn Crippen, (Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies)
Abstract Supervisory Committee
Dr. Roy Graham, (Department of Curriculum and Instruction)
Supervisor
Dr. Graham McDonough, (Department of Curriculum and Instruction)
Departmental Member
Dr. Carolyn Crippen, (Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies)
Outside Member
From colonies to nation, this work identifies and emphasizes the influence of
interdependent communal relationships on the ascent of the charter school movement. These ideals were made manifest in colonial social covenants that were then compromised by the conformist republican mandate of the common school. These ideals were recovered
incrementally as education was affected by broader historical forces, most notably the implementation of court-sanctioned racial apartheid during the Plessy era, the reaction to the underwhelming impact of Brown, and, beginning in the 1980s, the rise of legislation that prepared the way for charter schools. Moreover, this work challenges the assumption that charter schools have proven popular with American citizens due solely to promises of superior academic results. Alternatively, this work suggests that charter schools have
prospered because they have challenged the state monopoly in K-12 education, and have thus returned balance to the dynamic between the individual and the state. Finally, this work troubles the idea that charter schools are balkanizing American education, suggesting that the right of citizens to form charter schools, in an effort to sustain unique communities, justifies and is in fact endorsed by the American metanarrative.
Research on American charter schools lacks a coherent historical framework. This work provides the charter school movement with an historical narrative that argues for the movement’s legitimacy based on its consistency with the American Republic’s founding philosophy.
Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ... ii Abstract ... iii Table of Contents ... v Acknowledgments... vii Dedication ... viii
Chapter 1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Charter Schools ... 1
Charter Schools in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Sketch. ... 1
School Choice as a Concept ... 7
The Definition Challenge: Discerning between Charter Schools & School Vouchers ... 12
Charter Legislation from State to State ... 16
School Vouchers and the Concept of Choice ... 18
Chapter 2. Rationalizing Charter Schools in American Origins ... 27
John Locke and the Problem of Philosophical Origins ... 30
The Philosophical Seed of the American Charter School Movement ... 34
From Colonies to Nation ... 38
Chapter 3. From Revolution to Republic: the Marginalization of the Family and the Specialization of the Educator ... 57
American Education and the Effects of the War for Independence ... 58
Formulating the Rationale for Education: Constructing the Early American Republic ... 63
Thomas Jefferson and the Formation of an Educational Ethos ... 68
Formal Education and the Marginalization of the Family ... 73
The Rise and Evolution of the Parent Teacher Organization ... 81
Chapter 4. The African American Community and the Multiple Narratives of Brown ... 84
What was the Brown Decision and What Did Brown Accomplish? ... 86
The Broader Historical Atmosphere Surrounding Brown ... 96
The Vinson & Warren Courts: A Tale of Two Courts ... 98
The Message of Desegregation and the Meaning of Brown ... 101
The Road to Eclipsing Brown ... 110
The Plessy Paradox ... 118
The Promise of Brown and the Legitimacy of the Covenant ... 121
Chapter 5. The Politics and Philosophy of the Charter School Movement: An Evolution ... 126
The Bipartisan Appeal of the Charter School Movement ... 128
A Sociopolitical Journey: From Common School to Educational Vouchers to Charter Schools ... 131
School Choice: Tangible Beginnings ... 140
The Individual and the Collectivist: The Conflicting Philosophies of American Education .. 146
School Choice and Liberalism ... 146
The Justification for Parental Choice ... 148
Dewey and Gutmann: The Educational Claims of Comprehensive Liberalism ... 149
Chapter 6. From Theory to Practice: The Birth of the Charter School ... 156
The Minnesota Moment ... 157
Charter Schools and the Challenge of Race ... 167
Publicly Funded Religious Charter Schools: Paradox or Oxymoron? ... 174
Chapter 7. Conclusion ... 180
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people who have proven instrumental and unfailingly supportive throughout my doctoral program. My supervisor, Dr. Roy Graham, has been incredibly generous with both his time and expertise. Roy has become a pedagogical mentor as well as a source of intellectual inspiration. I am also very grateful for the keen eye of Dr. Graham McDonough, whose philosophical expertise has mentored me along throughout my time at UVic. As well, Dr. Carolyn Crippen offered important advice and editorial suggestions throughout the dissertation process. I am also indebted to the librarians at Duke University; the University of California, Irvine and especially the researchers in the Library of Congress, particularly those who toil in the Rare Book and Special Selections reading room - Many thanks!
This dissertation began with my passion for American history combined with a deeply held belief that the legitimacy of the American charter school movement is located in the textured traditions of the Republic’s historical experience from colonies to nation. As I watch my son grow, I have become keenly aware of the need for meaningful educational reform not tomorrow, but today. It is from this family perspective that I extend my deepest appreciation for the unfailing support of my wife, Candice Odgers and my son Finn. Candice always knows what I need, as opposed to what I want, and my son always knows when dad needs a hug. Also, I would like to thank my parents, Hank and Mona Goodridge for their unwavering support and interest.
Dedication
This work focuses on the history and development of the American charter school movement, the ideas that inform and sustain that movement, and the arguments adduced to warrant its status as a legitimate alternative to more traditional forms of education. By mapping the rise of the charter school movement onto broader sociopolitical shifts within the contemporary American experience, this introduction will explore the proposition that recent periods of political uncertainty and social tension have helped create the conditions whereby many Americans now accept charter schools as a normal feature of the educational
landscape.
The American charter school made the transition from theory to application as a pragmatic response to a series of educational and cultural challenges that had proven
resistant to traditional reform measures. It has since flourished, and has come to represent a prolific challenge to traditional education. This chapter is concerned with mapping the definitional and logistical terrain of charter schools onto the historical work to follow. Since the inaugural charter school legislation in Minnesota in 1991, these schools have spread rapidly across the educational landscape; with this in mind, a brief summary of the evolution of the charter school model from the late 1980s onward will provide context for the
definitional discussion to follow.
Charter Schools in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Sketch.
The structural design of the educational reform effort that would be known as the charter school movement began when Ray Budde, a public school administrator, authored
Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts in 1988. The book was inspired by the
need to stimulate an American education system that had proven resistant to conventional reform efforts. Budde (1996) sent copies of the book to colleagues and those he thought might be responsive to his ideas. Budde suggested that school boards charter teams of teachers and administrators to freelance in matters of curriculum and instruction. Budde was not thinking of chartering entire schools; he was strictly concerned with chartering specific departments or programs. While Education by Charter failed to garner widespread attention, it did capture the interest of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT).
