The Black power and education reform activist Howard Fuller gained national notoriety as the magnum force who helped propel the country’s first private-school choice program through the Wisconsin legislature in 1990, which is around the time I met him. The program he championed allowed low-income families in Milwaukee to remove their children from failing public schools to attend private schools of their choice. When I contacted Fuller in the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign to tell him about a book I was writing on the history of school choice, he immediately brought up the topic of charter schools.

Fuller told me how discouraged he was by the national political scene, describing Trump as “dangerous” and Biden as a politician whose “time had passed.” He was most disturbed by the Democratic candidates for president who identified as progressives. After our call, he sent me a 16-minute video of a conversation he had with Elizabeth Warren the previous November. The Massachusetts senator was campaigning in Atlanta for the Democratic presidential nomination and wanted to meet with a group of Black parents to discuss education. Fuller, reaching into his broad network, helped local leaders put the event together.

The video captured an intimate discussion between Warren and half a dozen attendees, including Fuller, that took place in a brightly lit hallway after the main event of her visit. Most of the local women were dressed in black sweatshirts that read “Powerful Parent Network.” Fuller was wearing jeans and a grey hoodie from Malcolm X Liberation University (which he had founded but is now defunct) with black lettering and a sketch of Malcolm across his chest. Warren’s signature bright red blazer and golden mane stood out under the glaring lights, creating a contrast of color that seemed to represent people from two different worlds. The exchange remained civil and respectful throughout, with no raised voices; but the disagreements were striking.

Warren had just posted her education plan. Despite proposing more resources for all public schools, the plan included a cut in federal funding to support the creation of new charter schools. The Atlanta parents and Fuller wanted to know why. One activist grandmother of 16 appealed to the candidate to hear stories from “real people who live and breathe this every day” and have to organize politically to get decent schools for their kids. She spoke about a charter school that “saved my grandbaby’s life,” a young woman who after four generations was the only person in her family to attend college. Warren denied that she opposed charter schools. She expressed concern that charters were not held to the same academic standards as traditional public schools.

At that point, Fuller introduced himself and joined the conversation. He noted how Warren had used the same buzzwords as teachers unions and other charter opponents, who throw around terms like “privatization” and “corporate takeover.” He acknowledged her expertise and said he would much rather be organizing with her to oppose Donald Trump, but he decried her platform as giving “air cover for those who are systematically attacking charter schools.” He reminded her that charter schools are public schools and noted that Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had supported them. In a hushed tone, Fuller cautioned Warren, “When you attack charter schools, you attack the self-determination of Black and Brown families.” He cited declining national test scores. “Our country’s Black and Brown children are not being educated,” Fuller insisted. “We are not the enemy. . . . What you need to do is back off from us.”

Charter schools have never had an easy run. Ever since Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter law in 1991, the schools have been a target of left-leaning Democrats who view them as a threat to public education, even though they were established as public schools of choice accountable to states as a condition of their existence. When charter laws have passed, Democrat-aligned interest groups have lobbied state legislators to underfund them and limit their growth. Last year, while charter schools in New York City were approaching capacity and the number of students on wait lists for entry exceeded 173,000 statewide, Democrats in the state legislature blocked appeals from parents to raise the cap on the number of charters allowed to open. In 2022 President Joe Biden proposed regulations that would make it more difficult to open charter schools and threatened to cut start-up funding for new charters.

As of 2024, 8,150 charter schools in 46 states and the District of Columbia enrolled 3.8 million students. While open to all, they tend to attract students of color with modest family incomes who are fleeing underperforming district schools. An estimated 60 percent of charter students identify as Black or Hispanic compared to 44 percent in district public schools; 59 percent in charters are eligible for free or reduced price lunch, compared to 50 percent in districts. Estimates of per capita funding differentials between charter schools and district schools range from $2,145 to $2,730 per pupil, or about 30 percent of average spending.

Despite the disparities in funding, charter schools usually outperform district public schools in student academic performance. A well-regarded 2023 study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes involved 1,853,000 charter school students and their peers at nearby district schools in 29 states. It found that, between 2014 and 2019, charter school students gained the equivalent of 16 days of learning in reading and six days in math each year, on average, over their district school peers. Charter school students eligible for subsidized lunches gained 23 days in reading and 17 days in math each year.

