One common argument against charter schools is that some states allow for-profit businesses to operate schools that don’t always succeed by every measure. As a result, businesses sometimes profit from failing students. The false implication is that public schools don’t do the same.
Perhaps “profit” isn’t the right word to describe what public school districts generate, but it’s applicable to the administrators and teachers who fail to give students a quality education but escape accountability for not doing their jobs. They still get paid even though the students they supposedly serve learn little under their watch.
Most teachers and administrators do a fine job of educating students. This criticism isn’t aimed at them. It’s aimed at the very worst school employees, who are so bad they endanger students’ futures.
When public schools fail, they often linger on in perpetuity, going unreformed and escaping closure. When charter schools fail, they close their doors.
There is legitimate debate over what defines failure for a charter school, whether it be too few students to ensure viable funding or some sort of test result. To be sure, parents should not send their children to a charter school with, say, a 1.3 percent graduation rate. But equally bad public schools, whether by standards of safety, academics or extracurriculars, stay open.
Nearly every state has horror stories of bad teachers who just can’t be fired because their laws make it so there’s no legal grounds for dismissal.
In Queens, N.Y., one public school teacher was not fired for physically abusing his first grade students. Instead, he was sent to anger management, fined $2,500 and allowed to teach first grade again. When parents found out, the school was publicly shamed into removing him from the classroom. Because of tenure laws, the school still couldn’t fire him, so he was placed on “administrative duty.”
He was still paid, but not for doing his job. Wouldn’t you call that profiting from failure?
That’s only one example, but the problem is prevalent enough that seven families sued the state of New York to overturn the state’s teacher tenure laws. Their case has been ongoing since it was filed in July 2014. It was inspired by Vergara v. California, a case in which the state’s tenure, dismissal and layoff statutes were ruled to be in violation of the state constitution’s equal protection clause.
In a “failing” charter school, families can simply switch their children to another school, possibly back to their local public school. Without school choice, families assigned to a failing local school have few options: They could send students to private school or move into a better public school area. If they don’t have the means to do either of these, then they’re stuck.
Not every school of choice will be perfect, but it is inevitable that some schools of all forms will fail. It’s better to allow families to make a choice from among many schools than to keep them stuck in one failing public school.
