Just as waves of parents across the country are rightly demanding more choice and control over K-12 education, the Biden administration is making yet another move to stomp out school options that unions don’t control.
In doing so, Joe Biden is crushing children’s dreams.
New rules proposed stealthily by the Department of Education, with a far shorter-than-usual window for public comment, would make it harder to open new charter schools. It could also force the closure of many existing ones. The administration says the rules are designed to encourage greater accountability and “equity,” but they probably would deter rather than encourage both goals.
Charter schools are publicly funded but operated independently of the public school bureaucracy, usually with tremendous flexibility in educational approaches. While some charter schools fail, of course, decades of research show that charter schools, on average, produce markedly higher levels of student achievement than do regular public schools.
Naturally, the public school bureaucracy and unions hate what they cannot control, so they strenuously oppose charters. Alas, where the bureaucracy and unions do have power is in the ascendant wing of the national Democratic Party, which once was quite open to charter schools but, out of fealty to the unions, has grown hostile, even as positive charter results keep rolling in.
Biden’s proposed new rules would hinder charters in numerous ways. For example, they would put stringent new requirements on a federal grant program for charter startups that, among other effects, would make it harder to found such schools in inner cities with declining populations and poor-performing public schools — precisely, of course, where charters can be most usefully established. One charter advocate, Michael Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called it “a brutal attack on charters. It would stop the charter movement in its tracks.”
Another rule requiring “diversity” of staff could result in superb white teachers becoming ineligible for jobs where they could do the most good. Another rule would require charters to “collaborate” with nearby public schools — the very schools whose failures the charters are trying to help children overcome.
The proposed rules particularly target for-profit enterprises that contract with charter schools, imposing (among other things) comprehensive reporting requirements that will burden charters with gobs of paperwork. Some traditional public schools contract with the same for-profit providers, but they will not be forced into this same needless reporting regimen.
As Robert Maranto, the editor of the Journal of School Choice, wrote in the March 28 New York Post, “Regulations reduce the numbers of charters started by educators of color and disproportionately shutter schools that serve students of color.” In a sharp contradiction of Biden’s claims that limitations on charter schools would improve racial and economic equity, Democratic former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana wrote in Education Week in 2015 that New Orleans’s experience with charter schools, which became the norm in that city after Hurricane Katrina, shows they vastly improve equity.
Landrieu told the Washington Examiner this week that she is baffled by the administration’s proposals and strongly opposes them as harmful to nonwhite students.
“For an administration that says it wants to expand opportunity for poor African American and other minority children, why would it want to cut off an avenue that has been absolutely effective in doing so?” she asked. “Public charter schools have broad support from the communities they serve and growing support among the civil rights community because they realize in many instances — not all, but many — traditional public schools have failed children in black, brown, and poor districts. Those are just the facts. There are many Democrats who are strong supporters of public charters because we have seen them change the life chances and life trajectory of children who were left behind and marginalized by the traditional public school system.”
Landrieu is correct. The administration is undermining one of the few remaining policy areas in which Republicans and Democrats have worked together constructively for the common good. These proposed changes, which are being rammed through with little chance for public input, would be immensely counterproductive. Children of all races and incomes deserve the options afforded them by charter schools, and these proposed rules flunk that test.