The benefits of charter schools for disadvantaged students are undeniable, which has made the misinformed attacks from the left particularly galling. Today, however, the greatest threats to the existence and mission of charter schools seem to be coming from the right. The first indication that the political headwinds had shifted direction was in Oklahoma in 2022, when the Catholic Church applied to open a religious charter school. The application was initially approved, but the state attorney general filed suit to have it rescinded. In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that the operation of a charter school by a religious organization violated federal and state law. The attorney general’s position had been supported by both the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who insisted that, as public schools, charter schools should not be permitted to teach religious doctrine.

When the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the state ruling this April, it handed down a split 4–4 decision, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself because of her association with one of the school’s supporters. This left the state ruling in place with advocates for religious charter schools promising another go of it with the hope that Justice Barrett will support their cause. Allowing charter schools to adopt religious instruction and practices would not only threaten the constitutional boundaries that protect the secular status of public education, but it would also alter the character of charters and make it harder for them to win support on the left.

Beyond the constitutional complications, there is an emerging fissure within the choice movement between charter school advocates and those who prioritize the late Milton Friedman’s free-market approach of using government-funded vouchers and similar mechanisms to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. Friedman’s market model holds that empowering parents to choose their children’s schools would lead to a more efficient and effective system of education than aggressive government oversight.

In June, Robert Enlow and Michael McShane wrote an article for Education Next celebrating the rise of private-school choice, noting that more than half the school-age population in America is now eligible for state funding to attend private and religious schools. Enlow and McShane serve as president and research director, respectively, of EdChoice, an influential nonprofit founded in 1996 to carry on Friedman’s legacy. Their estimate does not account for students who will soon be eligible for a federal education tax credit program recently passed by Congress.

But Enlow and McShane’s essay also conveyed a more pointed message. They argued against government oversight of how vouchers are used and in favor of “broader, innovative, decentralized school options” that are accelerating the school choice movement towards offerings like microschools, private tutoring, and home schooling. Referring to charter school authorizers as “unelected functionaries,” they claimed that charter schools have been “stymied” by a regulatory framework that has “buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structure charter schools were created to correct.”

This marked a hinge moment in the history of the school choice movement, signaling that at least some free-marketeers have become disenchanted with charter schools, which they find to be overregulated. Instead, they embrace vouchers for all-comers, with little to no regulation or accountability.

Enlow and McShane’s broadside against regulatory structure of charters could rock the school choice movement—and has not gone unnoticed. Michael Petrilli, president of the reform oriented, pro–school choice Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently posted a response to the Education Next article in Fordham’s Flypaper blog. Noting that Fordham has served as an authorizer for 20 charters in Ohio, Petrilli referred to Enlow and McShane’s charges as “fighting words,” and cautioned that we should “not be Pollyanna about the potential for fraud, abuse, bad ideas, poor execution, and all the rest.”

The charter school model was based on the idea that participating public schools would be given more regulatory flexibility in return for heightened accountability. Studies like the Stanford evaluation have credited that accountability—including the closure of low-performing schools—as a factor in the sector’s academic success. While there is persuasive evidence that private-school vouchers can lead to better graduation and college attendance rates, I know of no voucher assessment that is as comprehensive as the Stanford charter school study, which updates a larger series of observations going back some 25 years.

This widening division within the choice movement could be most harmful to charter schools in the long run, given the current momentum towards private-school choice. There was never unanimity between the “charterists” and the privateers—nor, as Howard Fuller would tell you, within the latter camp between those who supported universal choice like Friedman and those like Fuller’s allies in Milwaukee who demanded means-tested choice for the poor and underserved. It is those students who are now more vulnerable as divisions within the choice camp become more apparent, and Democratic partisans remain steadfast in their opposition to all forms of choice.

Adapted from Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education by Joseph P. Viteritti. Copyright © 2025 by Joseph P. Viteritti. Published by Oxford University Press.

Joseph P. Viteritti is the Thomas Hunter Professor of Public Policy at Hunter College, CUNY.