The Charter School Movement and the Marginal Revolution in Public Education

Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.

Longtime CharterFolk readers may remember a post from a couple of years ago wherein I mentioned owning two University of Michigan caps, a function of my wife having attended there and my having learned that it is better to be loyal to your spouse’s school than to your own.

At the time, Michigan was playing in the national football championship game. Two years later, I still own both hats, and I had them both out again for the national basketball championship.

Afterward, a CharterFolk reader forwarded me a story explaining that Michigan’s coach had drawn teaching insights from Doug Lemov, whose Teach Like a Champion work first took shape at Uncommon Schools.

A theme here at CharterFolk is that I often highlight the surprising progress the charter school movement is achieving, but until now I had failed to notice one of its most consequential downstream effects:

Helping deliver an NCAA national basketball championship!

But here we are.

Coach like a Champion!

Go Blue!

CharterFolk Doubles Our Number of Organizational Subscribers

Last week, I said I wanted to frame this week’s conversation around the idea of “marginal revolution.” By that, I meant a way of thinking that Tyler Cowen, joined by other economists at George Mason University, has through decades of writing under that banner helped popularize:

The idea that steady, incremental improvements can compound over time into changes large enough to feel revolutionary.

Often those improvements do not emerge from sweeping blueprints or grand theory, but from small, practical, context-specific solutions that address immediate problems and, through accumulation, reshape the larger world. Some of the most far-reaching changes result from redesigned incentives. When people and institutions are given reasons to make better choices at the margin, glide paths toward profound transformation can be created.

My contention is that the charter school movement’s steady progress over three and a half decades is amounting to a kind of marginal revolution in public education.

But I also think that same thinking applies to CharterFolk itself.

What began nearly seven years ago as a newsletter sent to 600 readers has grown into a publication and podcast series incorporating hundreds of voices and reaching more than 10,000 readers.

One of the ways that growth has compounded is through Organizational Subscribers: charter schools, advocacy organizations, and support organizations that pay an annual subscription and then share CharterFolk with as many people in their orbit as they choose.

Some organizations, like Rocketship, want everyone in the organization to receive CharterFolk content. Others prefer to limit it to senior leaders. Some advocacy organizations want their entire database to receive CharterFolk, while others share it only with those who attend their annual conferences. Different organizations choose differently depending on their context. But cumulatively, the readership grows. And as more organizations become subscribers, their participation begins to influence others.

Today, we’re excited to announce that 14 more organizations are becoming CharterFolk Organizational Subscribers, doubling our number of Organizational Subscribers to date. Another half-dozen have also said yes but would prefer that we delay announcing them until they have shared the news internally first.

Some of these new subscribers are themselves offering compelling examples of marginal change.

Achieve Charter School in Paradise, California, is committed to sharing CharterFolk content with all of the parents in its school community, and Literacy First in El Cajon is considering the same. Meanwhile, several existing Organizational Subscribers are expanding the number of people in their networks who receive CharterFolk. Springs Charter School, for example, has historically shared CharterFolk only with its central administration but is now expanding that circle to include teachers.

And to my knowledge, none of our existing Organizational Subscribers is discontinuing. That means CharterFolk’s growth continues to compound and now appears to be putting us within reach of one of our longest-held aspirations:

Becoming a community of charter school people serving literally tens of thousands of readers.

To our newcomers:

And to our continuing organizational subscribers:

We say thank you!

At the CharterFolk Board, we have talked about a stretch goal of reaching 50 organizational subscribers as we head into 2026–27. Each new organization not only adds to the momentum of our readership, but also strengthens our argument as we reach out to funders and ask them to match the support now coming in from our many subscribers. So if your organization would like to join our growing group of Organizational Subscribers, please reach out to me directly at jed@charterfolk.org.

CharterFolk is not, in itself, a revolution. But it is a marginal contribution toward something much larger. And the fact that the charter school movement is building something of this scale and seriousness speaks to one of its deepest achievements. Over time, by steadily, incrementally, and pragmatically devising solutions within local contexts, while also connecting those solutions to broader efforts that allow progress to be aggregated and compounded, the movement is making a contribution that, in the end, may rightly be understood as revolutionary.

The Charter School Movement: The Marginal Revolution in Public Education

Longtime CharterFolk readers know that I often underscore the debt our movement owes to Ember Reichgott Junge, the legislator who passed our first charter school law in Minnesota in 1991.

In recent weeks I’ve had occasion to speak with Becky Kelso, who co-sponsored the legislation and cast new light on some of the behind-the-scenes contributions Ember made. But the part of the discussion that struck me most was Becky sharing what Ember, Ted Kolderie, and others felt after the bill had passed.

Disappointment.

Chagrin that it had been so watered down. Not as many schools could open as they wanted, and there were other limitations they found demoralizing.

But what was impossible to grasp in that moment was the marginal contribution that had been made.

A charter school law had passed.

Yes, it was full of limitations. But it was enough of a game-changer that Gary Hart in California decided to emulate their efforts.

And then, when a once-in-a-generation parliamentary maneuver allowed Hart to get his bill passed essentially unamended, the limitations the Minnesotans lamented were no longer framing the national conversation.

Colorado Governor Roy Romer summoned Hart to Colorado to talk through his bill. Soon Romer was before his legislature calling for the creation of “super charter networks” able to operate at scale.

Starting at the 15 minute mark.

Within months, Colorado became charter school state number three, and Romer used his perch as chair of the National Governors Association to encourage his counterparts in other states to join the trend.

