WAMC RADIO COMMENTARY - 1-20-97 - CANDACE DE RUSSY, PH.D.
GIVING CHARTER SCHOOLS A CHANCE
Former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander once said that "the lack of school choice is the Berlin wall of domestic social policy." That wall is not exactly tumbling down, but it is very, very shaky.
One flourishing variety of school choice is the so-called charter school. In 1992 there was one lone charter school - in Minnesota. Last year, there were 480 across the nation.
Charter schools are public - that is, taxpayer-supported -schools. However, they are organized by teachers, parents, for-profit companies, colleges and other groups. As one headmaster of a charter schools says, some charters were even "started around kitchen tables."
How do charters work? To begin with, they are state-authorized. A school district then allocates the full tuition cost of a student who enrolls in a charter school. Students are selected at random among the pool of applicants.
Nearly all charter schools, by the way, have waiting lists. They appeal especially to economically poor students who have fared worst in ineffective public schools.
Charter schools make a compact - based on results - with their local school boards. If charters do not deliver acceptable student academic performance, their charters may by revoked.
But the most innovative feature of charter schools is their freedom from government mandates. The only mandates they should have to comply with relate to nondiscrimination, safety and health.
This is absolutely critical. The more such schools are freed from the usual morass of bureaucratic regulations, the more likely they are to succeed.
For example, at the apparently successful charter school of San Diego, teachers are not bound by the usual rules of teachers' unions. At this school, teachers have neither seniority nor tenure. Instead they are retained on the basis of how well their students perform.
What must be done to guarantee this precondition of charter-school success - that is, freedom from excessive government regulation? The crucial point here is that the state laws which set up the charters must contain exactly the right language. These laws, in other words, must explicitly spell out the freedom of charter schools to, yes, chart their own course.
Now some public-school unions and public-school bureaucrats adamantly oppose charter schools. Until charters came along, the only competition public schools faced was from relatively expensive private schools. Successful charters inject competition among public schools.
Moreover, many who oppose charters fear that they will open the way to even more heated competition - namely, school vouchers, or the issuance of school funds directly to students, not schools.
This fear of charters and other school-choice reforms is ironic, because such reforms will help save public schools. Why? Because giving parents more freedom to choose where and how to educate their children will set off a beneficial chain reaction in public schools. Poorly performing schools will be forced to raise standards so as to hold on to their students. Public schools will once again be credited with being run for the benefit of students and their families rather than a bureaucracy.
Is the charter-school movement "futuristic," as the director of the San Diego charter says? You bet. But it also sounds like plain common sense.