The Biden Administration Declares War on Charter Schools

T he decades-long honeymoon between Democrats and charter schools was too good to last.

Starting in the Reinventing Government era, Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama praised public charter schools for their innovations. Many “No Excuses” charters, in particular, succeed in teaching low-income African-American and Hispanic children when many traditional public schools fail, as decades of research demonstrates.

Even traditional liberal Hillary Clinton got boos from a National Education Association audience during the 2016 presidential campaign when she made positive remarks about charter schools, even while criticizing for-profit schools of all kinds. (A few charters are managed by businesses.) With this and other remarks, Clinton showed that she supported low-income parents, even at the cost of some union support.

But now, with Democrats going woke and a new president in town, the U.S. Department of Education has declared war on charter schools, using obscure bureaucratic rulemaking to kill the federal charter-school program without having to explain why.

On March 11, a Friday when media attention was focused on Ukraine and the Senate’s Thursday-night passage of the $1.5 trillion bill to fund federal-government agencies for the rest of the fiscal year, the Biden administration’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education issued 13 pages of rules designed to cut off charter schools from federal support, and that will likely serve as a model for state regulations limiting charters.

The administration’s proposals clearly took months to prepare, and their publication less than 24 hours after the key funding vote cleared the Senate, and coming after important House and Senate votes gave charter supporters in both parties less clout to bargain for changes, was timed to get as little notice as possible.

The administration is also employing a truncated comment process. That may sound arcane, but here’s why it matters for democratic governance. In accord with the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act, to ensure transparency, proposed new regulations are published in the Federal Register, with lengthy public-comment periods before rules are finalized. This gives time for experts, interest groups, and the public to offer input, making government regulations both more legitimate and more realistic.

For example, when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rewrote Title IX sexual-assault investigation rules in 2020, she did so after an 18-month process that considered over 124,000 public comments, producing better regulations because of this transparency.

For less-controversial proposals, a two-month public-comment process is the norm. Yet the Biden administration has allowed just one month for input on its proposed charter-school rules, from their publication on March 11 to the closing of public comment on April 13. For charter opponents, the fix is in, with devils in the details.

Among other things, proposed rules strongly recommend that charter schools seeking federal funds should “collaborate with at least one traditional public school” and “provide a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating a commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration” (Federal Register vol. 87, no. 49, p. 14199). This is like letting General Motors veto where Honda can sell cars.

Charters must also prepare a “community impact analysis” demonstrating “unmet demand for the charter school, including any over-enrollment of traditional public schools” (p. 14201). Of course, the worst traditional public schools are under-enrolled because parents of means left long ago. That means this regulation could remove options from low-income parents — all in the name of equity.

Likewise, the proposed rules require reporting on the “racial and socio-economic diversity of students and teachers in the charter school, and the impact of the charter school on racial and socio-economic diversity in the public school district” (p. 14201). In the real world, many charter schools exist to serve low-income students, so their demographics differ from those of the surrounding school district. Again in the name of “equity,” this change would slash funding to charter schools and encourage their opponents to attack as “racist” charter schools that provide education options to the (overwhelmingly minority) parents who need them most.

All schools buy goods and services from businesses. The proposed rules would require extensive reporting requirements for charter schools — but not district schools — that contract with for-profit companies providing anything from food service to tutoring. This will harass charters with extra paperwork.

As my own research shows, big charter networks such as the Knowledge Is Power Program schools have the lawyers and connections to survive more regulations, but regulations reduce the numbers of charters started by educators of color and disproportionately shutter schools that serve students of color. In practice, regulations purported to advance equity do exactly the opposite.

The good news is that parents of the 3.5 million students in charter schools have until April 13 to tell regulators and Congress members how they feel about the Department of Education’s attack on their schools.