New Biden Rules Could Chill Charters

Last month, the Biden Administration announced new regulations on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). The CSP is designed to offer a funding source for charter schools to expand access for students to high-quality school options, as well as to help schools fund facilities. The regulations are ostensibly designed to create better oversight. But they are largely based on strawman arguments about charters and will have a chilling effect on one of the most important educational options for families across the U.S.  

There are several troubling aspects to the new regulations. Among the most troubling is that charters would be evaluated for funding based on whether they’re located in areas that have excess students in traditional, local schools. This provision shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of charter schools. Charter schools are meant to be much more than an overflow valve for the excess capacity needs of a school district. They’re meant to offer competition to the existing schools by being freed from existing rules that hamper innovation. It is only by offering this competition that charters can work to improve the performance of the district, as traditional schools will be incentivized to improve.

Another problematic regulation has to do with a requirement that charter schools prove that they’re serving students from diverse backgrounds. This appears to be based on a belief that charter schools are some elaborate scheme to reinstitute Jim Crow in modern America, but there is no evidence to support this claim. While charter schools don’t always display the same racial balance as the average traditional public school, this is precisely because charters tend to exist in communities with the most at-risk students. According to recent data, charter schools serve a far higher percentage of African Americans (24.9%) and Hispanics (35.2%) relative to the population as a whole. 

There are other issues as well. Charters would be strongly encouraged to partner with local public schools in the area—schools that are, in many cases, unwilling partners. Charters would also be required to make extensive reports on any goods and services they purchase from for-profit entities. These regulations are little more than bureaucratic busy work and threaten to take away time and resources from the education of students.

Let’s look at an example of how the Biden administration’s new rules negatively impact students. In the past decade, Wisconsin has received more than $95 million from CSP to support high-quality charters in the state, a sizable portion of which went to Milwaukee charters. And while Milwaukee’s traditional public schools continue to fail a generation of predominantly minority students, thanks in part to this funding, the city’s charters have offered a beacon of hope. For instance, the most recent state exam found proficiency rates in math and language arts of under 20% districtwide. Yet local charter schools have continually outperformed their peers on the test, and their focus on serving the particularized needs of their communities has borne fruit.

One such charter was founded by Civil Rights advocate and former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, Howard Fuller. The school has boasted a 100% college admissions rate for a population of largely low-income, inner-city students since 2012. Under Biden’s regulations, due to Milwaukee’s declining population size and the population of students they serve, a school like Fuller’s would likely be ineligible for grants. Thus, the charter schools in Milwaukee offer a perfect example of the problems with these regulatory changes.

Former President Barack Obama was a big proponent of charters, having witnessed their success firsthand in Chicago. In his first campaign, Obama pledged to double federal support to charter schools so that more could be created. While he didn’t quite meet that goal, he did increase funding for the George W. Bush-era program substantially. However, support for charter schools has become mostly anathema among national Democrats in the Biden era.

One doesn’t need to check campaign finance filings to understand why this is the case. Because they offer competition for traditional public schools, charter schools are now among the bogeymen of the public-school unions as part of the broader school-choice agenda. But since popular support for school choice remains strong around the country, charter school opponents may soon realize that choosing unions over low-income families was a mistake.