Frustrated by the negative trajectory of American education, Shanker enthusiastically endorsed Budde’s innovative reform measure. Shanker (1988) concluded that while there had been many varieties of reform since the 1970s, none had “changed the fundamental assumptions or structure of schooling” (p. 1). Encouraged by the potential he saw in Budde’s vision, Shanker began promoting the charter concept, believing it would grant educators latitude and support to work outside the structure of traditional education and thus substantively honor the pedagogical goal of accommodating individual learning styles. In light of the current acrimony between contemporary teachers unions and charter schools, it is ironic that the president of the nation’s largest teachers union was the one who first took Budde’s theoretical model, expanded it, and proposed that “local school boards and unions jointly develop a procedure that would enable teams of teachers and others to submit and implement proposals to set up their own autonomous public schools” (Budde, 1996, p. 72).
Both Budde and Shanker felt that the charter school model was best suited to facilitate the success of at-risk student populations, largely consisting of students from minority families; these children, and these families, had been consistently let down by traditional educational reforms.1 Shanker intended that charter schools would work in conjunction with traditional education (Murphy & Shiffman, 2002); he did not mention, nor did he seem to be aware of, the animus that eventually would divide charter school advocates from their critics.
While charter schools were originally mapped onto American education as a pragmatic response to an educational challenge, they have been promoted, in part, by a crusading spirit often seen in American policy debates. The ideas of Budde and Shanker were soon adopted by Minnesotan Joe Nathan, one of the early pioneers of the charter school movement. While Shanker and Budde may not have foreseen the coming conflict over the implementation of charter schools, Nathan certainly did. A former public school teacher and current director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota, Nathan promoted the charter school idea as a mission, equating it with the great civil-rights causes of Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, César Chávez, and Frederick Douglass (Nathan, 1996), implying that those who opposed the formation of charter schools were akin to those who had once sought to block the expansion of “voting and workers rights” (p. 55). Like Budde and Shanker, Nathan believed charters could be a panacea for struggling minority students and wasted little time in impugning opponents of the idea, invoking images of
1 A broad body of scholarly research is devoted to critiquing the history of educational reforms. Among these, Bowles & Gintis, 2011; D. Tyack, James, & Benavot, 1991; and D. B. Tyack & Cuban, 1995 provide vivid insight into the systemic failure of educational reforms in meeting the evolving needs of American students and their families.
powerful white elites seeking to maintain the status quo, and powerful union interests preferring “job security, fewer hours of work and higher salaries” (p. 181) to truly improved conditions for minority students. By conveying these images, Nathan drew attention to the systemic cycle of oppression minority students endured in the dominant culture. From the beginning, then, the charter school concept emerged as a divisive issue involving a diverse array of stakeholders. As this work will bear out, these stakeholders have, at times, formed unlikely partnerships that have caused historically entrenched alliances to be either
compromised or abandoned.
Charter school critics have engaged the topic of school choice in general and charter schools in particular on two broad fronts. The first and most often cited of these concerns detailed quantitative comparisons of educational achievement. This line of debate takes aim at the saliency of test scores as they are compared across educational contexts, between students enrolled in traditional public schools and their charter school counterparts. This line of inquiry, while couched in generalizable quantitative methodology, at times obscures more than it clarifies. Despite the accumulation of encyclopedic volumes of data, reliable,
generalizations concerning either the veracity of charter school claims or their shortcomings have failed to emerge.2 While it is important to note that this work is not concerned with arbitrating the quantitative quarrels surrounding the academic success or failure of the American charter school movement, the substance of these quarrels supplies much of the empirical fodder used by both charter school advocates and their critics to bolster their
2 For various challenges surrounding the objective interpretation of academic outcome comparisons, see Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel, & Rothstein, 2005; Kane & Staiger, 2002; Lubienski & Lubienski, 2006a; and Nelson, Rosenberg, & Van Meter, 2004.
respective claims regarding the legitimacy of the American charter school movement. The atmosphere is further clouded due to the absence of a coherent historical narrative, within which the legitimacy of the charter movement can be assessed, thus creating an environment that invites the subjective deployment of such claims.
The second front of tension between charter school advocates and their critics is central to the motivation for this work. This tension speaks to the collective historical and philosophical drivers of American society and is nested in the seeds of the American
Republic itself. In essence, the questions that surround the legitimacy of the charter school movement as a viable alternative to traditional education are central to debates and ultimate ownership of the American metanarrative. Opponents of charter schools have suggested that charters are somehow un-American, that they run counter to American notions of
egalitarianism, social justice and democratic values (Ginsburg, 2010; Gutmann, 2002; Labaree, 2000; Amy Stuart Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002). This position can at times be uncompromising and invites individuals to position themselves ideologically within the charter school debate. Within the politically divisive atmosphere of contemporary America this is a conundrum that innovative reform measures often encounter. One would be hard pressed to identify a substantive American policy that is not forced to position itself on the continuum between individual choice and a collective mandate.3
With its mission being a conduit for societal values, education is positioned on an ideological and philosophical fault line. In fact, so much of education concerns the
3 A recent instructive example is the passing of the Affordable Health Care for America Act. This legislation and its reception reflect the ideological tension within the American electorate regarding the balance between collective mandates and individual choice.
transmission of normative values from one generation to the next that society manifests heightened anxiety concerning the fundamental structuring of education. This particular argument will be explored in detail and contains elements of the argument this work seeks to make; that is, that the American charter school movement is anchored in the bedrock of the American narrative.
With these “fronts” in mind, this work endeavors to clarify the place of charter schools within the American historical experience. In doing so, a significant portion of the ideological and historical acrimony regarding the role of charter schools as a legitimate educational reform measure will be clarified and thus removed as a barrier in discussions of evidence based comparisons between traditional public education and charter schools. Filling this historical void will facilitate two goals. First it will provide researchers, policy makers and educational consumers with a dynamic historical framework within which the legitimacy of the charter school enterprise can be assessed within the context of the American
experience. The existing narrative vacuum invites empirical comparisons, lacking historical context, to be leveraged as indicators of the charter school’s place in American society.
