Parents in the United States have a strong preference for charter schools, regardless of demographic factors including race, income, geographic region or political affiliation, according to a report released by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
An online survey of some 5,000 parents of schoolchildren revealed that 74 percent would consider sending their child to a charter school if one were available to them. Even among parents who might not choose a charter, 84 percent believe charter schools should be available to others.
Nearly 90 percent of families whose children have switched school types experienced a positive change as a result of the switch, with 57 percent saying their child was happier.
The findings came as a surprise to Debbie Veney of the Alliance, who authored the report.
“I went into this with questions about populations of students who have not been highly represented in charter schools,” Veney told The Epoch Times, referring in part to lower-income families and those with lower levels of educational attainment. “I was surprised to see strong support from people who have not typically chosen it.”
Of parents responding, 49 percent were not college graduates, 53 percent had an annual household income below $100,00 per year, and 23 percent earned less than $50,000 per year.
Respondents whose children were attending a charter school were slightly more likely to be Democrats than Independents or Republicans. Parents of children with special needs accounted for 17 percent of those parents.
Nearly 70 percent of charter school students are Black or Hispanic, according to the report.
School Choice Gaining Support
Since the first public charter school was established in Minnesota in 1992, the number grew to as many as 7,500 by 2019, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, comprising some 3.4 million students. Charter schools are sanctioned in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
All charter schools are public schools. They are given a charter to operate from an authorizing body such as a school district. Generally, these privately operated public schools receive public funding, but most provide their own building. Charter schools may be for-profit or non-profit. Most seek private donations in addition to public funding.
While charter schools operate under the same laws governing education as public schools do, they have a good deal of site-level autonomy to choose curriculum, set school hours and policies, hire and fire teachers, and control their own budgets.
An earlier report from NAPCS showed that some 1.4 million students left their district schools during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. The report stated that about 240,000 new students enrolled in public charter schools during that time.
Opposition Persists
Even as school choice options are gaining popularity, opposition to charter schools persists. Veney believes that has more to do with the efforts of anti-charter special interest groups than with charter schools themselves.“A lot of people don’t understand charter schools,” Veney said. “They have been given disinformation and misinformation about it.”
While some charter schools are unionized, most are not. Veney believes that’s a significant source of opposition to charters schools. “Every teacher not represented by a teacher’s union represents a loss of revenue and power,” she said.
The official position of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, is that it supports nonprofit public charter schools so long as they are authorized and held accountable by local, democratically elected school boards.
However, the nation’s largest teacher’s union also maintains that fraud is rampant in the charter school sector, and that charter schools drain funds from traditional public schools. More than 200,000 teachers work in charter schools, according to the NAPCS website.
“Educators originally supported charter schools as a place to experiment with educational ideas within the school system. Instead, political cynics and billionaire hobbyists have turned charter schools into a separate, overlapping set of schools that play by their own rules,” the NEA website states.
Some 141 for-profit management corporations operate charter schools in the United States, according to Network for Public Education. The NEA contends that such corporations put profit ahead of student needs.
As users of public funds, the NEA believes charter schools should be subject to regular audits, open meeting acts, open record acts, and conflict of interest requirements.
Parents Won’t Back Down
Regardless of the debate over charter schools, Veney believes parents will not back away from securing the best possible education for their children.“Parents like having choices, and they’re not going to give them up. This was consistent across all demographics. It cuts across race, income, geography, and political ideology,” she said.
Parental involvement in education is increasing, the survey showed, and their level of concern is growing. Education has become so important that 82 percent of parents said they would be willing to vote for a candidate from a different political party than their own if the candidate’s views on education matched their own.
“Parents will not settle for an option they know is not serving their children well. They simply will not settle. Where there is no other option available, they will just leave public education altogether and home-school their kids.”
