...equally still be flexible and responsive to citizens' individual needs; and that will hold public bureaucracies and recipients of government funds accountable for producing results. These claims are not controversial. However, rarely are they all realized in practice because policy choices inevitably involve privileging some values over others.

In this article, we analyze two values that are central in the nation's education reform debates: flexibility and accountability. In particular, we study how state policymakers have considered these two values in crafting state charter school laws. Our research addresses two specific questions: What factors influence the degree of flexibility and accountability present in state charter school laws? How does the balance between flexibility and accountability in state charter school laws influence the formation of charter schools in the United States?

We examine these questions in the following five sections. First, we draw on previous literature to describe the theoretical advantages of considering charter school policy through the lens of competing values. Second, we briefly discuss the charter school concept and trajectory of that reform since the early 1990s. Third, we analyze the forces influencing the content of state charter school laws. Fourth, we examine the effect these laws have had on the formation of charter schools. Our fifth section concludes. Across the article, our aim is to understand better the value dimensions of charter school laws and to help policymakers improve current and future charter school legislation.

Public Policy, Competing Values, and American Education

Policy conflicts over competing values are as old as the United States, and have become embedded in the country's cultural fabric and public institutions (Burns, 1994; Derthick, 2001; Ellis, 2000; Smith, 1993). Because the American political system generates policy from compromises between separated institutions empowered to act for everyone, it is inevitable that multiple and sometimes competing values will become embedded in public policy (Baumgartner Jones, 1993). That result fosters tensions that unfold when policy moves beyond the halls of legislatures and into the daily work of public servants and lives of the nation's citizens.

Several examples of these value tensions exist. Okun's (1975) famous study identified a "big tradeoff" between efficiency and equality. The irony of democratic capitalist societies, he reasoned, was that they prod people to work better to "get ahead of our neighbors" while simultaneously they embrace "the worth of every human being." In combination, that drive for both efficiency and equality has produced a mix of political, social, and economic disparities, which suggest the "uneasy compromises" that policymakers have made in constructing institutions such as the nation's income tax system and social safety net (Okun, p. 1).

Employees of public bureaucracies are quite familiar with the tensions that competing value commitments create (Moore, 1995; Posner, 2002; Wilson, 1989). Rather than explicitly privileging one value or another, the nation's policy system often produces laws that embrace many conflicting values simultaneously. That puts the nation's public managers in a bind. Even though policy might affirm several values in name, in practice, agency managers and frontline employees must broker the inevitable disputes that arise when, for example, their need to subject all citizens to detailed paperwork requirements, which upholds account ability and equity, conflicts with other desires, e.g., that bureaucracies should respond to individual citizens' unique concerns (Moore; Peters; Posner). Light's (1997) study of government reform from 1945 to 1995, for example, illustrates that previous value commitments frequently endure even as new waves of reform emerge. Thus, in the 1990s many policymakers and many public managers embraced liberation management, an idea that focuses on effectiveness and government responsiveness to citizens and frontline administrators. However, the nation's public institutions did not abandon their commitment to ideas more popular in earlier eras, such as efficiency, a legacy of the philosophy of scientific management, or internal and external accountability, which emerged with reforms to combat government waste.

Furthermore, conflicts can arise not only when different values compete for attention, but also when opponents disagree over the relative ability of public organizations to promote the values citizens cherish. Some would contend that public bureaucracies, as products of politics, could never be as efficient or effective as their private counterparts (Moe, 1989). Others argue that if the nation relies too much on private actors to solve public problems (in a celebration of efficiency), over time those choices may gut the social and institutional capacities of communities and governments to respond to future unexpected problems (Galbraith, [1958] 1998; Goodsell, 2003; Henig, 1994; Peters, 2001; Sandel, 1996). Education reform is one arena where these tensions reveal themselves in stark relief.

