New Charter Schools in New York: Race and the Conservative Alliance.

This paper examines the role of local racial and ethnic groups and external organizations in creating specific types of charter schools in New York State. Prior work has shown that a combination of minority interests and conservative politics has helped the adoption of school choice policies at the state level. Other research has demonstrated that charter schools are often oriented to promoting local community identities and even specific racial and ethnic identities. This contradicts an historic public school mission—to create a cohesive national cultural identity—and also undermines the historic tendency toward larger, more bureaucratic, and more centrally controlled schools and school districts. This paper argues that the "tribal" character of charter schooling and racial group's reliance on external conservative sponsors are valid descriptions of New York charter schools, but that the specific character of charters is dependent on a complex play between local conditions and the global institutional models that provide organizational scripts for action. This interplay provides the potential foundation for a new institutional framework for public education and suggests how institutionalist theory might be revised to account for this possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]