ABSTRACT
Charter schools are the hottest reform of the 1990s. The rise of charter schools to the top of the educational reform agenda has been spectacular. Barely five years old, the charter school movement has its own organization, the National Association of Charter Schools, its own newsletter, the Charter School Chronicle, and even a fledgling scholarly journal, the American Journal of Charter Schools. Child-, parent-, and teacher-centered reformers support charter schools because they are interested in expanding public school options and providing the sort of creative tension they believe will help improve all schools. Charter schools, like private school vouchers and for-profit schools, are built on the market-inspired illusion that our society can be held together solely by the selfish pursuit of our individual purposes. The charter school movement represents a radical rejection not only of the possibility of the common school but also of common purposes outside the school.
