How the charter school movement got started

In 1991, Republican President George H.W. Bush, the “education president” unveiled AMERICA 2000: An Education Strategy at a White House gathering of politicians, corporate leaders, and educators. In the audience was Mike Hopkins, “Lead Teacher” in the Saturn School in St. Paul, Minnesota, where teachers have already helped reinvent the American school.

Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter school law in 1991.

AMERICA 2000 laid the groundwork for at least 535 charter schools, one in every Congressional District, to be operational by 1996, and thousands of charter schools would be opened across America using public school funds. Private and parochial schools were the beneficiaries of vouchers for public school children who wanted to attend those schools.

“We can encourage educational excellence by encouraging parental choice. It’s time parents were free to choose the schools that their children attend. This approach will create the competitive climate that stimulates excellence in our private and parochial schools as well. We must also foster educational innovation,” Bush told stakeholders assembled in the White House in 1991.

“The architects of the New American Schools should break the mold. Build for the next century. Reinvent – literally start from scratch and reinvent the American school. There’s a special place in inventing the New American School for the corporate community, for business and labor,” Bush added.

Bush set the privatization of public schools in motion. He announced a non-profit that would be funded by American corporations and congressional dollars to do research and development into the establishment of charter schools and the application of America 2000 goals.

The Louisiana Legislature joined the charter school movement in 1995 with the passage of ACT 192. Charter school architects on Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) had the public schools give students a standardized test in 1999 and, in 2000, the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) Test and the 80,000 students who failed it became the justification BESE to take over the Orleans Parish public schools in 2003 with the passage of ACT 9 which created the Recovery School District (RSD).

Hurricane Katrina allowed the Orleans Parish School Board to fire tenured teachers and bring in young less qualified teachers to teach the predominantly Black student body in the experimental charter system.

After Katrina, the New Orleans charter experiment attracted the attention of education researchers who studied the system.

This article originally published in the January 17, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.