Second, this work has been conceived as a gateway narrative for a program of research that functions, in part, to invite and sustain more regional and particularistic historical inquiries. This is important due to the unique histories of the communities that avail themselves of the charter school model. Consequently, these communities would benefit from locating their communal histories within the national socio-historical experience. In seeking to trace the rise of the charter school movement in the American experience, it is important to consider that the history of the charter concept precedes the
1991 law that gave rise to the first charter schools in the state of Minnesota as well as Budde and Shanker’s original vision for charter school reforms.
Despite the rapid spread of charter schools from 1992 to the present, the societal forces that have coalesced to drive the charter school mandate predate the nation’s founding. Tied to this idea is the often overlooked fact that the charter school movement did not evolve in an historical vacuum. Educational history has been fundamentally affected by the ebb and flow of broader historical forces. This history seeks to map the charter school movement onto broader historical shifts within the American experience. This work is grounded in the idea that periods of uncertainty and broader societal tensions have been catalytic in
Americans accepting charter schools as a normative part of the educational landscape. This work is primarily concerned with the history of the American charter school concept, the ideas that sustain it and its place as a legitimate educational reform movement. However, it is essential to first lay the groundwork regarding the object of inquiry: what do we mean by “choice,” and where do charter schools fit along this continuum?
School Choice as a Concept
In the American context, the idea of choice resonates with the nation’s founding precepts. Ideas of liberty, republicanism and natural rights permeate the policy terrain. Each side of the charter school debate seeks to appropriate the concept of choice. Charter school advocates look to promote the Republic’s founding emphasis on the autonomy of the
individual etched in the Lockean theme of natural rights, while critics look to the collectivist ideals of community that informed and sustained the philosophy of the common school. By co-opting choice, both advocates and opponents of charter schools seek to lay claim to
ownership of the country’s founding narrative. As a nation, the United States has evolved to a place of divisiveness that the founders themselves feared and anticipated. While an entire chapter of this work will be devoted to the evolution of the ideals that inform the concept of choice within the American founding, it is important, in laying the foundations, to point out that as early as 1787, James Madison, in arguing for the ratification of the Constitution, warned that the formation and ossification of factions would signal the beginnings of civil dissolution by “kindling unfriendly passions and exciting most violent conflicts.” Madison mandated the federal government with the “regulation of these… interfering interests… involv[ing] the spirit of party and faction” (Hamilton, Madison, & Jay, 1818/2001, p. 44). Madison understood that, by its very nature, – a nature nested in natural rights- a democratic republic was vulnerable to the formation of factions. In a nation divided along political and economic lines, the concept of choice provides a natural philosophical and ideological venue for the formation of value laden societal binaries. The questions then becomes, do American historical and philosophical traditions allow for and encourage the freedom to have school choice, or does that same narrative guarantee freedom from school choice, in order to help guarantee equality in the public square?
For school choice advocates, choice in matters of education allows for the exercise of liberty in the educational marketplace. This form of freedom that invites parental oversight in choosing the educational venue for one’s children not only speaks to the natural rights that advocates of choice point to as being enshrined in America’s founding documents but also to more recent cautionary tales mapped on to modernist binary notions of “good” and “evil.” To this end, the exercise of choice differentiates American democratic values from
centralized authoritarian modes of governing, and thus keeps coercive forms of centralized education, reminiscent of Soviet era public oppression, from contaminating the free exercise of democratic choice (Meyerson, 1998). It is within this argument – fleshed out in later chapters – that the meaning of democracy is contested. For example, Feinberg (2008) explains that choice can be seen as antidemocratic, because it “removes control of education from elected entities” (p. 4). Chubb (1990), however, counters that it is actually an alternate form of direct democracy. In other words, where in one instance the educational realities of citizens are determined by disinterested parties of voters through publicly elected servants, in the other, consumers directly exercise their democratically derived preferences for the
educational venue that best suits their particular needs. This fundamental conflict over the meaning and evolution of choice in the American historical experience represents a
prominent disconnect between advocates of school choice and their critics. An exploration of this historical conundrum represents a significant component of this work. While the meaning of choice in the American narrative represents a key – albeit, at times, subterranean - source of tension in the charter school conflict, there are more concrete motivations for people opting out of traditional modes of public education: the most notable being academic achievement.
The idea that families would select into a school choice option based on promises of superior academic achievement is nested in fairly concrete reasoning4; however, it is
important to note that the reasoning that sustains this idea is anchored in notions of classic
4 It is important to note, that this work does not make the claim that public school choice results in superior standardized academic outcomes. However, this work does suggest two related ideas: first that families may select into public school options based on the perception of superior outcomes; and second, that families may be utilizing a different pedagogical criteria in selecting a nontraditional public school.
liberalism and is closely tied to the overarching concept of the liberty to choose. When school choice advocates point to academic achievement as a rationalization for opting out of government controlled traditional education, they are invoking their belief in the power of free markets and economic incentives to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of
education (Feinberg & Lubienski, 2008). In doing so, they are either explicitly or implicitly condemning what they see as the malaise of government run education married to the unquestioned uniformity of curriculum and school level, and, perhaps district, organization (Chubb & Moe, 1990). Furthermore, although there are many variants of school choice, the academic achievement argument has become synonymous with the debate over charter schools. The free-market principles’ invoked by charter school advocates rests on the natural selection mechanisms inherent in the educational marketplace. In other words, if schools fail to provide, what families perceive as quality service, they will be shunned and will
eventually close as students and their families gravitate to schools that fulfill their needs.
The terrain of academic achievement is the most often measured within the charter school debate; moreover, the results are also the most highly contested.5 The interpretations of these results are used to either bolster support for the legitimacy of school choice or they are invoked to condemn it. As suggested earlier, using these interpretive claims to sustain an argument for the movement’s legitimacy or illegitimacy is counterproductive and fails to address the basic point of contention regarding the right of individual families to retain a measure of autonomy in selecting the educational venue that most closely adheres to their
5 These issues have been contested on both methodological grounds as well as the interpretation of results. For a thorough review of the methodological quarrels, see Greene, Peterson, & Du, 1999; and Metcalf, 1998. For discussions of results, see Braun, Jenkins, & Grigg, 2006; Hoxby & Rockoff, 2004; and Lubienski & Lubienski, 2006.
educational and cultural values. A charter school’s academic performance, whether judged exemplary or academically challenged, provides people with a potential metric to assess whether they should or should not patronize it. However, it does not provide a lens through which we can judge its legitimacy as a venue for American public education.
