ABSTRACTTHE ORIGINATION OF MICHIGAN'S CHARTER SCHOOL POLICY:AN HISTORICAL ANALYSISByJames N. GoennerIn 1993, Michigan Governor John Engler called the bluff of a political rival, which resulted in the nearly overnight elimination of Michigan's school funding system and created an opportunity for him to advance his vision for broader educational reform. This study illustrates how Engler functioned as a public policy entrepreneur to take advantage of this window of opportunity in order to advance his vision for a competitive educational marketplace. The idea of using choice and competition to create an educational marketplace had been commonly associated with attempts to privatize public education through vouchers. This posed a seemingly impossible hurdle for Engler, as Michigan's Constitution has a strict prohibition preventing public funds from being used by non-public schools. Engler was an avid reader and was always searching for new ideas. So when charter schools began to emerge on the educational landscape as a way to withdraw the exclusive control schools districts held over the provision of public education and establish new public schools that could provide choice and competition to the extant system, Engler was intrigued. Applying Schneider, Teske & Mintrom's (1995) theory of public policy entrepreneurs, the study shows how Engler performed the three essential functions that all entrepreneurs undertake to accomplish their goals in order to originate Michigan's charter school policy. Through elite interviews, the study uses the words of Engler and his allies to examine what they intended to accomplish and how they went about accomplishing their intentions and overcoming obstacles. The study also examines how Engler's actions as a policy entrepreneur relate to more mainstream theories of policy change like incrementalism (Lindblom, 1968), policy streams (Kingdon, 1995), institutionalism (March & Olsen, 1989), punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993), and advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, 1988). The study concludes by asking Engler and his allies to look back and assess if the charter school policy they helped originate over 15 years earlier is accomplishing what they intended and fulfilling their expectations, in light of Cohen (1982) and Elmore's (1980b) notion that political leaders often become frustrated and fail in their attempts to change public education.
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