TIME NOTICE: This article was written by a student in the Journalism Fundamentals class in the 2024-2025 school year and may not reflect the most current information of the date of publication.
Abigail Laird was one of four siblings attending a private school before her family moved to Colorado. With a tight budget, they knew that private school would no longer be an option, so they entered the lottery to attend their local charter school, Thomas MacLaren. At the time, Laird had just completed her sixth grade year, but there was only one opening for the seventh-grade spot at the school, so she stayed back a year and was entered into the sixth-grade class lottery, which had 100 open spots.
“ Every student gets assigned a number, and those numbers are drawn randomly in front of an audience,” Laird said. “There’s a stage, and the numbers are drawn publicly like bingo. Everybody has their ticket out in front of them and they’re calling out numbers of students who get into these schools. It’s incredibly intense.”
Laird was accepted along with her sister into the sixth-grade class of Thomas MacLaren. She graduated from the program and is now a Math major at Eastern University and a member of the Honors College. However, Laird’s victory story is not shared by all students in America. Public education in America has been declining since the 2010s across the board, seeing a decline in reading and math scores, public opinion and enrollment. Many have turned to private schools and used school vouchers as a way to fund this shift, but the school vouchers have left students behind in the public education system with even less funding and support. Vouchers take a student’s funding that would have been given to their local public school and instead allow it to be allocated toward alternative educational costs, such as covering part of the tuition to a private school, transportation needs, supplies and even at-home curriculum for homeschooled children. While this is a great choice for those who can afford the gap between the school voucher’s worth and the cost of private education, in the end, it only leaves those left behind in the public schools in an even worse shape, starved of both funding and talent.
It’s no secret that Americans aren’t happy with the public school system; according to a 2023 Gallup survey, satisfaction with K-12 education is at an all-time low of 36%. While school vouchers were supposed to be a solution for all, the reality is that it only serves a small part of the population. The idea is that a voucher program can make private schools an option for those who could not afford it, but a Grand Canyon Institute study showed that a large portion of those using school voucher programs were already attending private schools.
The desire to switch to private schools is not unfounded; there are higher success rates across the board for many students attending private schools. With increases in math and reading scores and higher educational attainment, there’s certainly something that’s working that’s not currently in public schools.
In the midst of this, charter schools are becoming a positive middle ground between the public school’s need for funding and the private school’s educational quality. With their increasing test scores, college acceptance rates and national awards, charter schools could become the future of America’s education system.
“I think the biggest difference comes from the school culture, and I think that is enabled or supported in part because private schools are smaller than public schools,” Dr. Patrick Wolf, 21st Century Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, said. “They tend to be much smaller than public schools and in a smaller school environment, you can build a stronger culture around that school.”
“People should understand that smaller is better,” he continued. “When it comes to K-12 education the private sector has demonstrated that. I think that’s part of the secret sauce of private schooling, and I think the public sector would be smart to imitate it.”
In one way, the public sector has imitated it. Charter schools have popped up as smaller-scale public schools with different learning models, such as KIPP or Greater Hearts. Charter schools offer similar benefits and freedoms as private schools while also receiving public funding and remaining a public school, becoming, in theory, an option for everyone.
Hillsdale College is working to help create more charter schools like Greater Hearts through their Barney Charter School Initiative. In an interview with the Fordham Institute, Kathleen O’Toole, an assistant provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale, shared some of what makes their program thrive.
“We don’t think that children are too little to study real things,” O’Toole said. “If you give even a very young child access to something that is really worthy, really thought-provoking, really worth spending time on, that child responds. Children know when they’re being talked down to, and they know when they’re being given worthy things to do. The curriculum is full of worthy things, whether it’s great novels or a real history lesson given to very young children.”
“ I don’t know much about public schools, but I don’t think I would have gotten a good education,” Laird said. “ By a good education, I mean being exposed to the transcendentals: goodness, truth, beauty and holiness. You need to be exposed to everything. Students weren’t good at just one subject area; they made sure that every single subject area was excellent.”
