The Charter Boom

Charter schools are the Rodney Dangerfields of American public education: They get no respect. Just look at the recent debacle in Detroit, where the local teachers union worked over a craven mayor and governor until they got a local businessman to rescind his offer to donate $200 million toward the opening of 15 charter schools.

The good news is that as badly as Michigan has fumbled the ball here, at a national level this setback is looking more and more like an outlier. Notwithstanding the ongoing attempt by teachers unions and their kept politicians to strangle charters in their cribs, somehow they keep popping up.

Look at New York City -- the Kremlin of unionized educational bureaucracy -- where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein just announced plans to use private donations to open 50 new charters. Even the head of the teachers union said that though she'd rather see the money go to the district's regular public schools, she wouldn't mind running one of these charters herself. The Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability hailed these developments as acknowledgment that charters are the "new face" of public education.

Over on the other coast, meanwhile, the replacement of a Democratic governor completely beholden to the teachers unions with pro-charter Arnold Schwarzenegger has encouraged reformers to declare a goal of adding 1,000 new charters to the 471 the state already has. Caprice Young, CEO of the newly re-energized California Charter Schools Association, says charters "offer the best path to the meaningful reform of public education." Ms. Young speaks from experience: Until recently she was president of the Los Angeles school board and so knows how hard it is to try to reform within the system.

Even in the most blighted urban public school districts charters are breaking through an otherwise unresponsive political monopoly. In Washington, D.C., the current drive to put vouchers into the hands of desperate D.C. parents wouldn't be conceivable before the path blazed by charters. According to the Center for Education Reform, charters now serve about 15% of D.C. schoolchildren and have only whetted the appetite of our national capital's mostly black and Latino families for more choice.

Remember, when it comes to charters we're not talking about private schools. We're talking about a new model of public school -- one that injects some badly needed competition into the system. In their new book "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning," Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom note that it is "no accident" that almost all the good public schools they find are charters, because only charters are free from the traditional constraints (and politics) that undermine regular public schools. They further conclude that the scandalous racial gap in education performance will not be closed without more public schools following this model.

The unbridled hostility toward this promising new model for new public schools from the beneficiaries of the rotten status quo -- school boards, teachers unions and central bureaucracies -- should remind us that their opposition isn't limited to vouchers. It's to anything that would hold them accountable.

Updated November 3, 2003