Charter School Smackdown

The Supreme Court of Washington declares in 6-3 ruling, that charter schools are NOT public schools and are patently unconstitutional. Wasn’t even close. Charter schools, according to the courts, are something else. Whatever it is, don’t call them public schools.

For years, education law and finance scholars have warned that the legal status of charter schools is on shaky ground. In 2012, Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker asked, on his personal blog, “Charter Schools Are… [Public? Private? Neither? Both?].”

http://scholarship.law.umassd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=umlr

Will be interesting to see if this crushing of the charter school narrative survives the expected assault from the 1% billionaires, who fought hard to shove charter schools down the throats of the unwilling majority in the state of Washington.

Even the National Education Policy Center, in a joint effort by Western Michigan and the University of Colorado, has gotten in on this debate this year about the myths of charter schools. Stunning paper in this next link.

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/ttr-charterclaims-mmw.pdf

Baker notes, first, that charter schools differ from public schools, in most statutory law, because they have limited public access. Unlike public schools, charter schools “can define the number of enrollment slots they wish to make available … admit students only on an annual basis and do not have to take students mid-year, [and] set academic, behavior and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students.”

If Washington cuts the public funding lifeline of charter schools and forces them to be truly independent and self sustaining, then more power to them. But stop forcing the taxpayers to subsidize such an unwanted financial burden, when they have their own issues to worry about.

Co-existence and harmony is possible, if the involvement of money hadn’t gotten into the gears in various ways. Solutions are available, if we have administrations around the country willing to ignore the billionaire sponsors and do what is right for the children of America.

The original vision of charter schools, the book contends, was to provide “laboratory schools” to “experiment” with different approaches that could eventually be considered for adopting on a much larger scale. Two foundational tenets to these experimental schools, the authors maintain, were for teachers to have a stronger voice in determining the management of the school and for the student body to have higher degrees of economic and racial diversity than traditional public schools.

“The public policy rhetoric changed from an emphasis on how charters could best serve as laboratory partners to public schools to whether charters as a group are ‘better’ or ‘worse,’” the book argues. And “over time, the market metaphor came to replace the laboratory metaphor.”

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