Education is the second largest U.S. industry, and female employees outnumber male employees by more than three to one. Since there are more career opportunities today than ever before, ensuring the teaching profession attracts talented women is an important public policy concern. However, since 1983, when A Nation at Risk, a landmark assessment of U.S. education, concluded that the “professional working life of teachers is on the whole unacceptable,” little has changed despite numerous state and national efforts. A fundamental shortcoming of those efforts is that they treat teachers as objects of change, not agents of change. In fact, educators are driving emerging reforms by starting schools where teachers want to work and parents want their children to learn.

Until recently, private schools were the only alternative to the traditional public-school system. Overall, private-school teachers are nearly twice as satisfied as public-school teachers with their working conditions. In the 1970s and 1980s, educators began advocating “chartered schools” or public schools that would abide by the same accountability and admissions requirements as district schools but would be run by teachers, have distinct educational missions, and serve general or targeted student populations. The first charter school opened in 1991, and today some 4,000 charter schools are educating nearly 1.2 million students. Although charter schools represent about three percent of all American schools, charter schools create an instructive microcosm of a diversified educational system and show how that system might benefit teachers and students.

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