NYT Editorial: Reining in Charter Schools

How very nice to see the editorial board of the NYT singing one of our favorite songs! In today's paper they come down hard on the need for greater oversight and controls on charter schools.

Reining in Charter Schools:

The charter school movement began with the tantalizing promise that independently operated schools would outperform their traditional counterparts — if they could only be exempted from state regulations while receiving public money. It hasn't quite worked out that way. With charter laws now on the books in about 40 states and thousands of schools up and running, the problem has turned out to be too little state oversight, not too much.

Even states with disastrously low-performing charter systems can point to a handful of outstanding schools. But several studies have shown that on the whole, charter schools perform no better than other public schools. Beyond that, some states have opened so many charter programs so quickly that they can barely count them, let alone monitor student performance. Where charters have clearly failed, the states often lack the political will — or even a process — for closing them down. …

So far, the national experience with charter schools shows that they are not a magical solution to the achievement problem. The only way to improve public schooling is to provide well-trained teachers and orderly schools, and to monitor them to make sure that the students are actually learning. To salvage the charter movement, the states will need to abandon the strategy, now discredited, that consists largely of giving public money to what are basically private schools and then looking the other way.

I totally agree that more controls are necessary. But doesn't that just beg the question, if charters are subject to rigorous controls, what's the point?

I contend that charters, by their very nature, are a Faustian bargain. In order to give a charter operator enough freedom to innovate, you have to accept greater risk of fraud and failure. So if one concludes that price is too steep, and that more regulation is required, then why have charters at all?