Knowledge Bank

This work reviews the historical influences that led to the rise of charter or community schools in Columbus Ohio. The call for charter schools follows decades of systemic residential segregation, inequitable public funding, and the shortcomings of urban schools to provide for their students. Charter schools are offered as a solution to these ills, however, segregation in Franklin County persists, as does inequity in opportunities and outcomes. To evaluate the basis of the charter school movement governmental reports, news articles, opinion pieces, litigation, and historical records on education beginning immediately post World War II were examined. After WWII and throughout the Cold War, the public was warned of a doomsday scenario where the US loses its position as a world power because of its failing schools. Public school education persisted as a hot topic through the 1960s and 1970s as civil rights activists called for the enforcement of desegregation and violence broke out across the country. Frustrated with federal intervention, the lack of promised results, and white flight impeding these efforts, the public consensus swung toward more conservative solutions in the seventies and eighties. In education specifically, conservative thinkers called for more local rights and less federal influence. Charter schools gained traction in the early 90s nationwide, and in 1997 Ohio saw its first community school. Contemporary reports, litigation, and updated proposals were examined in relation to earlier hypotheses to evaluate their success. Charter schools were advanced under the theory that they would improve urban education outcomes, reduce segregation, and the competitiveness of the free market would improve nonchartered public schools. Twenty years after community schools were sanctioned, demographics and achievement reports do not reflect those notions. School choice is offered as a way of overcoming educational inequality, but it ignores that 'choice' alone did not segregate American schools and will not sufficiently remedy the systematic failures of public schools to support economically disadvantaged and minority students. This exploration into the rise of charter schools in central Ohio sets out to explain why community schools were established, why they operate in the way they do, and to evaluate their success.