To test the veracity of the claim that the American charter school movement is either legitimate or illegitimate, it is important to trace the rise of American education against the backdrop of broader historical forces that created the public space for the charter school movement. To prepare the backdrop for this work it is important to differentiate between various forms of school choice; for the purposes of this work, it is imperative not to conflate school voucher programs with the charter school movement.
Charter schools are but one manifestation of the concept of school choice. School choice represents a broad array of schooling options that share one fundamental trait: to varying degrees they afford families “choice” in the educational venues they patronize. In doing this, school choice seeks to shift the responsibility for providing education from the public to the private sector (Vergari, 2007). School choice encompasses a broad array of educational options such as homeschooling, inter/intra district choice, privatization, magnet schools, vouchers and charter schools. Despite the wide variety of choice options, no school reform measure has generated as much interest or caused such societal consternation as the idea that parents should be allowed to choose the school that their children attend (Feinberg & Lubienski, 2008). In gross terms, the various manifestations of school choice are, in part, defined, and either supported, or rejected by the degree of autonomy they offer from
While there are significant differences between these choice options, they are, at times conflated, thus appearing as a monolithic concept. This occurs most often between charter schools and school vouchers. Charter schools represent a hybrid of sorts between the free-market ideal of school choice, offered by voucher programs, where schools compete and either thrive or collapse as the marketplace dictates, and traditional concepts of public
education, where the state hold a monopoly over educational venues. The conflation of these two school choice variants – vouchers and charters- is understandable due to the charter movement having arisen from the philosophical and conceptual framework responsible for educational vouchers. This semantic layering, however, is potentially misleading regarding the place of charter schools in both contemporary and historical contexts. With this in mind, it is important to articulate what defines a charter school as well as school vouchers, where they intersect, and where they diverge.
The Definition Challenge: Discerning between Charter Schools & School Vouchers
Charter schools have acted as catalysts in provoking strong debates across disciplinary contexts. While vibrant disagreements concerning student achievement and corporatization continue unabated, researchers can agree on one fundamental scholarly deficit: charter school research lacks a substantive metanarrative; the effect of this deficit reverberates across research contexts (Bulkley & Fisler, 2003; Hassel, 1997; Murphy & Shiffman, 2002). Constructing a narrative for charter schools is complicated by the fact that a universal definition for them does not and cannot exist due to state as well as interstate level differences. The power of the charter school idea resides in its flexibility; to be a
charter school advocate is to embrace the idea that the traditional notion inherent in the traditional school model is too confining to accommodate all learners.
As Nathan (1996) points out, charter schools represent an “opportunity not a
blueprint” (p. 1). With this in mind, a definition must be adopted that is sufficiently bounded to provide meaningful characteristics around which a thoughtful history can be constructed, but broad enough to allow for both local and state level differences.
Charter schools are publicly financed institutions, which receive approximately the same amount of funding as traditional public schools6. These schools are founded by both individuals and groups and are located in either the public or private sector. Charters are allowed to hire for profit companies to run the day to day operations of the school; however, the charter itself cannot be awarded to a for-profit entity. As public institutions, charter schools cannot charge tuition or levy taxes. However, charter schools can seek grants from the federal government, and accept charitable or philanthropic contributions and donations from nonprofit organizations. Working within this framework, charter schools are freed from most of the rules and regulations that traditional public schools must conform to. Some of the key freedoms that charter schools enjoy are autonomy in areas of staffing, curriculum choice, and budget management (Miron & Nelson, 2002). This autonomy allows for, and, in fact, encourages, the creation of individual charter school landscapes. Reflecting the preferences of families and school founders, these schools often emphasize various disciplines or themes such as foreign languages, sciences, mathematics, fine arts, or college
6 It is important to bear in mind, however, that charter schools are also eligible to receive philanthropic donations. Large donors are identified as venture philanthropists (Scott, 2009). These donors have become a significant source of friction between charter school supporters and critics. Critics see these donors as pursuing a neoliberal agenda that will result in the corporatization of American public education (Hursh, 2005; Saltman, 2007).
preparation (Vergari, 2007). Despite a significant degree of latitude in matters of curriculum and pedagogy, charter schools remain bound to the same academic standards and
standardized testing requirements as their traditional counterparts. The one advantage that charter schools possess over traditional public institutions is that they are allowed to cap their enrollment, thus minimizing student to teacher ratios thus allowing for increased
individualized instruction.
While this description provides a sound technical definition, it falls short of conveying the dynamism of the charter school concept. Alternatively, it may be more helpful to think of the charter school idea as a grouping of principles designed to maximize autonomy while guaranteeing accountability. From its infancy, the charter school mandate has focused on four broad concepts that have been woven into charter school initiatives as they seek to fulfill the particular educational needs of their prospective learning
communities. The charter school model seeks to create public schools that are patronized by students and their families by choice; that offer entrepreneurial opportunities for educators and parents to create schools that match their needs; that are explicitly accountable to the community for improved standardized achievement; and finally, that engage in competition within the educational marketplace (Nathan, 1996).
Three of these principles, or pillars of the charter school idea, locate their origins in the Republic’s founding: the ideas of choice, free markets and entrepreneurial initiative resonate with libertarian ideals. However, the charter school is also accountable to the community that endorses its mandate. These schools are constrained from “creaming” the
student population,7 requiring admission standards, or establishing a sectarian curriculum. Broadly, schools are responsible for demonstrating that they are delivering on their promise to improve the academic standing of their students. Specifically, these agreements include, but are not necessarily limited to, a clear delineation of the schools proposed educational methodology; goals and missions; how educational growth will be measured and assessed; evidence concerning parental, faculty and community support; qualifications of faculty and school sponsors; and a description of the financial management and organizational structure (K. D. Jones, 2002). These schools are generally chartered for 3-5 years with an option to renew after an extensive audit. These accountability measures speak to the concessions that free-market advocates make to broker a compromise with those that insist on community oversight and regulation in publicly funded schools.
