Executive Summary

This report traces the origins, evolution and impact of Minnesota's pioneering charter school law -- on its own schools, students, and communities and on the development of charter laws in many other states. It notes that, unlike what is now happening elsewhere, new schools are now being chartered at an accelerating pace in Minnesota. And because Minnesota has been chartering schools for more than a decade, the report found that many fundamental pieces of the infrastructure needed to maintain and accelerate that expansion are now in place.

This is happening at a time when Minnesota faces several critical challenges, including huge gaps in achievement levels and graduation rates among different demographic groups in an increasingly diverse school-age population. Those gaps will become even more evident under the testing and reporting requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. In addition, like most states, Minnesota faces tight budgets and strong resistance to authorizing new spending -- creating heightened competition for available resources and intense resistance to creating new public schools from established interests intent on protecting the status quo.

Minnesota's charter school movement has experience, assets, and new perspectives it can draw upon to overcome this resistance and help give leadership to a new generation of policy initiatives and ideas -- not just in Minnesota, but elsewhere in the country as well. Minnesota's next generation of national leadership on charter schools and chartering can draw upon:

• Strong policy leadership -- both from bipartisan policymakers and key education reformers and leaders in and outside the traditional public education system.
• New insights about the essential role that creating new schools must play -- at least on par with improving existing schools -- in addressing the challenges now facing American public education.
• A consistent context of expanding public school choice and choices -- creating the "supply side" for school improvement and a favorable policy environment for bringing new school choice options to scale.
• Expanding opportunities for organizations other than local school boards to authorize and oversee new public schools -- withdrawing the historic "exclusive franchise" of public school districts.
• New options and new opportunities for teachers, including establishing teacher cooperatives and other professional practice arrangements.
• Direct relationships between new public schools and the state, resulting in a significant degree of autonomy and a realistic goal of having public funding -- all of it -- follow students.
• Reasonably equitable funding for charter schools, relative to district schools, including state and federal funds for planning, start-up, operations, and facilities.
• A growing infrastructure of private-sector financial support and technical assistance, advocacy, and administrative support.
• An emphasis on using new schools to establish, redefine, and strengthen communities, particularly in the state's growing immigrant population and other communities of color.

This report also makes seven broad recommendations -- addressed to Minnesota's education and public policy leadership. Although each state is different, these recommendations include important lessons that are just as relevant for policy discussions now going on in other states. They include:

• Re-articulate a clear and convincing rationale for chartering -- as a mechanism to address serious shortcomings in our current education system -- by creating many new and substantially different public schools of choice.
• Continue to expand the boundaries that have historically defined "public schools," while preserving and honoring the most essential core elements of "public education."
• Use charters and chartering to more strategically and proactively address huge gaps in student achievement levels among racial and other demographic groups, while also contributing to racial and ethnic integration.
• Better document the successes of individual charter schools in meeting the student achievement and teacher quality goals of NCLB, while also documenting fulfillment of the unique mission and attributes of each charter school.
• Use charters to test new and creative strategies to expand choice and choices -- while also respecting today's fiscal realities.
• Continue to strengthen the capacity of a diverse array of sponsors to provide appropriate oversight, and promote more responsive and cost-effective ways to provide functions historically performed by district central office administrators and by unions.
• Broaden and deepen private-sector financial support and partnerships that can expand available resources, and proactively seek greater non-financial contributions from community partners for creating and replicating high quality new schools.

This is not an agenda for the complacent or faint of heart. Nor is this a time to presume Minnesota's historic education policy leadership and innovation can run on past success -- or even on current momentum. Maintaining Minnesota's historic position of leadership -- and meeting the state's new educational challenges and opportunities -- now requires moving chartering to a new level as a proactive strategy for changing and improving public education.

Thirteen years ago this spring, Minnesotans made a huge contribution to addressing their own and the nation's educational challenges by passing America's first charter school law. Minnesota's education and policy leaders have a new obligation in 2004 -- to make sure the revolution they began in 1991 is retooled and reinvigorated, to address challenges that now face us as a state and nation, and to realize exciting new opportunities that now lie ahead.