Move fast and break things.
Though Facebook only came onto the scene in the 2000s, its now–infamous motto perfectly captures the spirit of Silicon Valley in the 1990s. As cutting–edge firms like Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple tore onto the scene—bringing with them faster and more powerful digital technologies—it seemed as though the sky was the limit for American ingenuity. But beyond building sleeker tech, these companies also seemed to be adopting sleeker ways of doing business. Eschewing traditional corporate hierarchies, many Silicon Valley firms granted employees unprecedented autonomy and kept bureaucracy to a minimum, allowing them to adapt and respond rapidly to shifts in the market.
This spirit of reform certainly wasn’t limited to the tech sector. It was only a matter of time before this mentality inspired changing sentiments in government, as well. With educational attainment stalling out across many metrics throughout the 1990s, many in government saw the adoption of private–sector tactics to fix public–sector problems as long overdue.
Enter the charter school.
Public charter schools, which receive state funding but operate autonomously of regular school districts, exist in a nebulous and largely unregulated space between traditional public and private education. Charter schools across the state are coming under fire from public education advocates, who allege that charters lack accountability and impose a heavy financial burden on struggling school districts. At the same time, many of their traditional allies in the school choice movement have moved on to other battles in education, from private school vouchers to the right to homeschool. While charters are too large a part of Pennsylvania’s public education system to disappear entirely, the role they play seems to be in flux as the battle over school choice changes fronts.
The first charter schools in America, which came out of Minnesota in 1992, seemed like a victory for both sides of the aisle—Republicans rejoiced over the loosening of the government monopoly over education, while Democrats appreciated the fact that underserved populations now had access to greater educational opportunities. Albert Shanker, then–president of the American Federation of Teachers, initially envisioned charters as schools led by teachers themselves, unconstrained by the bureaucracy that plagued district schools. From the beginning, charter schools existed at the intersection of two dueling logics, one anti–bureaucratic and one pro–competition. “One of the rationales for a charter school is this notion of decentralization … [that] local communities know what’s best for their students and their needs,” says Rand Quinn, a professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education who researches school reform. “That’s a different rationale [from] the rationale around choice and competition. Having a choice–based system creates a competitive school system, and the stronger schools sort of persist, and the low–performing schools fall by the wayside.”
What the charter wave seemed to reflect was the emerging bipartisan consensus of the neoliberal 1990s that government should emulate the best qualities of the private sector—slimmer, faster, more disruptive. Just as Silicon Valley’s top firms seemed to be capable of endless mutation in their pursuit of better tech and higher profits, digital–age America had to trim the fat and be ready to try anything. From reforms meant to “end welfare as we know it,” to a massive deregulation of the banking industry, the message trumpeting from the Clinton White House was clear: big government is out. Adaptation is in.
In this climate, charter schools seemed like natural sites for the emergence of innovative practices in the education space. “Charter schools were meant to be these incubators of innovation,” Quinn explains, “and the innovative pedagogical and structural elements that emerged in a charter school could then transfer to non–charter public schools.” Under the mantra that competition breeds excellence, it was thought that loosening the government’s firm grasp on the education sector would force traditional public schools to push themselves and improve their offerings.
Charter schools in Pennsylvania emerged under the administration of Republican governor Tom Ridge and the first–ever Philadelphia charter opened its doors in 1997. What began as a small–scale experiment in school choice has ballooned over the past two decades into a parallel school system that opponents argue is largely unaccountable to city or state authorities. Philadelphia alone is home to over 80 charters that serve students from kindergarten to the 12th grade. Today, charters educate about 169,000 students across the state, and Pennsylvania currently has the highest online charter school enrollment of any state in the nation.
The AFT’s original vision of teacher–run education is a far cry from the modern charter space, where private networks of charter operators like the Knowledge is Power Program and Imagine Schools run dozens of schools across the country. Like other public schools, Pennsylvania charters aren’t allowed to select their students or charge them tuition directly. Instead, they typically receive per–student payments from the public school district where their attendees reside. Where this money goes has been a source of great concern for both advocates and lawmakers alike.
Maura McInerney, legal director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Education Law Center, argues that this lack of accountability is not accidental, but a fact codified in law. The great draw of the charter school experiment has always been an injection of market logic into the public sector, introducing elements of competition and ingenuity into a space long seen as stagnant and bureaucratic. Alongside this freedom to experiment, however, comes a freedom from the regulatory structures that hold traditional public schools accountable. Charter schools are generally exempt from the rules of the Pennsylvania School Code, which provides a framework for the regulation and oversight of traditional public schools.