The concept of consumer choice motivates charter schools to place innovation and customer service at the forefront of their design. This enables charter schools to cater to particular demographics that have been historically underserved within existing educational structures. This marriage between American Lockean ideals and covenants with the
community represents a significant compromise. Furthermore, their strategic deployment helps explain why charter schools have proven to be the most successful and far ranging manifestation of school choice (Sugarman & Kemerer, 1999).
7 Charter schools are often accused of taking or “creaming” the best students from low SES schools; however, this has been consistently refuted, as in Buckley & Schneider, 2005; D. R. Garcia, McIlroy, & Barber, 2008; and Lacireno‐ Paquet, Holyoke, Moser, & Henig, 2002.
Charter Legislation from State to State
It is important to note that in order to open a charter school a state must first pass a charter school law. There are currently 41 states as well as the District of Columbia with charter school laws woven into their state constitutions. In 2009, 4371 charter schools welcomed over 1.7 million students (Hubbard & Kulkarni, 2009); by the close of the 2012 school year, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported that the number of charter schools had swelled to 5,618 (Public Charter School Dashboard). The United States Constitution relegates matters concerning education to the discretion of the states. Outside of federal funding and civil rights provisions, states enjoy nearly unfettered autonomy in the realm of education. With this in mind, each state that chooses to enact charter school legislation is free to adjust the defining characteristics of charters so long as they do not violate federal statutes forbidding discrimination based on sex, race, national origin, or disability (Jones, 2002).
Charter school law changes rapidly, with states expanding or contracting the level of autonomy granted to schools based on regional and state level experiences. With this in mind, detailing the laws of individual states does little to illuminate the current state of charter school legislation. However, state charter laws are judged as either “strong” or “weak” based on their level of adherence to some basic criteria (Murphy & Shiffman, 2002). “Strong” charter school legislation allows for both state and local board level school
sponsorship; encourages any individual or group to submit a charter proposal; grants exemptions from state laws, rules and policies; grants complete autonomy in all fiscal matters (including faculty salaries); grants complete legal autonomy, thereby making the
faculty and staff employees of the school and not the local school district; discourages states from placing a ceiling on the number of charter schools that can be formed; and finally, encourages schools to hire and retain faculty without insisting on formal teacher certification (Nathan, 1996).
Despite extensive state level autonomy, the federal government has crafted funding incentives that charter schools can opt to apply for. Given the constitutional barriers erected against direct federal government involvement in public education, the federal government has, since 1787, sought creative ways to influence local educational mandates, without
violating the autonomy of the states, an issue that will be explored extensively in Chapter 3. In applying for federal grants, charter schools must conform to federal guidelines for the operating of charter schools outlined in the Charter Schools Program (CSP), Title V, Part B of the Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA). By offering these resource incentives to charter schools, the federal government is able to maintain a degree of control over what would otherwise be a state level prerogative. The federal non-regulatory guidelines are carefully crafted to reflect the federal government’s mandate of encouraging the formulation of strong state charter laws while explicitly asserting that it in no way do they seek to
infringe on the autonomous role of the states in creating charter laws that are conducive to the regional needs of its citizenry. To apply for CSP funding, the federal government’s sole stipulation is that charter schools comply with Constitutional and federal civil rights
legislation (www.Ed.gov-department of education.2011).
The charter idea exists on a continuum of choice. Educational Management
the charter school as an access point to initiate the process of converting public education to wholesale privatization. Consequently, they are viewed with suspicion by charter supporters who would rather side with traditional public education but have come to believe that the charter idea is a necessary remedy for an overburdened public school system. Some of the EMOs such as Sylvan Learning Systems, Nobel Learning Communities, and Knowledge Universe have worked their way into the charter school lexicon and have become accepted parts of the charter terrain. It has been suggested that by 2020, EMOs will be responsible for the day to day operations of a significant portion of the charter schools operating in the United States (Deal, Hentschke, & Kecker, 2004). The EMO design inches the charter school idea closer to its free-market antecedent, the school voucher.
School Vouchers and the Concept of Choice
American charter schools owe their existence to their free-market predecessor, the school voucher. It is accurate to think of school vouchers as the antecedent to the charter school. It is, therefore, helpful to have a clear understanding of what exactly a school voucher is. While various voucher-like schemes were initiated to accommodate immigrant groups in both the colonial and early national period, the voucher idea was first seriously floated during the 19th century, in New York, in an attempt by Governor William Seward to meet the needs of Catholics who were determined to have their children educated in the Catholic as opposed to the Protestant faith. The voucher evolved as a potential remedy for American education as various reform efforts failed to satisfy an expanding population with diverse educational needs and desires. With this in mind, it is important to understand how
vouchers are understood in a contemporary context, how they differ from the charter school concept, and the symbiotic connection between them.
While Shanker and Budde are inextricably linked with the origins of the charter school movement, their names have faded from the literature. Antithetically, the Nobel Prize winning economist, the late Milton Friedman, is at the forefront of any discussion regarding school vouchers. Friedman first applied the term ‘voucher’ to education in his essay The Role of Government in Education (1955). Friedman endorsed a universal publicly funded
voucher system that would allow families to abandon school systems that failed to meet their educational needs. In Friedman’s original vision, these vouchers could be redeemed at any public or private school. Friedman’s idea was couched in the theory of self correcting market forces. In Friedman’s view, the intrusion of private education into the monopoly of traditional public education would increase competition and either motivate public schools to improve, or force them to close. Moreover, Freidman was confident that private schools would more often than not outperform their public counterparts (Friedman, 1955; Friedman & Friedman, 1990).
Public education employees and their advocates took Friedman’s educational manifesto as a “call to arms” (Berends, 2009, p. 268), and were instrumental in defeating voucher legislation proposed at the federal level throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Some of this legislation, such as the three voucher Bills president Reagan sent to Congress during the years 1983, 1985, and 1986, received very little legislative attention, garnering negligible support. It would not be until 1989 when the Wisconsin and Ohio state
failing public schools that vouchers made the transition from theory to practice. In the narrative of charter schools this was significant because both the Wisconsin and Ohio bills were passed by the narrowest of margins. The success of these measures was enabled by a coalition of conservatives and liberals that wanted the same thing albeit for very different reasons (Viteritti, 2009). The forming of this coalition, which will be explored in Chapter 6, proved to be a bellwether moment for American school choice legislation and marked the initiation of a tense partnership that brokered the public/ private compromise that would be responsible for the first charter school laws.
