October 2001

In 2000 Minnesota’s law creating a charter sector within public education was recognized by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and by the Ford Foundation as an important innovation in American government. The charter law was not a pedagogical innovation, creating a new kind of school, but an institutional innovation creating an opportunity for others to start and run a public school; to offer public education in the community.

With the recognition came $100,000 - to Minnesota, as to the nine other winners - to be used to tell the country about the innovation and to urge others to replicate it.

This presented an unusual problem. Minnesota’s charter law was enacted in 1991. By 2000 the idea of the state creating a charter sector had become widely known to those in education policy around the country, and legislatures in something like 35 states had by then replicated the law in some form. What, then, could Minnesota usefully do further to advance the national understanding of its innovation?