The term alternative schooling has always referred to nontraditional public and private educational approaches available by choice to parents and students. These programs, ranging from actual schools to programs within schools to single classrooms, began to evolve during the late 1960s and grew from a few isolated innovations in local communities into an educational reform involving millions of students. By the year 2000 it was estimated that over 15 percent of the students enrolled in public education in the United States were attending a public school of choice.
Since the late 1500s there have been private schools, parochial schools, or home schooling alternatives for those who could afford them or whose beliefs dictated a particular approach to education. Yet until the latter part of the twentieth century, public education in the United States was characterized by an unusual uniformity. With the exception of vocational/technical schools and a few selective programs for at-risk or gifted and talented students, almost all school districts had traditionally assigned families to schools based on residence addresses and geographic boundaries. Since students were assigned to a particular school, public education worked to assure that all schools had uniform programs. By the mid-to late 1960s, this emphasis on public school uniformity began to change. Beginning with a few highly innovative experimental schools and dropout and continuation programs, alternative schooling emerged as a grassroots revolution, which has grown to include a variety of different types of educational options in the private and public sectors. These include religious and private not-for-profit schools, technological educational options, and thousands of distinctive public alternative, magnet, and charter schools. The concept of alternative schooling, which first emerged as a radical idea on the fringe of public education, evolved to a mainstream approach found in almost every community in the United States and increasingly throughout the world. This mosaic of distinctive educational programs is referred to as public schools of choice.
Alternative schools represent one of the most significant educational movements ever to occur in the United States. According to a 1999 study from the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, between 1993 and 1996 the number of students attending public schools of choice rose from 11 percent to 13 percent. PACE projected that the number of students attending a public school of choice would increase another 15 percent by 2000. Career-theme magnet schools, the most widely used type of educational option in public education, have likewise experienced dramatic growth. From 1991 to 1992 school districts across the United States operated 2,400 magnet schools and 3,200 magnet programs involving more than a million students. By 1996 the number of students attending magnet schools had grown to 1.5 million students, with over 120,000 students on waiting lists. In 2001 magnet schools were expected to enroll more than two million students in over 5,000 schools and programs. Charter schools also have experienced rapid growth, following the opening of the nation's first two schools in Minnesota in 1992, to an estimated 2,500 charters as of 2001, serving 1 to 2 percent of all public school students.
Two states in particular have experienced significant growth in alternative schooling within public education. In Minnesota, the numbers of students enrolled in some type of alternative schooling has grown from 4,000 students in 1990 to more than 112,000 students in the year 2000. In Arizona, as of 2000, there were 359 charter schools serving about fifty thousand students–about 6 percent of the states' 800,000 students.
National statistics regarding school choice often do not include the number of parents choosing non-public options (those choosing private schools, home schooling, participating in for-pay, online learning) or who are influenced in selecting their home residence by where their children will go to school. The number of K–12 home-schooled students grew from approximately 800,000 in 1990 to1.7 million in 1998; by 1999 it was estimated that there were approximately two million children and youth being home schooled. In 1993 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimated that 20 percent of the students in grades 3 to 12 were enrolled in public and private schools chosen by their parents. PACE estimated that the number would rise to 25 percent by the year 2000. In addition, 39 percent of the parents interviewed by NCES reported that the public school their children would attend influenced their choice of residence. Even more striking, they reported that 72 percent of parents earning more than $50,000 responded that they had first chosen some type of school of choice–private schools, public school optional programs, or public schools–and then selected their residence.
For a concept that has had such a revolutionary impact on public education, the idea of alternative schooling and public schools of choice is really quite simple. It involves little more than diversifying public education by creating distinctive educational programs designed to meet the needs and interests of specific groups of students and providing these programs to parents, students, and teachers through voluntary choice. More recently, as charter schools have developed, the concept of school choice has also come to mean the opportunity for an individual school to exchange many state and locally mandated rules, regulations, and requirements for contractually specified student performance outcomes.
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