Charter schools and vouchers differ on three fundamental levels. First, charter schools must be non-sectarian as opposed to vouchers that can be used to patronize faith based institutions. Second, charter schools must accept all students; they cannot ‘cream’ the student population. Finally, unlike charters, schools that accept vouchers can use admission tests to select their student body so long as they do not violate anti-discrimination laws (Nathan, 2005). Regarding charter schools, these distinctions are important as they create an atmosphere of choice that thrives within the orbit of public accountability. Their ‘charters’- or contracts- serve as a form of public oversight that ensures school operators, parents and various interest groups cannot seize control of schools and in doing so initiate the wholesale privatization of public education.
It is this philosophical compromise between school choice advocates and those who value traditional public education that has made the charter idea tolerable to diverse
sensibilities. Despite the fact that charter schools and voucher programs differ in concrete ways, charter schools and the communities they serve often operate in an atmosphere of
considerable tension. Some look to charters as a gateway to an unrestricted voucher
program and thus see charters as being unduly burdened by oversight; others only grudgingly accept the limited autonomy of charter schools and fear that public education is on the
precipice of complete privatization (Vergari, 2007).
Charter schools have been successful in garnering significant, albeit, in some instances, cautious and tepid, support from across the research spectrum (Apple, 2002; Apple, 1996; Miron & Nelson, 2002). Unlike many policy debates, charter schools defy the traditional political binary that signals either support or opposition to particular measures. Those that oppose charter schools cannot be reliably placed on the political spectrum, as evidenced by the bipartisan makeup of the coalition that passed the first voucher and charter laws in Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota. Essentially, how one evaluates the legitimacy of the charter school movement depends on an individual’s view of the rights of the individual versus the right of society to shape and reproduce itself at the expense of the individual’s autonomy. Charter schools represent a grand compromise between the two guiding
philosophies of the American experience: the founding Lockean concept of natural rights and the older American impulse, to band together, ensconced in a communal covenant, to further the interests of the common good. The concept of the communal covenant and its
undergirding philosophy will be leveraged to support a significant portion of this
dissertation. With this in mind, it is important to briefly consider the utility and meaning of the term covenant as it is deployed in this work.
The role of the Puritan covenant in the formation of colonial America is well established (Bremer, 2003; Elazar, 1998; Mount Jr., 1981; Novak, 2003). The idea of the
Biblical covenant is most often invoked, as Mount (1999) explains, to locate “the relational self in a community of identity, promise and obligation with God and neighbor” (p. 1) that worked to sustain the New England communities from the Great Migrations of the 17th century into the early national period. Because the Protestant covenant assumed an intensely personal relationship between the individual and God, the notion of the covenant emphasizes one’s understanding of God and often ignores or minimizes its human communal dimension. However, as Niebuhr (1954) argues, the covenant signaled the “binding together in one body politic of persons who assumed…responsibility to and for each other” (p. 133); Mount sums up this reality when he explains that “Puritan individualism functioned within a corporate, organic context [and] was not [concerned] with the isolated individual but the individual in the community” (1999, p. 364). This organic context depended on the individual
“behav[ing] industriously in their earthly calling or profession [and] loving their neighbors” (P. M. Jones & Jones, 1977, p. 15). With this in mind, this work focuses on the secular dimensions of community covenants to identify and explore the origins of the interdependent communal relationships, and unique educational needs that exist within homogenous
communities. This work is not arguing that the charter school movement has consciously revived the Puritan or Communitarian covenant cultures of colonial America. Instead, this work invites the reader to contemplate a much more balanced and nuanced understanding of the influences of America’s past on the proliferation of the charter school model. These influences manifest themselves most strongly in historically underserved communities by working to return equilibrium to the educational dynamic between the individual, the family and the community. This perspective grants a unique view affording lens to assess the
legitimacy of the American charter school movement within the historical experience of the United States.
This work seeks to locate the legitimacy of the charter school movement within the continuity of the American narrative from colonies to nation to the present day. This
legitimacy, rather than being solely entrenched in the rationale of attaining superior academic results, is nested in a systemic extension of the historic American propensity for unique communities to band together in interdependent covenant relationships that value and honor the autonomy of the individual and thereby work symbiotically to ensure communal survival. The history of any seminal movement in American domestic policy consists of significantly more than the linear narrative of the evolution of the legislative process. Working from this premise, this work proceeds chronologically, utilizing an historical approach that seeks to capture the impact of diverse and textured historical forces as they acted on the ascent of charter school legislation. As outlined below, this work begins in Chapter 2 by tracing the roots of its argument from the earliest years of the American colonies and ends, in Chapter 6, with an examination of contemporary challenges and opportunities for the charter school movement.
Chapter 2, Rationalizing Charter Schools in American Origins, explores the role of the Republics founding philosophies and the particular contributions of the New England, Middle and Southern Colonies in matters of culture and education. This chapter pays
particular attention to New England’s covenant culture and the value and rationale placed on education and literacy. Furthermore, this chapter works to determine the saliency of Locke
as an appropriate philosophical point of origin for school choice in general and charter schools in particular.
Chapter 3, From Revolution to Republic: The Marginalization of the Family and the Specialization of the Educator, explores the disconnect between the radical Lockean drivers
of the American Revolution and the antithetical conformist educational structures that emerged during the early years of the Republic. A significant portion of this chapter is dedicated to exploring the motivation for Jefferson’s proposed education legislation, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, and how these statist educational impulses
contributed to a school system built to socially engineer societal cohesion. Jefferson’s Bill, while never passed, contributed significantly to the ethos of the common school. This period in American history marks a radical transformation in education as the teacher emerges as a pedagogical specialist and mandatory schooling becomes cloaked in the garb of the state. This formalization of education initiated a process of parental marginalization and a loss of autonomy for the individual. As such, it signaled the temporary demise of family and individual prerogatives in education at the behest of the state.
