The concept of charter schools, ironically, arose from American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shankar after a visit to Cologne, Germany in 1987. Mr. Shankar's original vision stipulated that teachers within public schools would create educational laboratories to innovate best practices that could be rolled out on a larger scale. In the original conception, charter schools allowed teachers more agency in determining content and pedagogy in order to re-engage some of the most disengaged students. Free from some of the more cumbersome top-down mandates, charter schools would be able to implement more democratic processes and curriculum. The original vision also emphasized collaboration between charter schools and their public counterparts. Shankar also believed that charter teachers should be unionized. (Source: The New York Times) 

Though they were initially wary of a change to the status quo, many conservatives saw an opportunity to reduce state involvement in education. The resulting situation saw a pair of interesting bedfellows: Conservatives trying to reduce state capacity in the education sector and progressive advocates fighting for better educational outcomes in marginalized communities. To this day, charter school advocates find support on both sides of the aisle. (Source: The New York Times)

As the reform movement developed, Albert Shankar's original vision of charter-public collaboration became a competitive relationship. Charter schools and public schools compete for students and funding. We can see this competitive relationship play out in the somewhat testy transition of Olney High School back to the School District of Philadelphia. (Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Charter school advocates, in extrapolating market theory economics to education, claimed that increased choice would lead to better student performance and lower costs. "At the system level, charters are expected to diversify the provision of education, to increase competition among schools, and to increase accountability" (Mitra, Educational Change and the Political Process, 158). (Image Source)

Thomas Sowell, in his book Charter Schools and Their Enemies, compares the test scores of a set of public schools and charter schools that are housed in the same buildings in New York City. Charter Schools and Their Enemies has been well received by most of the Neoliberal establishment.  National Review, in its discussion of the book, said this:   

"If the opponents of charter schools succeed, the biggest losers will be poor minority children for whom a quality education is the best chance for a better life." (Source: National Review) 

Notice the appropriation of social-justice language, a common reform-advocate strategy. 

Sowell concludes that in this subset of about 100 schools, charter schools have dramatically outperformed public schools in terms of academic performance. Typical of most neoliberal analysis, Sowell's definition of success relies exclusively on test scores.

In his effort to find comparable data, due to a high degree of variance in national education conditions and demographics, Sowell uses a set of schools that educate 23,000 students in New York City. In its exclusion of equity issues, Sowell's methodology leaves something to be desired and typifies a lot of the blind spots in the neoliberal discussion around education. 

In choosing the New York schools that he did, Sowell claims that he is comparing apples to apples.  Because the charter schools used a lottery system, all students must have similar profiles and demographics. Intentionally or not, Sowell skips over some very important factors that also impact the data:

• Published data from the NY State Education Department shows that the public schools had much higher rates of students with disabilities. 

• Public schools had higher rates of economically disadvantaged students. 

• The public schools are required to continually enroll new students. 

• Sowell's conclusion assumes that every student who goes to the public school also applied for the lottery.  As Mitra writes in Educational Change and the Political Process, "the most disadvantaged families have the least access to information" (Mitra, 154). It follows that the most disadvantaged students are also most likely the ones that didn't apply for the lottery or transferred into the public school mid-year. The data backs this up, as we can see that public schools had higher rates of both economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities.