What Decides Charter Schools?

Since 1980s, a series of school reforms have been performed at the elementary and secondary level in the United States. As one of them, charter school reform outweighs as the most popular and fastest spreading one. The declining American public trusts in public schools and the urgency for school reforms serve as the direct causes for the introduction of charter schools. But there are more reasons. In fact, the founding principles of the nation-individualism, liberty and equality play a significant part in the popularization of charter schools as well. Based on this view, this thesis endeavors to investigate the deciding power of the charter schools in a broader context.In this thesis, the charter school reform is reviewed in a historical and cultural context. The thesis is divided into five parts. In the Introduction, the definitions of charter schools are illustrated and the core dimensions of the charter concept are analyzed.Chapter One begins with the discussion of American traditional values of individualism, liberty and freedom. Looking into the history of the United States of America, the thesis traces the roots and flows of the three values, and also detects American people's efforts to maintain those values.Then Chapter Two moves to the public education sphere and manages to find evidence in several most significant public schoolreforms of America that Americans did make efforts to preserve the values of individualism, liberty and equality in the history of American public schools.In Chapter Three, it is argued that within current public schools, there are situations and policies that lead to the problems of unsatisfied individual needs in schools, unequal treatment in education, restriction of freedom to choose schools, which contradict with the values of individualism, liberty and equality. Then charter school idea's potential solutions have been provided to resolve these problems. As it is, we can see that charter schools are really endeavoring to target the deviances of the discussed traditional values in American public schools.The thesis then concludes that charter school reform is the Americans' strategy to maintain the traditional values of individualism, liberty and equality.