Six months ago, Washington State’s Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to thousands of students who had taken advantage of a new public charter school system that voters approved in 2012. Using a poorly defined state constitutional restriction on funding “non-common” schools from the state’s general fund, the court ruled that the state government may not fund these charter schools.
Fortunately, legislators have figured out a way around the ruling, and on a bipartisan basis voted to save Washington’s charter schools. The State Senate passed the bill on Thursday, and the Democratic governor is expected to sign it.
It circumvents the court’s decision by using state lottery money to fund charter schools instead of taking money from the state’s general fund. Charter schools would also be ineligible to receive funds from local levies.
This is a heartening development for the 1,200 children in the state’s first charter schools. And it bodes well for everyone who cares about improving public education.
Every state has a public education system, and the vast majority of K-12 students pass through it. The state has an interest in seeing through the expensive task of educating its future workforce and turning its youth into informed citizens. From that perspective, government is an appropriate mechanism for funding schools.
But there is no corresponding evidence that government bureaucracy is well-suited to running them. This is where the theory behind charter schools is grounded. Charters are government-funded, but may adopt curricula different from those at public school. You want a Montessori school? A Chinese or Spanish-language immersion school? A Classical curriculum? New hypermodern and experimental methods of education? There’s a charter school that does that.
Charters are typically approved by government panels that can just as easily shut them down. Their continued existence depends on their performing adequately, so taxpayers don’t have to fund failure year after year, as they often do in public school districts.
Washington, D.C., where public schools were long among the worst and most costly in America, has become a laboratory for charter schools. Today, 45 percent of public school students in D.C. attend charter schools. And when compared to the schools they compete against (the ones outside wealthy Ward Three), they tend to deliver superior results. The schools that don’t are unceremoniously shut down when they fail to improve.
Teachers’ unions, the ones that sued to shut down charter schools in Washington State, tend to oppose charters because their workforces are harder to unionize. Charter school teachers are allowed to join unions, but they usually don’t want to and cannot be forced to. Naturally, the personal freedom enrages the corrupt and sclerotic educational establishment that insists on the right to continue failing tens of millions of students, especially poorer black and Hispanic students. Unions dislike charters because their success often creates competition and accountability, both of which tend to expose incompetence.
So congratulations to Washington State politicians, both Republican and Democratic, who worked to rescue this innovative new educational option from the anachronistic laws that govern their state. Someday, one hopes, those laws can be changed. In the meantime, we wish the charter school students and educators the best as they move forward in providing good education to students.