Chapter 4, The African American Community and the Multiple Narratives of Brown, forms the centerpiece of this work and explores the proposition that the Brown ruling and the desegregation it mandated8 failed to achieve equality of opportunity for African Americans and instead acted as a catalyst for the African American community to view themselves as a
8 Interestingly, though not adopted in this work, it has been suggested that it may be helpful to refer to the pre‐ Brown era as one of segregation, which carries a conceptual connection to oppression, while referring to the post‐ Brown era separation by race as a voluntary act of “sitting apart”. This distinction, it has been suggested, may help clarify the difference between a forced marginalization and subjugation of a social group, on the one hand, and the voluntary association of persons in the same group for the purpose of maintaining and promoting a distinct culture, on the other (G. McDonough, personal communication, April 10, 2013).
people apart. The societal atmosphere of this era proved catalytic in bringing school choice legislation in general and charter school legislation in particular to the forefront of
educational reform as a means of improving educational opportunities. This chapter takes a broad historical lens to the concept of educational self segregation in the African American community and looks to systemically assess the impact of cycles of racism, persecution and rejection in motivating African American communities to retreat to interdependent
communal covenants from the antebellum period to the Plessy era and onward. Finally, using the work of Bell, Du bois and others, this chapter explores the idea that the charter school movement may, in fact, be leveraged to move beyond the rhetoric of integration to realizing the promise of Brown.
Chapter 5, The Politics and Philosophy of the Charter School Movement: An Evolution, critically examines the relationship between the first modern American voucher
program, in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and the political alliance that made it possible. This work explores the role of A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in motivating conservatives to join a political alliance with African American civil rights advocates, who, having grown weary of waiting for the “promise” of Brown to be fulfilled, compromised traditional alliances and brokered school choice legislation with conservatives, and by doing so created a political atmosphere conducive to passing the inaugural charter school legislation the following year in Minnesota. This chapter concludes by critically assessing the warrants for the
justification for parental choice in conjunction with the philosophical scaffolding that lends support to both advocates and critics of the charter school movement.
Chapter 6, From Theory to Practice: The Birth of the Charter School, traces the process of the passing of the first American charter school legislation in Minnesota. It assesses this process against the possible affect of the migration of the New England covenant cultures to the state of Minnesota as they amalgamated with communally minded Scandinavian immigrants. Next, this chapter moves to work through the challenge of mitigating charges of racial segregation or self- segregation against the merits of supporting the formation of homogenous charter schools. Finally, this chapter concludes by examining, what is evolving to be the most salient challenge for the charter school movement: religious charter schools. Increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants, hailing predominantly from East Africa, are finding life in traditional American schools isolating and intolerant. As a result, they are rapidly availing themselves of charter school laws and creating Muslim oriented charter schools. These schools are presenting a unique challenge to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment due to the virtually indistinguishable demarcation between the
secular and the sacred in Muslim culture.
Chapter 7, Conclusion, looks to future directions for a program of historical research that assesses the regional and/or micro impact of education on unique communities and cultures and how their particular heritage and societal positioning impacts their educational needs.
Chapter 2. Rationalizing Charter Schools in American Origins
Although the literature on the American charter school movement lacks a comprehensive history, on occasions when an historical backdrop is deployed, the philosophy of Locke is often, either implicitly or explicitly, associated with its point of origin. It makes little difference whether the argument favors charter schools (Godwin, Kemerer, Martinez, & Ruderman, 1998; Ruderman & Godwin, 2000; Tarcov, 1999), or whether their place in American public education is being contested (Gutmann, 1980, 2002; Weber, 2008). Locke, or particular versions of his philosophy, becomes integrated into the argument for the desirability of varying degrees of educational autonomy, nested in
humanity’s inherently derived natural rights. This desire is driven by Locke’s overt distrust of the state.
The United States is unique among Western nations in that its commitment to its founding mythology is sacrosanct (O’Brien, 1996). This commitment creates a largely unquestioned adherence to the nation’s civic religion. Individualism is a crucial piece of the American identity; it is anchored in the historical experience of the Republic. However, it has never existed in isolation. The myth of individualism9 – quite different from the reality – has thrived and continues to thrive within particular social contexts, most notably in the
9 In questioning the legitimacy of individualism, Mount (1981) suggests that it represents a “distinctly American ideology” (p. 362) that “denies the self’s web of relationships and its historical and social location” (p. 369). The most salient critique of the place of individualism in the American narrative resides in the conflation of individual elitism with the ideal of working within defined communal boundaries to achieve controlled autonomy (Grabb, Baer, & Curtis, 1999). However, Individualism’s place in American society still garners considerable scholarly support. Most prominently, Lipset (1997) argues that individualism is prominent in the American labor force resulting in a population steeped in “American exceptionalism.” Lipset sees individualism as representing the “American creed,” while Novak (1990) argues that the intrinsic power of individualism causes the American citizen to abandon family and social networks to stand alone.
American Southeast, among the states of the old Confederacy; this regional predilection will be explored in Chapter 3.
From the beginning, these contexts have been supported by communal
interdependence. Despite the power of individualism within the American creation myth, it is true, as Mount (1981) suggests, that “Puritan individualism functioned squarely within a corporate, organic context” (p. 364). This Puritan model, Mount concludes, positioned the individual squarely “in the community … a citizen of the holy commonwealth” (364). It is to this interdependent dynamic – balancing the autonomy of the individual with substantial accountability to the community – that the charter-school movement appeals. The
compromise between individual and community that nurtures the American charter school can be glimpsed in embryo in colonial America, and thus encourages a reexamination of America’s founding philosophy prior to the Revolution and Locke’s rise to prominence.
The American charter school emerged from a protracted period of philosophical gestation. The historical process that culminated in the charter-school movement is driven by many of the same philosophical beliefs that gave rise to and continue to sustain the American Republic. Driven by the fear of state imposed tyranny, Locke’s philosophy, emphasizing natural as opposed to state-derived rights, provided the American founders with much of the intellectual framework and emotional zeal needed to justify their rebellion against Britain. As such, Locke has become enshrined in the American pantheon of civic religion.
The American creation story is part of the credo of what has often been called a civil religion. Robert Neely Bellah’s seminal work (1967) suggests that civil religion denotes more than the means by which a nation locates its cultural heritage; rather, it conveys a historical destiny rooted in sacred texts and persons and woven into the fabric of common national values (Williams & Demerath III, 1991). The closer the object of worship is to the moment of creation, the more difficult it is to question its legitimacy.