From there, the movement entered a period wherein dozens of states adopted charter school laws, while many states returned to their original laws to improve them incrementally over time. Hart’s original charter school law, for example, capped the number of schools at one hundred, provided no appeal rights to the state level for charter applicants, and created no presumption of approval for district authorizers who clearly had strong disincentives to approve new charters. Over time, those flaws were addressed and those incentives reset.

And it was all made possible by a legislative breakthrough in Minnesota that its originators initially experienced as a disappointment.

I relay this story because of its resonance with the concept of marginal revolution, the kind of change I believe the charter school movement is bringing to public education: not something achieved all at once in the form of one seismic event, but something building on itself over time.

Name another public education reform that has endured for more than 35 years while continuing to make incremental progress year after year, with specific policy initiatives and growth efforts emerging from the context-specific practical needs of communities across the United States.

And name anything else in the current landscape that is unleashing the same kind of cumulative force.

Community schools?

Voc-ed?

The Science of Reading?

Steadily, incrementally making progress over decades of effort?

Not even close.

Yes, private school choice may yet unleash something that creates compounding impact over time. Or it may not. We will see.

Artificial intelligence may matter too. But more likely it will resemble other technology-centered reforms: a muddle of positive and negative change, with values-driven people working hard to address underlying equity issues, and with the broader establishment’s indifference allowing many of those equity issues to worsen.

The truth is that we are now at four million kids in charter schools, and we are still growing. Would we wish that progress were faster? Absolutely, especially when we intuitively understand that we have the potential to do much more.

But we should also recognize how unusual it is for a public education reform to endure for more than 35 years while continuing to make progress. That kind of persistence matters because progress compounds over time. Our task is not to lose heart over the fact that revolution has come marginally. It is to keep going, to keep figuring out how to make progress at the margins, and not to let our eye be taken off the ball by the shiny objects that so much of the education world allows itself to be distracted by. The Science of Reading will not get us to the promised land. Only a full redesign of our public education system will, and that can only be achieved through decades of progress on the margins.

The question for us now is what next marginal changes are needed if our world is to stay on course for revolution. And the stark reality is that our policy work has been stuck in something of a rut. Marginal improvements in our policy agendas, changes that take into account that charter schools are now unleashing systemic change, not merely creating bastions of innovation, have been too slow in coming. Just as important, our movement needs to stay better abreast of the growth and advocacy trends actually unfolding across the country.

For example, right now many national observers mistakenly believe that the charter school movement is in a period of recession in California.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, Gavin Newsom and CTA-aligned policymakers did massive damage to California’s miraculous charter school law in 2019. The law that Gary Hart got through unamended now contains some of the very features of the original Minnesota law that Ember, Becky, and others lamented. But it also retains marginal improvements feathered into it over time that make California’s charter school movement incredibly anti-fragile.

Most importantly, California still has a non-classroom-based charter school law, not a “virtual” law where kids receive all of their instruction online, as is common in many other states, but a law that allows a portion of instruction to happen in non-classroom settings. That has enabled a whole category of schools in which kids learn in person two, three, or four days a week, and where the resource centers serving families often have unit sizes of no more than 100 or 200 students.

That, in turn, makes the introduction of charter schools into rural areas far more attractive, because it obviates the need to bring in 500-student models that can disrupt an entire local system. And because the facilities footprints are much smaller, it is also far easier for schools to overcome the building bottleneck that impedes growth in many places.

This is what has allowed California’s non-classroom-based schools, in combination with classroom-based programs in more Republican-leaning parts of the state, Orange County, the Inland Empire, and the Central Valley, to generate a level of enrollment growth over the past three years that is essentially identical to what has happened in Texas, a state often thought to be head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the nation.

And lest any of you worry that I am celebrating school growth without regard to the quality of opportunity those schools are creating, the evidence below shows that California’s NCB charter schools, or “flex-based” charter schools as they are sometimes called, are posting strong academic gains even as this significant growth is occurring.

And if we look closely at the non-classroom-based provisions proving so consequential in California, we realize that almost no other states have them.

Which means that the introduction of NCB, or flex-based schools into other parts of the country represents one of our greatest opportunities for high-impact marginal change right now.

But it is not the only one. More ideas like those coming out of Indianapolis would help.

What we need is not a single policy proposal that might work in many cities, but a whole clearinghouse of ideas. Public education architecture varies enormously by region, and the issues involved are highly complex: tax structures differ, school district governance arrangements differ, public facility and other asset-ownership structures differ, and many places face thorny cross-jurisdiction problems when students reside in one taxing district but attend school in another. In some communities, the key issue is who controls buildings. In others, it is how funding follows children across district lines, how local governance authority is exercised when educational demand is regional, or how to create forms of third-party accountability for school districts more akin to what charter schools face.

All this points to the need to begin undertaking a whole host of efforts aimed at generating a wide menu of options for states and cities seeking to marginally evolve their public school systems toward something better able to create and sustain greater equity and excellence in their communities’ schools.

These kinds of changes are unfolding against a backdrop of enrollment decline and funding loss in the traditional system, pressures that will shake many school districts’ foundations and open up the possibility for accelerated marginal change.

It is incumbent upon our world to spend time at the margin asking: What is the new thing, or the new things, we now need? And, thinking in specifically Cowen-like terms, what incentives can we design that would incline the entire system toward faster marginal change?

I do not mean to suggest that any single set of policy changes will produce instant revolution. That would contradict everything I have argued in this column. But I do believe there are three changes, each now politically achievable in many parts of the country and well matched both to the new realities of public education and to the charter movement’s increasing readiness for new forms of growth, that together could do more than anything else to accelerate the charter school movement’s marginal progress.

On Wednesday, in lieu of a typical Mid-Week Whip-Around, I’ll lay them out directly.

Hope to see you here.