Charter schools can be more useful and focused if they are operated by school districts as part of a cooperative, symbiotic network, rather than under the existing cloak of independence, which creates more problems than it solves
Ronald G Corwin, Professor Emeritus
Department of Sociology, Ohio State University
My colleagues and I published the nation’s first systematic studies of charter schools in 1994, and before that we embarked on a study of the 1992 California voucher initiative. Our results were published in the Phi Delta Kappan, and in monographs titled What a Voucher Could Buy,Vision and Reality: A First-Year Look at California’s Charter Schools, Freedom and Innovation in California’s Charter Schools. Since those early years, co-author E. Joseph Schneider and I have been closely following the school choice movement. In 2005 we published our conclusions in a book titled The School Choice Hoax: Fixing America’s Schools Originally published by Praeger Press, it has been re-published in paperback by Rowman and Littlefield (2007).Charter schools are publicly funded, tuition-free, nonsectarian public schools that have been released from many of the laws and rules that govern school districts, including for example, rules pertaining to teacher qualifications, curriculum, and calendar. Funds allocated to the school district follow the student to the charter school, which is expected to