“That statewide thing is just rotten,” argued rural Republican Senator Tom Gannon. Kempthorne was pummeled politically for his proposal. Governor Dirk Kempthorne, who was elected in 1998, followed the lead of other charter school states and in 2004 proposed the creation of a statewide charter school commission with members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders that could authorize charter schools independently of school districts. Operational freedom for Idaho’s public charter schools came through political struggle over multiple legislative sessions. In Idaho, no local tax dollars follow students to their local public charter schools.
This was problematic because few district officials even knew what a charter school was, let alone had any interest in launching schools with independent boards of trustees who would compete with their schools for students and the state and federal dollars that followed them. In 2008 the Center for Education Reform rated Idaho’s law the “14th weakest of the nation’s 41 charter laws.” Under the original law only school districts could authorize charter schools, that is allow them to open and operate. Charter schools had few operational freedoms and received less money than traditional district schools with no financial support for facilities. In the early years of Idaho’s charter school experience growth was slow and tedious. From the start Idaho, like other charter school states, struggled to get the balance right between “freedom and operational flexibility” for “accountability for results.” The early law in the Gem State was a consensus document that tried to balance the charter school idea of operational freedom for accountability, with the many concerns of traditional education groups about giving public charter schools too many competitive advantages. My state, Idaho, would pass its first charter school law in 1997 and the state’s first school opened its doors in 1998. Several states quickly followed suit: California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Wisconsin had all approved charter school legislation by the end of 1993. Ember Reichgott Junge, the Democratic state senator who crafted Minnesota’s law argued, “the purpose of the chartering legislation was to give freedom to parents and teachers to create new schools outside the existing system.” Minnesota’s first charter school opened its doors in 1992. Minnesota was the first state to approve a charter school law. He argued, “the goal of charter schools should not be innovation for its own sake, but innovation for improved student achievement.”
Shanker was the first national figure in American education to propose charter schools. That same year, Albert Shanker, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), embraced the charter school concept at a speech he gave to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. In his 1988 book, Education Charter: Restructuring School Districts, Budde outlined his plan for what would from then on be known as “charter schools.” As far back as the 1970s the University of Massachusetts-Amherst education professor Ray Budde proposed letting teachers create semi-autonomous schools that would combine enhanced teacher freedom and flexibilities with stringent accountability for student results. Going back to its creation story in the last quarter of the 20th century, the public charter school bargain in America called for an exchange of operational freedom for schools in return for accountability tied to results. Originally Published on the CharterFolk Blog
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