The Union President Who Proposed the Charter School

A Publicly Accountable Experiment, Initiated by Teachers

The proposal was not a concession to the critics of public education. Shanker was the most prominent union leader in American K–12 schooling, and he framed the charter idea as a union idea — a way to give teachers the professional authority they lacked inside bureaucratically rigid districts, while keeping the new schools inside the public system, subject to public accountability, and open to any child who wanted to attend. The school would be chartered by a public body, not by a private operator. It would receive public funds. It would not charge tuition. The bargain, as Shanker described it, was freedom in exchange for results.

He returned to the argument in print. A July 1988 column in the New York Times, appearing under his long-running paid advertisement "Where We Stand," laid out the concept in accessible terms for a national audience. The column described a compact between the chartering authority and the school: the school received operating latitude; the authority received demonstrable performance against agreed goals. Shanker was explicit that teachers — not private entrepreneurs, not for-profit companies — would be the initiating parties. The charter was their instrument, not a vehicle for market competition with public schools.

The idea drew on real discontents. American school districts in the 1980s were widely described as rule-bound and resistant to innovation, a critique that Shanker shared even as he defended collective bargaining. The AFT had watched school reform debates focus on standardised testing, merit pay, and accountability — tools aimed at teachers rather than at the structures teachers worked within. A teacher-led experimental school, operating under a specific and reviewable public agreement, offered a different answer. It located the problem in institutional inflexibility rather than in teacher performance, and proposed institutional redesign rather than individual sanction.

Minnesota became the first state to enact charter legislation. The Minnesota charter school law, signed by Governor Arne Carlson in 1991, authorised the creation of outcome-based schools operating under public charter. The first school to open under it, City Academy High School in St. Paul, enrolled students in 1992. But the Minnesota law, and the legislation that followed in other states through the 1990s, departed from Shanker's model in ways he considered decisive. Teacher initiation was not required. Private operators could apply for charters. For-profit management companies entered the space. The accountability mechanisms that Shanker had treated as the hinge of the whole arrangement were, in many states, weakly enforced.

Shanker grew openly critical of what charter schooling became. He argued that the movement had taken his language and discarded his conditions — that "charter school" now named a policy of market competition dressed in the vocabulary of teacher professionalism. He continued to distinguish between the experiment he had proposed, with its tight public accountability and teacher leadership, and the expanding charter sector, which by the mid-1990s looked considerably less like a union innovation and considerably more like the privatisation he opposed.

He died in February 1997. By then, roughly thirty states had passed charter legislation, and enrollment in charter schools was growing rapidly — NCES data from that period tracking the spread state by state across a sector Shanker had named but no longer recognised. The gap between the 1988 speech and the 1991 law, and the larger gap between both and the movement that followed, is the essential fact of Shanker's relationship to charter schooling: he proposed the concept, watched it travel, and spent his final years insisting on the difference between a publicly accountable teacher experiment and a school choice programme that happened to use his word.