Read Part 1, where I unpack what it means to be “fully funded.”

What does it mean for our schools to be “fully public”?

Presumably, advocates who use this phrase only have traditional public schools in mind. For instance, visit Central Indiana DSA’s “Fully Funded Fully Public Campaign” page from during this year’s legislative session and you’ll see one of their core demands is a moratorium on new charter school authorizations (similar calls prevailed among Indianapolis Public Schools’ board members and during public comment periods from various community members throughout this spring).

I didn’t hear anyone call for the elimination or roll-back of charter schools entirely, though, and pushback against the private school voucher expansion seemed tepid at best (perhaps a reflection of it being a foregone conclusion to most). While the DSA nationally is nominally left of the Democratic party, I think their demands locally more or less reflect typical liberal thinking for Indianapolis (setting aside the line calling for wealth redistribution).

The “fully public” notion espoused by many isn’t in relation to the entire education ecosystem. But rather the part of occupied by, at this moment, both traditional public schools and charter schools. I read it as a call to wrest back more of the public school sector from charter schools and safeguard the future for traditional public schools.

After all, I see many traditional public school advocates argue that charter schools are not really public schools. They’re just masquerading as a pale imitation, an example of privatization at its most insidious. As someone who taught in a charter school and would go on to support dozens more in different ways over the years, I’ve never agreed with that line of thinking. I have too much firsthand evidence proving to me that, while charters are not perfect or a silver bullet for the long-entrenched ailments of public education in the United States, they are indeed public and they have indeed made a considerable difference in the lives of thousands of students here in Indianapolis.

For me, a “fully public” system has room for both traditional public schools and charter schools. Both are public. Both have a role to play in educating our kids well. (If anything, I’m quite bullish about the fact that private schools are antithetical to a “fully public” system and if there’s a fight we ought to pick it should be redirecting government support from that type of school back toward the public system. But, according to the Supreme Court, that ship has sailed.)

If you ask me whether the education ecosystem in Indianapolis is “fully public” or not, and restrict me to considering just our traditional public schools and charter schools, I would say it already is. Can our schools be improved? Of course (and that improvement needs to happen within IPS and the charter sector, even if it’s clear that charter schools tend to produce better academic outcomes than traditional IPS schools). Can it be more “public” than it currently is? Well, to most folks pushing for that, charters would have to modify their DNA or else cease to exist. But I don’t think that’s necessary.

So for what it’s worth, I want to tackle four things I often encounter that lie behind this view that charters are somehow less “public” than traditional public schools. And lay out why I don’t think they carry water.

1. The perception that charter schools don’t have to enroll/serve any student

I note perception because it’s a myth that charter schools can be selective about which students they enroll. They are required to enroll any student who wishes to attend. Now, I’m not naive. I know charter schools have been guilty of using less-than-admirable tactics to avoid enrolling certain students. So too have many major public school districts. My response to failures on both sides is not to condemn only one or the other but to say we ought to hold all schools accountable for enrolling every student who wants to attend. Let’s eliminate shady enrollment tactics wherever they occur. Let’s also avoid creating an unnecessary boogeyman where there isn’t one.

Moreover, for me, one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Indianapolis charter schools (on the whole) live up to the promise to enroll every student is their demographics. As a collective, Indianapolis charter schools enroll larger proportions of students of color and low-income students than IPS does. Put differently, IPS’ student body is whiter and wealthier than our charter school sector. I’m not sure how you could argue that’s a result of charter schools cherrypicking students.

2. The fact that charter schools are rarely, if ever, unionized

I’m a big proponent of unions. Higher union density would be a good thing for American adults. So I’ve always wrestled with the fact that charter schools aren’t really compatible with teacher’s unions. I lived this when I worked for a charter school. My pay and benefits were not as good as my traditional public school friends and acquaintances. I had no real path to union involvement.

I think there’s something important we need to balance in education. The wellbeing of students and the wellbeing of the adults who choose to educate them. Unions, whatever their public messaging at times may indicate, are designed to be on the side of adults. Let’s just be honest about that. Their advocacy can sometimes be on behalf of students. But when push comes to shove, I’d expect any union to take the side of those it directly represents: the adults. Which may be at odds with what could produce better outcomes for kids. 

Equally, there is no functioning education system if decisions are made that do not take educators’ needs and concerns into consideration. After all, if all the teachers quit, academic outcomes and student opportunities won’t exactly be rosy.

I believe we can have schools where adults and kids thrive. Sometimes those schools are charter schools without unionization. Sometimes those are traditional public schools with unionization. When it comes to education (and this for me really is a distinction from other industries where I believe the absence of a union is always a negative), it’s the mutual thriving I care about more so than the union presence.

3. Charter school boards are not elected

It’s true charter school boards are not publicly elected. And there are very fair criticisms to make of the way charter school boards sometimes do not operate as transparently as they should (and very fair criticisms to make of traditional public school boards not being transparent either). Meetings are sometimes poorly publicized and rarely well-attended. Still, I would argue a parent, armed with the right information, actually has more power to influence their charter school board than a traditional public school parent does to influence the board of an entire school district.

Moreover, Indianapolis set a positive precedent by making the mayor’s office our city’s main charter school authorizer. That gives the public a major lever of democratic control over the future of our charter school sector in any given election. So far, whatever furor animates the community-level debate over traditional public vs. charter schools, there’s been an astonishing amount of continuity regarding how charter schools are authorized at the mayor’s office for the past two decades. 

4. The fact that charter-friendly policies split increasingly along Republican party lines

The different educational causes I support do not split cleanly along partisan lines. I’m much farther to the left than the Democratic party in pretty much every way, yet find myself by dint of circumstance and professional experience a staunch charter school supporter. That, at least these days, seems to lump me in squarely with Indiana Republicans.

As a result, this line of attack is sometimes deployed against me: the Republican-dominated Indiana legislature is bad on education generally; supporting any bill they pass means you are cosigning all of their agenda and must be in league with the MAGA-right; and supporting anything they do means you lose the credibility to criticize anything else they might do.

I just don’t subscribe to this type of politics. Certainly, I disagree with almost all of the Republican agenda locally, statewide, and nationally. But I have no problem recognizing when one of our two political parties does something I think is good. Neither do I believe doing so negates my ability to criticize either party when it does something I think is bad. For instance, I support the legislature allowing charter schools to share property tax dollars. I do not support the property tax cuts they pushed through at the same time because they disproportionately help businesses over people and will strain local budgets to, again, help businesses over people. 

The fact that only the Republican party in Indiana now supports charter schools does not make charter schools themselves bad. I think it’s worth asking why local and statewide Democrats have largely abandoned them, despite the fact that they overwhelmingly serve students of color and low-income students. Perhaps it’s a prioritization of resistance politics. I don’t think it’s a prioritization of what’s best for student outcomes.