As the national conversation about school choice and privatization heats up around Congressional Republicans’ efforts to enact the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), a nationwide federally administered school voucher program, the political debate has mostly moved away from other “school choice” options, such as charter schools, that have traditionally caused the most friction. But a recently published series of reports on charter schools in Minnesota, home to the nation’s first charter school law, raises the question of whether or not charters are a less onerous option than vouchers or other school choice schemes.
In 1991, a bipartisan group of state legislators signed off on a bill allowing for the creation of charter schools in Minnesota. These privately managed, publicly funded K-12 schools were sold as a way to improve the quality of education in the state through innovation and teacher empowerment, which a pro-charter schools report from the Citizens League referred to as the “Minnesota difference.” Freed from rigid district mandates, the report argued, teachers and students in charter schools would have easier access to “equitable opportunities and excellence in education.”
Even local teachers union leaders, initially opposed to the charter school concept due to concerns over collective bargaining rights and other key issues, eventually got on board. Under the leadership of former presidents Louise Sundin and Lynn Nordgren, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers even became the first union in the country to provide funding and oversight for start-up charter schools in the state—a move that sparked backlash among some rank-and-file members of the union.
The vision for charters, as Sundin described it in a 2012 book, was to build creative, collaborative, teacher-run schools that would attract the “best and the brightest.” But while there are now roughly 180 charter schools in Minnesota, drawing more than 7 percent of the state’s K-12 students, reports by The Minnesota Star Tribune suggest ample evidence of corruption and churn in the Minnesota charter school, of the sort that has continually dogged the charter school industry nationwide.
In his investigation, Star Tribune reporter Jeffrey Meitrodt paints a picture of an industry that seeks to protect itself rather than deliver on promises of greater student achievement through deregulation and privatization. In 2024, the state’s supreme court restricted the Minnesota Internship Center—a charter school for high school students with campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul—from accessing more than a million dollars in per-pupil funding after finding that the school had inflated its enrollment numbers by 137 students. The extra money the school pulled in was seemingly not used for educational purposes, as former employees told state investigators that special education classes in particular involved little to no oversight or instruction. In fact, Meitrod notes that just 2 percent of the Minnesota Internship Center’s students show up for school on a regular basis, compared to the state average of 70 percent.
In the past five years, numerous other charter school leaders across the United States have been implicated in similar scandals that amounted to more than $300 million in stolen taxpayer funds. Meitrodt notes that while these flagrant violations of the public’s trust have led to greater charter school oversight in states such as Ohio, officials in Minnesota have yet to take similar actions.
A lack of oversight has in fact led to multiple examples of failure and upheaval in charter schools around the state, especially in charter schools that serve vulnerable student populations. Consider the case of J.J. Legacy School, a K-6 Montessori-focused charter school in the historically underserved area of North Minneapolis which closed abruptly in January 2024 after it was revealed that the school owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state due to enrollment discrepancies. The school’s accountant was apparently nowhere to be found, leaving school officials unclear about why such financial problems had taken hold.
Meitrodt reported that nine Minnesota charter schools closed in 2024—the most since the industry’s founding—with another ten likely to be forced to close in 2025. He chalks this up to a stunning lack of oversight and accountability. Charter schools in Minnesota are overseen by nonprofit authorizers, ranging from the Minnesota Guild, which was once funded by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, to the University of St. Thomas, a private Catholic school in St. Paul.
These authorizers earned nearly $4 million in fees collectively in 2023, according to a report from the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools. The money came from the state’s public education fund, and was paid to each authorizer by the charter schools they were tasked with overseeing. Yet, the Association of Charter Schools report found that the exact flow of funds is difficult to ascertain, as many authorizers have consistently failed to follow reporting guidelines put in place by the Minnesota Department of Education.
Meitrodt reported in November 2024 that the ten largest charter school authorizers in the state had thus far refused to share documentation with him regarding the oversight they were supposed to be providing for the schools under their charge. To make matters worse, the Minnesota Department of Education “does not routinely require authorizers to provide such records.”
This troubling situation is all the more concerning given that the federal Department of Education is currently facing an existential crisis of its own as the Trump Administration seeks to shut it down. Should Trump succeed, it could leave millions of students across the country in a very vulnerable position, likely without any oversight regarding how public funds are allocated and whether or not students with disabilities receive the education they are legally entitled to.
The heated debate taking place now on Capitol Hill over the real and potential harms caused by school voucher programs will certainly continue, but it should not be forgotten that the decades of bipartisan support for school choice schemes across the board, including Minnesota’s mostly unchecked charter school sector, have helped weaken protections and compromised opportunities for the students most in need of a robust public school system.