Charter schools are essentially less regulated public schools, free for students and free from unions’ and districts’ hiring requirements as well as most curricular constraints. They offer a popular alternative path to families in low-income districts where flagging reform efforts do less good than intended.
It’s a controversial format, subject to abuse and encouraging of pedagogical experimentation. Crowded waitlists testify to their desirability as well as to the negative view many parents hold of standard public schools. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia have some form of legislation on the books to support charter schools. But Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Washington state could soon be jamming the brakes.
Meanwhile, the court of popular opinion may be turning against charters. In a recent monologue, our new overlord, John Oliver, relied on disturbing and mostly outdated data to decree that free market experimentation has no place in education. He sneered, “The problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids is that kids change faster than the market. And by the time it’s obvious the school is failing, futures may have been ruined.” Nick Gillespie, writing in Reason, took the comedian to task, “This is all clever, glib, and blessedly uninformed by research that shows increasing publicly funded choices for parentsincreases outcomes for students across the board. Holy hell, it turns out that education, a $620 billion industry, actually does respond to competitive pressures, just like most other activities.”
Charters siphon off public funding, the anti-charter camp contends, and they’re untested and unproven, and being unencumbered by frustrated old strictures, they’re ripe for corruption. When a charter fails its population, it’s dissolved—often with dark enthusiasm. But when a charter succeeds, it’s a model public schools are held up against. Of course Massachusetts public schools include the very best in the country, making their handful of struggling public schools about as irksome as the comparable success of the state’s dozen charters. The deep blue commonwealth historically punishes experimentation with a puritanical passion. Be it alleged paganistic play in those old North Shore woods, busing to integrate public schools, or Jack Gardner’s plucky wife Isabella Stewart—what’s new is deviant, perceived untrustworthy and protested or cast out entirely. Thus, opposition to a Bay State ballot-measure to fund a dozen new charters fits a familiar pattern.
In a 1978 lawsuit, Massachusetts students fought for equal protection, citing the immense inequality incumbent in school systems dependent on local taxes. The state’s single best school, and indeed the nation’s, is still Boston Latin, but its best public school district is in its wealthiest suburb, Weston. The students won, in 1993, and legislation supporting the formation of charter schools followed. This November, decades down the line from their inception, charters seek funding to expand. The teachers unions—joined by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’s sided with charters in the past—object that raising charters’ funding cap would effectively rob ordinary public schools and the ordinary families they serve, while those in the poorest district still pray for admission to charters.
Likewise, Washington state’s onetime embrace of charters comes under a new challenge. The state first allowed charter schools in 2012, but a court ruling last year amounted to their effective repeal—until the state’s Charter School Act passed in April, which would protect the nine embattled charters. Now a new lawsuit to overturn the Charter School Act again reveals the priorities of a political class removed from the interests of families whose kids they consign to comradely mediocrity. Charter school advocates are quick to dismiss the union agenda. But, as Frederick Hess pointed out in National Review, “romantic” interpretation Washington’s state constitution—its provision for “common schools”—may support an anti-charter interpretation of what constitutes a “common,” uniform public education.
Meanwhile, the standard is not common enough in Connecticut. Where the state’s poorest slums neighbor some of the nation’s wealthiest exurbs, parents complain of a profoundly unequal standard. A California-based advocacy group has backed a federal lawsuit, Martinez v. Governor Malloy, against the state on behalf three parents and a grandmother from Bridgeport and Hartford. Connecticut laws limiting charter schools are “anti-opportunity,” the case alleges, citing “inexcusable inequality” between public schools within miles of each other. Charter schools with long waiting lists and lotteries offer little hope to families afraid to send their children to poorly run public schools.
Nuances notwithstanding, these states’ stake a common ground. We might understand Oliver’s snipe: Charter schools make up a small fraction of state-funded schools and their variable fates can catch hopeful kids in the crosshairs of a conflict really about something bigger. A debate about government’s role in educating American children should not shake up their schooling. Oliver’s reductive complaint pulled up the problem charters present. It deserves measured debate, not ironic sneering, as it’s a philosophical battleground, a universal homefront, with a high stakes answer.