One of the most unique features of the Pennsylvania charter education system is the prevalence of so–called “cyber charters.” These charter schools are entirely virtual and enroll students from across the state. While research diverges on the educational impacts of traditional brick–and–mortar charters, studies generally concur on the poor performance of cyber charters. “Cyber charter outcomes are worse across the board … across [all] student groups, which is somewhat unusual,” says Sarah Cordes, a professor at Temple University researching education and urban policy. “Usually, there’s at least one group that a type of school works for, but cyber charters just seem universally bad.”
Multiple studies have demonstrated that cyber charter attendance is correlated with lower educational attainment, a lower likelihood of graduating high school, and a lower likelihood of enrolling in a four–year college. The consistent failure of cyber charters to provide adequate education takes a particular toll on the state’s most economically disadvantaged. McInerney explains that these schools are particularly attractive to low–income families. “Due to structural and systemic racism, black students are far more likely to be educated in underfunded schools,” she says, “and they’re more likely to turn to cyber charters that often fail to provide them with high-quality education.”
Cyber charters are also among the worst offenders when it comes to financial accountability. A 2025 report by Republican State Auditor Tim DeFoor found that numerous cyber charter schools sported massive financial reserves, irregular expenditures, and annual revenues that were rapidly expanding year–over–year.
Despite outcry over the state’s charter regulations, one of the greatest forces working in favor of Pennsylvanian charter schools today is simple inertia. Having been allowed to grow with little regulation since the mid–2000s, existing charters make up too large of a portion of the public education system to eliminate or substantially cut without the collapse of the system as a whole. Charter schools are simply too big to fail, particularly as underfunded local school districts across the state continue to struggle with budget shortfalls.
“The guidelines [regulating charters] are very weak,” says Arthur Steinberg, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Steinberg says that payments to charter schools are expected to cost the Philadelphia school district $1.5 billion in this fiscal year alone. This cost is particularly worrying given the district’s already dire financial situation. After using its reserves to cover a $306 million budget deficit this year, the Philadelphia School District expects to face even greater shortfalls in the coming years.
The cost of charter school tuition payments increased 134% from 2010 to 2021, and the Pennsylvania School Boards Association found in their 2024 report that the biggest source of budget pressure on districts was mandated payments to charter schools. With budget crises hitting districts across the state, administrators and lawmakers have found themselves in a difficult position. Although hoping to cut down on the costs that charter payments impose on districts, they also recognize the key structural role they play in the state’s education system. For Steinberg, this crisis of funding never had to happen. It's a simple fact, he says, that "Pennsylvania has the worst charter school [oversight] in the country."
But all of this may be about to change. This past June, Democratic lawmakers in the Pennsylvania State House passed a bill massively overhauling the state’s charter funding system and implementing stricter accountability standards for cyber charters. Though a major victory for public education advocates, its path forward remains unclear as it stares down a Republican–dominated State Senate and a governor with a history of supporting charter education.
One of the bill’s most important provisions overhauls how charter schools receive special education funding. Traditional public schools that have special education programs receive a per–student reimbursement to help meet students’ individual needs. The system, which was adopted in 2014, uses a tiered structure in which new payments increase based on the severity of a student’s disability. Charters, on the other hand, receive a flat payment for any special education students that they take on, regardless of the extent of their disability. “[Traditional publics] are serving a disproportionate number of students with higher cost needs,” McInerney says. “Notably, approximately 20% of students enrolled in the state cyber charter schools receive special education funding … and most of those students are children with low–cost special education needs.”
Another major goal of the bill is to equalize education costs across districts, especially for cyber charters. Because a pupil’s zoned district determines the amount of money a cyber charter receives for educating them, massive disparities exist between what each district pays to cyber charters. Depending on a child’s school district of origin, the tuition these charters charge can land anywhere from $8,917 to $23,799 per student. To combat this, the State House bill mandates that cyber charters receive a flat $8,000 for each student they educate, regardless of where in the state they come from.
Despite the increased scrutiny charter schools have found themselves under, advocates for parental choice in education have pushed for even greater deregulation of the education sector. Today, the school choice movement has bypassed charters entirely to send tax money directly to private schools, institutions which are held even less accountable by state and local governments. At the same time that the charter reform package passed in the Democratic–controlled Pennsylvania State House, Republicans in the state's Senate Education Committee advanced a bill that would create a state–funded voucher program for students attending low–performing public schools. The package mirrors the pro–school choice policies pushed by Republicans at the federal level, where the "Big Beautiful Bill" recently made donations that pay for students’ private school tuitions fully tax–deductible up to $1,700.