As federal and state policymakers have crafted new laws to improve student learning across the diverse locales in United States, they have faced a difficult delegation problem, which scholars of public policy and administration commonly recognize in principal-agent relationships (Bendor, 1988; Bendor, Glazer, & Hammond, 2001; Epstein & O'Halloran, 1999; Salamon, 2002; Wilson, 1989). Smart principals recognize that to maintain their credibility they must hold their agents accountable for results. However, principals must simultaneously provide agents enough flexibility to respond to unexpected and novel contingencies on the ground. In K-12 education policy, that tension has revealed itself in the growing popularity of two particular reform agendas: standards-based reform, which stresses accountability for results on standardized tests; and school choice, which promises greater flexibility and responsiveness to parent and student needs.

In general, the American system of education governance has a long history of privileging responsiveness to local concerns over other values (Conley, 2003; Epstein, 2004; Tyack & Cuban, 1995; Wirt & Kirst, 2001). For decades, school districts were considered the primary institutions for deciding what students should know and be able to do. Across time, though, other values such as guaranteeing equal educational opportunities to children of all races and economic backgrounds, and, since the 1980s in particular, the need to hold schools and school districts accountable for academic performance challenged the local control prerogative (Graham, 1984; Howell, 2005; Manna, 2006; Ravitch, 1995; Rothstein, 2004).

Given that the movements for standards and choice often emphasize different values, the potential exists for these policy agendas to work at cross purposes. Too much accountability to public authorities may stifle the flexibility needed to respond to parent wishes. Conversely, too much flexibility means that public schools become beholden only to the parents they serve and not other relevant stakeholders, such as taxpayers without school-aged children and community members who enjoy the collective benefits of public schools. Thus, the tendency for policymakers to embrace both accountability through standards and flexibility through choice creates potential challenges for making policy work. To clarify, we are not suggesting that these reforms are necessarily incompatible (Hess, 1999); however, when policymakers conceptualize accountability in community-wide (i.e., accountability to a public authority) rather than narrow individual (i.e., accountability to parents) terms, these two reforms may chafe against one another in practice.

To explore this potential tension between accountability and flexibility we analyze the educational model of public charter schools. As public schools, charters generally operate within the same accountability systems as traditional public schools even as they cater to parent interests. Since the early 1990s, state charter school laws and public charter schools have become more prominent on the American educational landscape. In part, these laws are attractive because they appear to provide a compromise in the nation's divisive debates over school choice. On one hand, charter schools are public schools which placates forces preferring not to see public dollars in the form of vouchers or tax expenditures, subsidize private and religious schools. On the other hand, charters do enjoy more operational flexibility than traditional public schools, which advocates emphasize will provide greater alternatives for the nation's students.

In theory, at least, charters split the difference between these competing positions. In practice, however, the development of state laws that govern charter schools, the expansion of the number of schools themselves, and the performance of existing schools has continued to spark debate (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel, & Rothstein, 2005; Miron & Nelson, 2002; Viadero, 2004; Zimmer et al., 2003). Despite their increasing popularity, charters remain controversial in part because, like many other school reforms (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), they attempt to satisfy many values simultaneously. Because charter schools are public institutions that rely on tax dollars, arguably they must remain accountable to the larger political community, not just the parents and students who they serve. Still, too much accountability can undermine the flexibility that charter principals and teachers argue is necessary to meet their students' needs. How have state leaders attempted to strike that balance between flexibility and accountability? And further, what impact have their policy choices had on the expansion of charter schools across the country? Studying the state laws that govern charter schools provides an interesting arena to understand how the values of flexibility and accountability intersect in practice.

Using an original and unique database of state charter school laws that we have developed, we analyze the role state policymakers have assigned to flexibility and accountability in crafting charter school legislation, and then we explore how these laws affect the formation of charter schools. Consistent with state politics research in other policy areas (Erikson, Wright, & McIver, 1993; Hero & Tolbert, 1996; Ka & Teske, 2002; Mintrom, 2000), we show that state political and contextual factors help account for variation in state policy In our case this is the degree of flexibility, but not accountability, in state charter school laws. We explain this discrepancy in our discussion. Further, we show that the degree of flexibility and accountability, and political and contextual factors influence the number of charter schools that form in the states. Before turning to our empirical analysis, we provide some more general background on charter schools and the charter movement in the United States.

Overview of Charter Schools

The charter school idea goes back at least to the late 1980s. Minnesota enacted the first charter school law in 1991 (Nathan, 2002,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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