Find The Courage For Charter Schools
Leaders in the Washington state Legislature say they’ll take another run at authorizing charter schools. Good.
The charter-school initiative voters defeated last fall had fatal flaws. It lacked the central safeguard - provisions for a contract (or “charter”) to require certain levels of academic attainment and closure of the school if the levels aren’t reached.
Elsewhere around the nation, better-written charter school laws are releasing torrents of educational innovation.
Significantly, some of the most popular charter school efforts aren’t in the suburbs, they’re in the nation’s troubled inner-city neighborhoods where both parents and teachers long for educational alternatives.
Some charter schools specialize in re-engaging dropouts. Some focus on students of color. Some make intense use of computers.
Many emphasize the “basics” and the discipline the public clearly wants. Some offer vocational internships. Some emphasize the arts.
In its essence this approach, under way in more than 25 states, is a rainbow of innovation and neighborhood involvement - the very things that bureaucratic, centralized approaches to reform have failed to deliver.
Does Washington state have the courage to give this a try? What do we have to lose - other than mediocrity and a worrisome spread of levy and bond issue failures?
Charter schools are public schools. They don’t siphon money from the public system because they’re part of it - though their neighborhood governing boards are independent of the usual bureaucracy.
Charter schools receive public funds only if parents examine their program, like it and enroll their kids.
Experience around the country indicates a charter-school law should begin on a pilot basis and provide for auditing of finances and for charters with clear yardsticks for academic performance. And, a law must offer significant relief from state regulations, administrative bureaucracies and union interference.
Harold Hochstatter, chair of the Senate Education Committee and a key charter-school supporter, notes that the capital’s political power games strangled a legislative committee assigned in 1993 to deregulate all local schools.
Charter schools empower local parents and local teachers to start with a clean slate and do what seems best for local children. That’s risky. That’s why accountability is key. Yet Sen. Tom Patterson, a charter-school advocate from Arizona, argues that “It’s important to allow for failure, it really is. Public schools never fail. They just keep graduating kids that can’t read or write.”
Bring on the reform.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster For the editorial board