Charter challenge

It doesn't take much digging to see North Carolina's dysfunction in the area of charter school policy. Caught in the crossfire of partisan politics, the kernel of a good idea has languished between free-market extremists who seem eager to dismantle public education altogether, and left-leaning politicians who fear that any crack in the dam will unleash a torrent of angry teachers. Both sides should reset their priorities.

If you study the literature on charter school performance versus traditional public school performance, you can find almost any set of facts to support whatever biases you bring to the party. That said, it's possible to boil it all down to three simple statements.

• Some traditional public schools are great, some suck.
• Some charter schools are great, some suck.
• Teachers don't get paid enough.

In North Carolina, the program of charter schools is administered by the Office of Charter Schools, which is housed in the Finance and Business Services arm of the Department of Public Instruction (pdf). That position in the administrative hierarchy is the first hint that we're dealing with a sub-optimized initiative. Because charters are isolated organizationally from core academic services, it's hard to imagine that our school systems are aggressively taking advantage of opportunities for value capture, knowledge transfer and innovation. When any organization is assigned to finance for functional leadership, it's guaranteed to show up as an expense instead of an investment in the eyes of policy makers. Which might explain a common attitude about charters among some in the education establishment: a drain on "real" schools and a threat to teacher security.

A quick review of the Office of Charter Schools website shows an organization that goes to great pains to describe a charter school as just another kind of public school.

Charter schools provide parents a choice in the education of their children -- and it is a public choice. Public tax dollars are the primary funding sources for charter schools. Local, state, and federal dollars follow the child to a charter school. The schools have open enrollment with no discrimination, no religious associations, and no tuition.

But as Terry Stoops at the John Locke Foundation points out, that similarity stops at the line where accountability for performance kicks in. It pains me to say Stoops is correct on this issue, especially since he can't manage to keep sarcasm out of his reporting, but the truth is, he has a point. Charter schools and traditional public schools should be assessed with the same principles of accountability for performance.

To cut to the chase, I believe progressives and liberals are on the wrong side of the charter school debate. Rather than resisting the opportunity for innovation that comes with small schools, we should have been championing them all along. Specifically, we should be proponents of policies that encourage the education establishment itself to drive innovation by creating a thriving network of small schools all across the state. We should be encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit of our best teachers and administrators, inviting them to start new schools with the full support and backing of the Department of Public Instruction, as well as state and local school boards.

Instead of pouring resources into a growing base of huge public school facilities costing hundreds of millions of dollars to construct, and hundreds of thousands to maintain, let's shift dollars to teacher salaries so we can attract more of the best talent available ... and then cut them loose to innovate and excel. Not outside the education establishment, but as a new front inside the establishment, working in real partnership with parents, administrators, policy makers and families.

That could mean opening schools in vacant downtown stores, office buildings, strip malls, apartment complexes and more ... integrating students back into the communities where their parents live and work. You might think that's crazy, but it's not. My daughter attended high school on in a three room building with no gym, no cafeteria, no auditorium, and a total of 30 students in all four grades. It was a private school, but could just as easily have been a charter. (Her school was not willing to go along with standardized testing and a standardized curriculum, which is probably something that should be examined if we're serious about innovation.)

Innovation and experimentation with fresh, new thinking about charter schools appears to be on President Obama's agenda as well. His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, was featured in the New Yorker this week (subscription required), and he is evidently working through the same issues:

In the fight over education in America today, there are, roughly speaking, two major camps: free-market reformers, who believe that competition, choice, and incentives must have greater play in education; and liberal traditionalists who rally around teachers’ unions and education schools. Obama’s choice of Duncan was widely received as a compromise. His appointment was a loss for the unions. Republicans approve of Duncan’s commitment to market-based reforms. Duncan must contend with critics on the right who don’t accept the federal government’s active role in education, and ones on the left who see him as a neoliberal enforcer, exploiting Obama’s Democratic bona fides to impose the free-market reform agenda on the unions.

Finally, Jim Hunt last week has some simple advice on the matter, reported by Jack Betts in Charlotte.

He's all for lifting the statutory cap on charter schools. The number is capped at 100, and Hunt thinks that artificial cap limits the educational innovation that charters can bring about. It's not that he wants to eliminate the cap altogether, but he believes the experience of successful charters such as the Kipp Charlotte charter school proves the point. Hunt isn't sure how high the cap ought to be. "I don't know how much, but make sure they are performing" and when they don't, recapture the charter and give it to a school that can produce results.

This should not be a debate about having a cap or not having a cap. The real issue is how we can jump-start innovation in public education in a way that rewards great teaching and fosters more learning. Instead of fighting against the potential of entrepreneurial energy in the Department of Public Instruction, progressives should be demanding that the educational establishment step up and take the lead in spawning a new generation of charters, led and nurtured by the best professional educators money can buy.