Over the past two decades, the charter school movement has had considerable success. In the 21 years since the first public charter school was established in St. Paul, Minnesota, the share of K-12 students enrolled in public charters has increased to 5 percent, and there is good reason to believe that this share will continue to increase. This is despite the fact that several states do not have laws authorizing charter schools, and many of those that do impose stringent caps on the number of public charters that can be established or on their enrollment. The main appeal of charter schools is that they grant administrators autonomy from certain regulations that govern traditional public schools. Yet some state governments have required that charter schools, or charter schools above a certain size, be subject to the collective bargaining agreements governing other schools in a given district, thus severely limiting autonomy in practice. And so one of the larger questions facing the charter school movement is how to govern public charters as they continue to expand. 

One city, New Orleans, has raced ahead in embracing public charters, having enrolled 76 percent of its K-12 students in them as of the 2011-12 school year. New Orleans’ Recovery School District (RSD) it has emerged as the country’s first true charter school district, which grants very wide autonomy to public charters while also aiming to impose rigorous accountability. Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, a non-profit organization that aims to support the city’s charter school movement and the RSD, has emerged as a thought leader in the charter school movement, having argued that school districts across the country ought to learn from the RSD’s modest but real success. In a recent AEI paper on “The Recovery School District Model,” Kingsland describes how the RSD has built an alternative to the traditional district model, in which the school district is both the regulator and the service provider and autonomous charters are seen as either marginal or as threatening to the district’s interests. He proposes that charter school districts serve the following three functions:

Market creator. An RSD can break local government monopolies by utilizing charter schools, alternative human-capital pipelines, and vouchers. In short, it can reduce both the school operation and labor market share of a local monopoly. If well-executed, this should lead to increased talent levels, innovation and entrepreneurship in the system.

Ambassador and talent recruiter. The RSD leader can be a legitimate ambassador for a new way of doing business. She can brand the RSD around academic excellence, recruit charter operators and human-capital providers, and be a leading voice for a state’s most vulnerable children. The best RSD leaders are able to use their local and national networks to infuse the new system with the best educators in the nation. Market systems without great organizations and great people will provide limited results. A visionary RSD leader understands that people matter and that talent is a virtuous cycle. The best attract the best and so on.

Bankruptcy steward. An RSD’s legislative mandate is to turn around failing schools. However, unlike a typical takeover agency, the RSD’s goal should not be to directly operate schools. Replacing one government monopoly with another is a fool’s errand, and the history of district takeovers is dismal. Rather, the RSD’s job should be more akin to that of a traditional banking regulator. If a bank fails, a banking regulator will intervene and either sell or rehab the institution, the key point being that the government does not operate the bank in perpetuity. It is a temporary steward, not a replacement operator.

Broadly speaking, the RSD is designed to facilitate the establishment of new schools and new instructional programs, and the expansion of those schools and programs that prove most successful. More vexingly, the RSD is also obligated to shut down schools the prove unsuccessful. This churning process is disruptive, but the hope is that average performance across the system will improve as the most effective schools grow or are cloned and as the worst schools leave the scene. 

Kingsland’s vision for charter school districts is attractive. Separating educational governance from educational delivery does seem like a good strategy for increasing entrepreneurship and responsiveness in public education. But one of the lesser-known consequences of the rise of public charters is the decline of traditional private schools, as recently described by Chester Finn Jr. Parochial school enrollment has been declining alongside religious observance, and while elite private schools are flourishing, their less prestigious counterparts are not. There is a certain irony behind the decline of private education and the rise of charters. American private education has long been a reflection of the health of American civil society, and the charter school movement represented an attempt to inject a dose of private sector ingenuity into the public system. Now, however, the failure of U.S. private schools to adapt to a changing economic and cultural landscape, defined by rising diversity and inequality and declining social capital, is proving fatal, while charter schools benefit from their connection to the public sector, which relies on taxation rather than persuasion to secure a stable funding stream. Because private education is less subject to regulation and scrutiny, you’d think it would be a site of innovation. One can imagine a scenario in which low-cost private schools expanded to compete with low-quality public schools across urban America, as they have in India and other developing countries. In the end, it seems that the leadership of the private education sector proved too risk-averse to strike out in this direction. This could change, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.