Finishing touches: More than a quarter of all public schools in Arizona are now charter schools. Some districts have lost more than 20 percent of their students to charters. Guess who's concerned? - Forum

Education Next, Winter, 2001 by Robert Maranto

* Assimilation. At least two districts have made overtures to buy out and absorb their more popular and conventional charter competitors, while ignoring the more exotic charters and those for at-risk students. In the long run, this may prove a popular strategy for districts with the resources to pursue it.

Demand and Supply

Critics of school choice have advanced several arguments that are contradicted by Arizona's experience with competition. First is the claim that school choice is unnecessary since most Americans are pleased with their public schools. For example, Berliner and Biddle state that it is a "canard that American parents are generally dissatisfied with public schools." They call demands for education reform a "manufactured crisis" created by influential "reactionary voices" from "the Far Right, the Religious Right, and Neoconservatives."

In the fall of 1995, 55 charter campuses opened in Arizona, with approximately 7,500 students. In 1996 there were 119 campuses, rising to 222 in 1997. By the fall of 2001 about 431 charter campuses were serving roughly 61,000 students. The charter sector has added about 1 percent of market share (5,000 to 10,000 students) annually. The Arizona Department of Education reports that by their second year, most charter schools have waiting lists. Even if the majority of parents are reasonably happy with their public schools, a growing number are clearly interested in alternatives, As former Arizona superintendent of public instruction Lisa Graham Keegan said:

It takes a great deal of courage for parents to enroll their children in a new, untested charter school when there is a nearby district school whose program is a known quality....Given a choice, relatively few parents have absolute loyalty to the school their child is in right now. There is a huge market for schools that would address kids' needs in different ways.

Critics are of course right to note that demand for schools does not develop overnight, but this is very different from saying there is no demand for alternatives. Sometimes parents don't know that they want something different until they see it.

Another popular argument among critics of school choice is that there aren't enough spaces in schools of choice to absorb all the students interested in leaving traditional public schools (notice how the critiques of school choice tend to cancel one another out). Yet Arizona clearly shows that a range of providers are eager to open new schools if given the opportunity. About 25 percent of Arizona's charter schools are operated by former district school administrators; 25 percent are run by for-profit firms; 23 percent by former district school teachers; and 23 percent by social workers. A further 13 percent converted from private school status, and 11 percent were starred by parents, professors, and charter or private school teachers. (The total is more than 100 percent due to overlap among categories.) Educators and social workers, rather than for-profit management firms like Edison Schools, dominate the Arizona market, most likely because per-pupil funding in Arizona is too low to attract the for-profits, i n contrast to that in other states, like Massachusetts and Michigan. As of the fall of 1999, 162 of 216 charter-school operators were running a single campus; only 10 ran 5 or more, signaling a grassroots movement driven mainly by local educators and parents, not distant management companies.