Let’s imagine you have an important job to do. Some reasonable people consider it the most important job.  The future wellbeing of society is directly correlated to how successful you and your peers are.  There are a few oddities, however, for such a crucial job as yours. If you do a great job, you aren’t likely to earn more; you’ll get the same pay raise next year regardless of your performance. The primary hope of a substantial pay raise is to get a promotion, in which case you’d no longer have the same role. If you ease off and your work becomes mediocre or even poor, you’ll get the same raise next year. All you have to do is stick around. Don’t rock the boat, stay on your boss’s good side, and you should be fine.

What if you’re the boss in this scenario with the same incentive structure? You do what you can to encourage your team, but you don’t have many tools or resources beyond your own pocketbook to reward your star performers. It is already normal for your employees to fund the majority of their professional supplies from their own pocket. Despite your organization’s primary role occurring on the front-line, roughly 50% of the employees of the greater organization are not in a front-line role. The other 50% are mostly in support office roles. This, despite well-known and publicized shortages of the primary function workers. Support workers interact with the primary mission mainly through numbers, reports, and shamefully unhelpful human resources departments. They provide updates to best practices, operational standards, and other “how-to” guides for those overwhelmed on the front-lines. The cost of employing such a large proportion of support office staff leaves little budgetary flexibility to give bonuses to those doing the primary work, to hire new assistants or trainees, or to increase the applicant pool by paying all the primary workers more.

As a leader of a front-line branch, getting rid of your lowest performers requires piles of paperwork and possibly attending a formal hearing. It’s easier to just move them around to minimize their harm to your product.  Reassigning un-coachable underperformers, “Here, go do less…over there,” is a crucial part of your quality control. So it goes, those low-performers often perversely get rewarded with roles that—by all appearances—are easier and lower stress than their previous mission-focused job.

The above is a description of what a charter school is not. Instead, it describes the organizational and incentive structure that my wife, family, and former colleagues experienced as employees of traditional public schools in Baton Rouge and Baltimore. It is the incentive structure I witnessed as a student for the teachers I had in Baton Rouge’s traditional and magnet schools.

One fellow teacher once lamented her previous employment at a certain traditional public school was just a “dog and pony show”—to use her words. She explained to me that unless someone from the central office was coming for a visit, the primary operation was to just hang on and perpetuate the elaborate scheme of glorified babysitting. This particular case was at a totally rebuilt multimillion dollar campus, so at least anecdotally, this rules out storied culprit of “underfunded school systems.”

Great education can happen in these settings, especially where there are clear and uncompromising standards for students, like magnet schools. But even there, it is in spite of the above described teacher incentive structure and not thanks to it. When educational progress happens in traditional schools, it is because talented and passionate teachers—who could be paid far more elsewhere—work grueling shifts, stay late hours, navigate their hydration through onerously regimented bathroom breaks, pay for their own supplies, and turn a blind eye to the farce of other equally paid teachers who merely show up.  If they are lucky, they also enjoy parental buy-in. This is generally demonstrated by students who allow the teacher to teach without highly skilled child-whisperer intervention à la Lean on Me or Dangerous Minds—I was punched in the face by a teenage student, so I think I get to write that.

So, what is a charter school then? Perhaps the most important and refreshing answer is “not that.”

Technically speaking, however, a charter school is a publicly funded, tuition-free school that is run by an independent organization. To receive those public dollars, charter school entities are issued a charter, a limited-time contract to provide an educational format that is not provided by existing local schools.  Charter agreements are issued by either a local school board or a state government board of education.

In areas where public schools tend to perform well, charter schools are usually scarce and would need to offer a particularly distinct educational format to even be considered, such as Montessori or foreign language immersion. In areas where public-schools are chronically underperforming and failing, organizations tend to be granted charters for simply having a solid track record of educational progress in other communities.

In other words, they distinguish themselves from existing schools simply by being a place where students are learning.

They are nevertheless usually required to represent something distinct about their style of education.  Such distinctions can be heightened rigor (BASIS), the addition of a character-based curriculum (National Heritage Academies), or even the utilization of melodic or rhythmic sing-along memorization aids (KIPP).

Charters effectively make a quid pro quo bargain with state and local governments. They receive budgetary and strategic autonomy in exchange for performance accountability. If they do not show promised results or at least better results than surrounding schools during their chartered period, they may lose their charter. At times, charters may even surrender their charter before their period is up when they find their particular methodology is not effective in a certain area.

Like a company that runs grocery stores without being told by regulators or politicians what to stock, how to stock it, and where to buy it from, charter schools can rapidly test any number of financial or strategic priorities to see how they affect their ability to attract quality educators and effectively educate students. When confronted with a failing policy, they can nimbly make changes without the need of wading through public hearings, special interest groups, or political threats. More like a private sector hierarchy, the school administrations can make authorized adjustments, or if necessary, their board— which is required to open its meetings to the public—can meet to consider more fundamental shifts in strategy.

Instead of filtering their dollars-per-student through myriad “support office” salaries in a parish or county central office, they can start their teachers with higher pay, offer bonuses for student growth, and even provide fully stocked supply closets—something unheard of in countless public schools. I enjoyed these professional private sector traits in different charter schools located many states apart and run by different organizations. Ironically, without all of the stringent teachers’ union protections imposed on public schools, charter schools in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge have treated me and my former colleagues much more like professionals than teachers among my friends and family were ever treated in traditional public schools.

Where traditional public schools face accountability-of-process on the front end, with hours and hours of public hearings, political posturing, and elections, charter schools skip these steps and instead face accountability-of-progress on the backend.

Certainly, many traditional and magnet public schools have found ways to thrive with talented teachers, community investment, and thoughtful leadership.  For decades, however, generations of students have already matriculated through failing schools with no other opportunities to try a different educational path. Any single charter offering is not a panacea for all the student types and family needs that exist, but if one day every city has as many school options as grocery stores have options for bread or tomato sauce, we will look sheepishly upon our past and wonder why it took so long. Perhaps a renaissance of competitive educational offerings lies just beneath the aging assumption that school boards and politics do it best.

David Pearce, Contributing Author