The contributions of Locke and the primacy of the individual, and the roles both played in American civic philosophy, found their first defining expressions in Turner’s Frontier Thesis. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner read his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” before the American Historical Association. Turner stressed the role of the American wilderness in shaping the character of the American citizenry. The American frontier offered unprecedented riches; however, to succeed in this wilderness, settlers had to adopt, refine, and pass along certain virtues. Of these, the most prominent was individualism. Turner’s thesis has been singularly persistent in the face of later criticism. Despite being consistently discredited for its nearly mythic reliance on the individual, it endures.10 Putnam (1976) articulated the frustration of many historians when he lamented that despite legions of researchers “placing a question mark on the significance of the western movement in American history” (p. 377), Turner’s thesis continues to haunt
American historiography, largely because of its invocation of the American creation myth. Turner became the 20th-century voice for the mythic power of the individual in shaping the
10 Three sources of the more prominent and enduring criticism of the Frontier Thesis are Abercrombie & Turner, 1978; Caughey, 1974; and W. N. Davis, 1964.
American landscape. This era marks the beginning of a coherent Lockeinspired -celebration of “rugged individualism” in the American identity.
John Locke and the Problem of Philosophical Origins
“Thus in the beginning all the world was America,” writes John Locke in his Two Treatises on Government (1690a/1967, p. 215). Locke is widely seen as America’s philosopher (Tarcov, 1999); his place as the prime mover of American philosophy is difficult to dislodge. Looking outward from 17th-century England, Locke saw America as a second Garden of Eden (Arneil, 1996), a chance to transplant noble English sensibilities while leaving behind the vices and imperfections that had led to two civil wars and the imposition of an oppressive state in England. As the American Revolution progressed from a series of minor New England
uprisings to a full-scale colonial insurrection, the philosophical leaders of the American War for Independence found in Locke the inspiration for the seminal documents of their new Republic. The founders mapped Locke’s principles of natural rights onto the terrain of American
contemporary culture. The American founding mythos thus became influenced by a doctrine of individualism that challenged, and eventually overcame, the Republic’s’ collectivist colonial roots.
Charter-school philosophy reflects a certain amount of these early philosophical groundworks. To be sure, Lockean philosophy plays an important role in the debate over the legitimacy of charter schools in the United States. Locke becomes most directly useful to charter-school advocates when discussing parental rights. The full extent of that influence will become clear later. At this juncture, however, the overriding concern is to look for a potential point of origin; that is, the historical nexus of traits that represent the philosophical
drivers of the American charter-school ethos. First it is helpful to explore how Locke’s philosophy has been misconstrued as the genesis moment for the American charter school.
In Two Treatises on Government, Locke (1690a/1967) argues for the natural rights of all people. These rights, he argues, are fundamental to our existence: we are born with them, and they supersede the purview of the state. These rights are captured succinctly in the oft-paraphrased Lockean dictum that the right to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are bestowed by nature, not by the state. Locke did not articulate these sentiments verbatim; they were rather inferred by the American founders from two of Locke’s essays, A Letter Concerning Human Toleration (1689/1983) and An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690b/1859). Such inferences would form the cornerstone of the Declaration
of Independence, which instructs Americans that they have been “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Driven by its place of prominence in the American civic tradition, this line of thought motivates school-choice advocates to identify traditionally mandated education as oppressive, infringing on the natural rights of Americans by coercing the individual to adopt the normative values established and promoted by the state.
Something closely resembling such thinking appears clearly in Locke’s lone work explicitly concerned with schooling, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693/1971), which avers that the state cannot be trusted in the education of children. Ever mindful of encroaching state tyranny, Locke warns of the “influence of instructors to [lead students to] vice and temptation” and instructs parents to maintain “watchfulness in the education of their children” (p. 71). Similar ideas resonate whenever Locke either touches on or is explicitly prescriptive in matters of educational methodology. The distrust of state-sponsored
education derives directly from Locke’s fear of state indoctrination (Ruderman & Godwin, 2000). It was for this reason that Locke warned against state interventions in spiritual matters concerned with the “good of souls” and sought to constrain state activities within its rightful domain of civil interests such as “life, liberty, health and the indolency of body” (1689/1983, pp. 65, 69).
While Locke’s philosophical ideas are rightly located and scrutinized in debates concerning both broad matters of school choice and particular warrants for charter schools, there are significant problems with identifying his philosophical work as a point of origin for American charter schools. Three cautions should be observed. First, we must keep Locke in his historical context. As Ryan (2012) rightly warns us, “we must not credit past authors with our own favorite ideas … we value their insights, but they did not have us in mind when they came to them” (p. 2). Locke was not familiar with, nor did he anticipate, the structure of contemporary American schooling. Nowhere in his writings does he directly address education in a manner that is structurally recognizable to 21st-century educators. Therefore, the arguments that can be directly lifted from his writings are at best inferential.
Second, Locke speaks only to one side of the relation between individual and community. He is directly opposed to the notion that the state should mandate issues best left to families. The public school, Locke tells us, invites the imposition of “rudeness and vice” (p. 107); there is nothing to be gained, he concludes, from one’s children being thrown into a “mixed herd of unruly boys,” as they are generally derived from “parents of all kinds” (p. 108).
If we are to take him at his word, then, Locke is suspicious of all forms of formal education. A close reading of Locke suggests that the farther an individual is educated from parental supervision, the more likely it is that the student will succumb to “rudeness and vice.” From this perspective, Locke is most appropriately aligned with the home-schooling movement (Olsen, 2009). Home schooling represents the oldest form of school choice; as we move into an increasingly globalized age, however, in which long-term student success requires the fostering of dynamic interpersonal skills, the isolationist pedagogy of home schooling forces it to the margins of educational reform. Consequently, home schooling serves a niche market, reducing it to a unique choice as opposed to a true movement (Davis, 2005; Isenberg, 2007).
It is difficult to assess Locke’s educational philosophy divorced from his deep-seated suspicion of external influences imposed on the individual or the individual’s children. From this garrison perspective, all educational venues outside the home threaten the family’s liberty. However, if Lockean sympathizers concede the need to participate in some form of formal communal schooling, then school voucher programs, which depend on free-market values, most closely align with Locke’s precepts. The school voucher, however, has never enjoyed broad support, for the very same reason Locke’s philosophy cannot be identified as the driving force behind the charter school ethos: it eschews community oversight, picturing the individual’s autonomy as absolute and the state as always being a step away from
oppressing that autonomy. Given that American history is traditionally understood in terms of the grand narrative, coupled with Locke’s pivotal role in establishing the primacy of the
