When an Oklahoma state school board approved what would become the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school, opponents of the proposal called it “deeply un-American” and “a flagrant violation of long-standing constitutional law.” An Oklahoma parents group and a handful of state and national civil organizations filed a pair of lawsuits to block the new school. Creating a taxpayer-funded religious school “turns on its head the concept that charter schools were supposed to be public schools,” American Federation of Teacher president Randi Weingarten argued.
Indeed, they were supposed to be public schools. But anyone who has been watching the devolution of charter schools could see this coming from a mile away.
The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma.
Charter schools, which were originally proposed to be district-run, innovative public schools, have since morphed into national charter school chains, Christian nationalist schools, and facades for for-profit corporations.
From charter schools in churches with websites displaying crosses to “faith-friendly” charters, the charter industry has been flirting with religiosity for years. Under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federal Charter School Programs were given the green light to award grants to religious organizations that own or operate charter schools.
During the 2021-2022 school year, 20 percent of all charter school students were enrolled in a school run by a for-profit company. This allowed these companies to evade laws and regulations by using a nonprofit school as a facade. And it is but a small hop over a line drawn in the sand to move from the federal government funding a religious organization to run charters, to funding charters that provide religious instruction in classrooms. It only takes a strong breeze, and the sand lines disappear altogether.
The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma, nor does the hocus-pocus turn solely on the question of religion.
Even as quasi-religious and perhaps overtly religious charter schools are on the rise, there is another effort intent on blurring the line between public and private.
A recent bill passed in North Carolina, a state in which a large proportion of charters run by for-profits, dismisses other features that determine whether or not charter schools, in fact, deserve the title “public.”
Charter schools are supposed to be “free and open to all” without discrimination or favor. But HB 219, passed by a Republican supermajority legislature over the veto of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper, allows charter schools to charge tuition and grant enrollment privileges to certain students. With the bill’s passage, North Carolina’s under-enrolled charter schools can now enlist both foreign and out-of-state students on a tuition basis. How will under-enrollment be defined?
Since the bill also allows nearly uncontrolled expansion of existing charter schools, finding space for tuition-paying students will not be difficult. Who will pay the tuition bill—the state, the foreign nation, or the family? North Carolina left that question unaddressed, but the likely outcome will be families, which favors the wealthy.
Not only does North Carolina challenge the definition of a charter school as a free school, but it also flaunts the idea that charters are open to all. The new law erodes equal access to charter schools in the state by giving enrollment privileges to special groups, allowing charter schools to shape their student bodies.
This is an extension of what already exists. North Carolina already gave enrollment priority to selected students—beyond what is offered in most other states. Enrollment preferences were already allowed for siblings of present and former students, children or grandchildren of board members and employees of the school (and for the for-profit or nonprofit management company that runs it), and students who attended another charter school.
To these already privileged sub-groups, the state has added foreign exchange tuition-paying students who need not even enter the lottery, children of members of the armed services, and students of private pre-schools selected by the charter.
In a state known for its white-flight charters, high-tuition or religious preschools are likely to enter these “enrollment articulation agreements” that grant their students access privileges.
In 2021, the Network for Public Education was joined by more than sixty civil rights and education advocacy organizations in filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. We argued that the distribution of the state’s grants of the Federal Charter School Programs to schools that overall were disproportionately whiter and wealthier than the districts in which they were located. There is no doubt that the new laws will only make such disparities worse.
Ironically, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a trade and lobbying organization that adamantly claims that charter schools are free and open to all, not only applauded the passage of HB 219 but gave the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Representative Tricia Cotham a hero award.
That alone is enough to tell us where the industry is going—charter expansion at any cost. It is also why those who care about public education should look beyond the question of religious charter schools to the other features that make schools truly public—features that are slowly being whittled away.