“ In the math program, I went up through advanced math topics, which are group theory, set theory, all sorts of things,” Laird said. “Every single student was exposed to that. And I know there’s a track system in public schools, I don’t know much about it, but some students wouldn’t even have been exposed to that stuff and they need to be exposed to it. Every person has the right to experience that, and the same goes for all the other subject areas.”
Examples such as Laird’s math program may be the reason that charter schools are now beginning to outperform traditional public schools. According to a 2014-2019 study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, “83% of charter school students performed the same as or better than their peers in reading, and 75% performed the same as or better in math.”
“I remember when my school first started back in 2014, and parents told me about the differences they saw,” O’Toole said in her Fordham interview. “They said within about four or five weeks, the conversations that they were having with their children in the car on the way home were completely different… The things that they had been learning were truly thought-provoking and truly interesting to the children. And so they were energized by it even though it was the end of a long school day, and they had so much more to say to their parents. And over time, they became a lot more articulate at saying those things.”
Wolf noted that studies have been conducted for school voucher programs to evaluate other markers of success such as educational attainment, mental health, criminal behavior and even marriage rates. The results have shown neutral to positive responses across the board, with charter schools being a part of that as well.
“ Me and my siblings would come home and we have discussions at the dinner table about what we learned that day,” Laird said. “It improved the whole family dynamic. We were going through the same curriculum, so we could remember what we did and we could talk about it. I remember how I was really impacted by a Keats poem in 8th grade and now, because of that poem, I’m going to study just John Keats in Oxford. Just that one little experience affects everything else.”
One of the worries about private school success transferring over to a charter school system is the often religious nature of many private schools, which cannot be brought into publicly-funded charter schools. Laird is an Orthodox Christian and had the external influence of her church and family on her education, which played a role in her success.
“[My school] basically copied and pasted the curriculum from a private school called the Trinity Schools, which is a Catholic organization,” Laird said. “We took their curriculum, cut out the religion, and put in music.”
“There was definitely a difference, but I also don’t think there was a difference at the same time,” she continued. “I do think there was a difference that I had a religious background because I was constantly applying everything that I learned to that religious experience. But also, I believe that you can see God in everything that’s good, true, beautiful, and holy. My agnostic friend who did not have a religious background at all was able to experience God by experiencing goodness, truth and beauty, and thus experienced holiness as well.”
“It’s hard to untangle and identify the effect that religion itself has on private schooling outcomes because it’s so interwoven into the school culture and the school mission,” Wolf said. “That’s where a lot of us are doing research, this question of the role of religion, our religious commitments and religious affiliations of various denominations. Are those part of the secret sauce of private schooling, or can we achieve outcomes that are just as good without the religious component? It’s an open and unresolved question that I think is an important one.”
Another factor of charter school success also comes down to individual performance. While private and charter school options usually lead to a greater success rate across the board for students, students who don’t see those gains instead see major declines in their performance. Yong Zhao referred to this phenomenon as “Tankers and Leapers” in her 2019 book “What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education.” However, this doesn’t have to be a nail in the coffin for charter schools; after all, they simply exist as an alternative option, not a requirement.
“Students thrive in different kinds of educational environments,” Wolf said. “If you have experience working with young people, you certainly know it. [Traditional public school] works for some students, but it doesn’t work for other students. And so the motivation for school choice is for students who don’t fit in in their neighborhood public schools to have other options that might be a better fit for them. Parents are the world’s foremost experts on the needs of their children, so we want parents to decide what schools will best serve their child and put public resources behind those decisions.”
“Families want different things in education,” Laird said. “My family wanted something more classical, so they found a classical charter school. Maybe another family wants something more math-oriented so they can find a math-oriented charter school. I just think the smaller that you can, the better.”
Charter schools are doing a lot of hard work to make schools a positive learning environment for everyone. By keeping their funding available to the public sector, there’s a lot of opportunity for growth for both traditional public schools and charter schools as they share the same resources and adapt learning models together. But at the end of the day, it’s a great opportunity for many students to be able to access a different learning model.
“I think charter schools are the way to go,” Laird said. “It gives schools state funding but also allows them the freedom to do what they think needs to be done. It’s also a great opportunity for low-income families to have a good education. It’s great to experience that, and I think that everyone deserves a good education.”