Contextualizing and Exploring the Charter School System

Abstract

Education spurs innovation and ideas, and from the inception of America, institutions date back to the 1600s. America's first education systems perpetuated inequality, and centuries later there are still opportunity gaps. The contemporary bureaucracies of the United States have fallen short of such utopian hopes that education as a whole can foster learning and socioemotional skills in children. Looming over the national stage of the 1980s was the Cold War and a recession. Under the Reagan administration, American visions of global power and economic domination slipped, and the nation pushed policy reform aimed at halting a shifting reality. From an educational standpoint, the country was not the top-scoring international nation. Reagan called for students, parents, and policymakers to establish rigorous curriculums, higher standards, and increase performance as the nation's future depended on academic aptitude. Furthermore, the introduction of the computer revolutionized everyday life, and by the end of the decade changed the classroom. Amidst the nationalist push for education reform and general discontentment with American public education, the educator and visionary Ray Budde designed a new system for school choice: a charter school. In his conceptual model, any community member could propose a school plan to their local district. Such sponsors would aim to serve either a particular student population, experiment with innovative pedagogical methods, and/or create new schooling experiences. If ratified by the district and community, organizers and sponsors would receive public funding to open their proposed charter. The sociopolitical climate also influenced the design system, which included undertones of capitalist beliefs stating increased competition between public institutions would improve performance. Charter schools emerged from changing political climates with a vision that innovative pedagogy and school-choice would increase flexibility, autonomy, and learning. Thus, while fulfilling its political agenda and quelling frustrations with public schools, the charter school system was specifically designed to improve student, parent, and teacher lives' and the nation. The design context of charter schools was a means to a political end in America during the 80s and 90s, however, the charter school system is instead an end-in-itself for low-income and urban education.