Charter schooling has long suffered from a “more-of-the-same” problem. For all the opportunities to rethink the familiar schoolhouse, few of the nation’s 8,000 charter schools have actually done so. While they tend to outperform their district counterparts due to high expectations and elbow grease, many charter schools just aren’t all that different from nearby district schools.

Why? It’s due to culture, practice, and policy. From facilities to funders, there are a slew of forces urging charter leaders to do the usual, just “better.”  This is what the former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans famously lampooned as the “suck less” mindset. 

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That play-it-safe dynamic has proven tough to dislodge. Indeed, things went backward over the past decade, as high-flying “no excuses” charter schools ditched their pioneering strategies and retreated to the comfortable, soft sameness of “social justice” education.

Well, on Friday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon took a useful step to help push the charter school envelope, announcing that the U.S. Department of Education will revamp the federal Charter School Program’s Model Development and Dissemination Grants. This sounds like Beltway blather, but it could be a valuable chance to help unshackle the charter sector.  

Established back in 1994, the CSP is a vital source of start-up funding for charter schools, with nearly half of the existing charters making use of these funds. Meanwhile, the dissemination grants support efforts to develop much-needed resources for charter schools. Unfortunately, in 2022, the Biden administration launched a three-year program that prioritized helping schools “address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,” yielding charter resources that didn’t add anything to what was already developed for traditional schools.  

Now, in an overdue shift, the next round of grants will emphasize the needs of new school models, identifying what’s needed to promote game-changing schools dedicated to those things that families want and need. The focus will particularly be on the barriers that impede charter schools focused on classical learning, STEM, civics, and careers, with grantees studying exceptional charters in order to understand the challenges they encountered and provide tools and resources that can help.

A senior department official explained, “This is about fulfilling the promise of charter schools. Especially after COVID, when we saw an explosion of new school models, the question was how we could encourage this in charter schooling — how to do something truly different without having to be in the private school space.”

McMahon also announced that she’s shifting an extra $60 million from other uses to the charter school program, increasing federal charter funding to $500 million this year (after funding was frozen under the Biden administration). Moreover, because McMahon has determined that the charter program will return to abiding by the language of the actual charter school statute, CSP will launch its new grant competitions free from Biden’s onerous, union-friendly regulations.

Especially heartening is that all of these moves, from the reconfigured grants to the CSP bump-up to jettisoning the Biden regulations, meticulously respect established law. It’s a textbook display of how much Trump’s education team can accomplish when permitted to operate deliberately. The process might have been announced a bit sooner if jammed through, but this approach means the result is unlikely to be tripped up by court injunctions or legal travails. 

In education, a perpetual frustration is the way in which sensible ideas run afoul of a “culture of can’t,” caught up in a web of rules, regulations, routines, contracts, confusion, and skittish leadership. State officials frequently think federal regulations are more onerous than they actually are. Rules governing facilities get mindlessly interpreted in ways that make a building unaffordable. Outmoded attendance policies can make it prohibitive to run hybrid programs or on-site apprenticeships. 

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Efforts to combat the red tape and solve these problems tend to fly beneath the radar, both because this all sounds pretty nerdy and because too much attention can paint a target on a charter school’s back. Indeed, over the years, many accomplished charter schools have sought to keep a low public profile to avoid becoming a target for teachers’ unions or other critics. McMahon’s new marching orders could help flip that dynamic by celebrating creative problem-solvers.

Putting a spotlight on schools that have successfully swum against the tide has the potential to motivate advocates, inform the priorities of state lawmakers, and be a boon for education coverage. It would be a very good thing if the growth in educational choice is coupled with due attention to the barriers that are impeding better choices.   

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Annika Hernandez is a research assistant in education policy studies at AEI.