If one thing is clear from the education landscape of today, it's that the ’90s—and its spirit of public–private partnership—is dead and buried. The hot topic of the school choice agenda today is school voucher programs, which allocate taxpayer money to pay for children’s private school tuitions. With the ability of private schools to teach (and spend) as they please, vouchers push education even farther outside the watchful gaze of the state. Today, ten states and the District of Columbia operate explicit voucher programs—nearly thrice that number have implemented some form of private school choice legislation.
That’s not to say that charters have disappeared from the public conversation—school choice advocates continue to defend charters and lobby for their expansion, even as most of their efforts shift to voucher programs and issues around parental rights. Even the Trump administration recently granted charters an extra $500 million in federal funding to charters across the country, bringing the federal government’s total charter expenditure to around half a billion dollars yearly. What also seems clear, however, is that the spirit behind these programs has been radically altered since the Clinton years.
While charters remain on the scene, they're now just one part of a larger school–choice agenda—and a relatively minor one at that. The $500 million granted to charters pales in comparison to the nearly $4 billion that the federal government is expected to lose in tax revenue due to Trump's enactment of the first federal school voucher program in U.S. history. First building their strength by receiving public patronage, private schools ultimately serve to make the state institutions that built them obsolete. Now, with the Department of Education itself on the chopping block, private schools are in a prime position to expand their role by asserting themselves as stable options in a fraught education space.
In 2019, Cordes prepared a report for the Pennsylvania Department of Education on the impact charter schools had on student outcomes. The results showed that urban charters were generally correlated with positive outcomes, while rural and suburban schools produced either no change or negative change. These disparities were present with respect to race and income as well, with more disadvantaged groups generally benefiting the most from charter education. Unlike private schools, charters are less of a refuge for the privileged and more of a beacon for the needy. For many parents in struggling school districts, charters really are a ray of hope, offering the only alternative their children have to district schools that seem subpar or unsafe.
This promise of opportunity, however, hides a more difficult truth—because of financial underregulation, charters are only worsening the problem of access they were initially meant to solve. Given the large payments that charters draw from school districts, administrators are left with less funding to run traditional public schools, sending them into a death spiral of shrinking funding and progressively lowering enrollment.
It’s a spiral charters are only making steeper through their advertising campaigns. To attract low–wealth communities, charter schools frequently utilize their surplus funding to run extensive recruitment initiatives. Other money goes towards even more lavish expenditures—in a single year, McInerney says, the state’s biggest charter school, Commonwealth Charter Academy, spent “$600,000 at car dealerships and car washes, … $115,000 for dining, and $5,000 in a payment to a vineyard that I still haven’t figured out.” Charters are particularly active in lobbying legislators as well, with Commonwealth Charter Academy alone spending $202,500 on education lobbying in 2024.
The underregulation of Pennsylvania charters ends up being cyclical—with education funds unbound from specific expenditures, cyber charters are free to use those funds in recruiting more students and deepening their political influence, bringing in even more money down the road. “If Philadelphia had to give $12,000 per kid to a charter school here, we would also have to give $12,000 to [a] cyber charter,” Steinberg says, despite the lower operating costs of the cyber charter. “They accumulate these huge surpluses, and they use it to recruit.”
When it comes to “running government like a business,” charters tend to bring the good with the bad. The logic of expansion so deeply ingrained in capitalist life shapes the actions of charters that seek to progressively enlarge their student body. This mode of rationality also bleeds over into traditional publics, who now have to fight to protect both their funding and their enrollment numbers. Though the traditional logic of the public sphere mandates cooperation for the common good, the expansion of private sector education has turned K–12 schooling into a war of all against all, with every school struggling to find its place in an increasingly competitive education sector.
Regardless of whether or not the Democratic reform package passes the State Senate, it seems clear that charter schools, in some form or another, are here to stay. “I think they’re sort of entrenched in the education system at this point,” Cordes remarks. This entrenchment is despite the fact that the ingenuity that charters were meant to bring to the table seems largely illusory—“The innovations that we see in a charter school are innovations that we’ve seen in district schools,” Quinn says. “It’s sort of a question of how much of this is really a reform, and how much of this is just an opportunity for private actors to manage publicly funded schools?” The role charter schools can, or should, play in the public education space remains a point of real contention.
In the 21st century, charter schools seem less like a path forward and more like a fact of life. Unions have long since abandoned their support for charters. School choice advocates have shifted their focus to fights over voucher programs and homeschooling. As the Trump administration shifts the burden of educating America’s youth to the private sector, it seems as though the political base for public–private partnerships has all but evaporated. The path forward for charters, then, in their original character as truly public centers of innovation, remains unclear. “A lot of people used to see charter schools as the answer,” Cordes recalls. “And I don’t think that’s the general consensus anymore.”
