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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

August 17, 2004, 1:33 p.m.

Can You Read?

Charter schools vs. public schools: the real battle.

The New York Times treats as the topmost news item of the day a report that 
students at (most) charter schools are doing worse than students at (most) 
public schools. These are data put together on fourth grade students. The 
question asked was: How well are they reading?

We are told that the public school students are one half year ahead of the 
charter school students. This is certainly headline news, and what makes it 
a headline is that the findings are so unexpected. If the poll had 
established that students do better, learn more quickly how to read, at 
charter schools, that news would have got nowhere on the front page. Why? 
Because it would merely confirm what the reader would assume, or intuit 
from the basic facts.

A charter school operates outside the authority of the school board. If 
dissatisfied parents join forces and hire a lawyer to walk them through the 
bureaucratic paces, they can organize a charter school. The hiring of 
teachers and arrangement of the curriculum would be left to the organizing 
council, and lo! a charter school has been founded. There are about three 
thousand of these, 88,000 public schools, and the new federal program 
called No Child Left Behind anticipates a growth in the charter schools 
corresponding to the growth of the number of public schools that are shut 
down because they perform so poorly.

On the same day that this story broke, a Florida court narrowly (2-1) 
disallowed a voucher program that permits students to attend religious 
schools. To permit vouchers, said the court, flouts the provision of the 
Florida State Constitution forbidding state money to religious schools.

Now there are huge mountains and valleys of thought that distinguish 
between supporting a religion and granting a voucher to a student who uses 
it to attend a school in which religion is also taught. These are 
qualifications acknowledged by the Supreme Court, and the ruling in 
Tallahassee may not last till the next hurricane. Governor Jeb Bush has 
ordered an appeal, the school will proceed as before until that appeal is 
heard, and constitutional adjustments are always possible.

But the endless question dogs all Americans, which is: Many public schools 
are doing a bad job in educating American children; what can be done about 
it? Do we need to surrender to a constitutional vise that seeks a 
theological commitment to the separation of church and state binding enough 
to choke off any flow of state funds to schools that mention Adam and Eve?

The big headline on the matter of the charter schools doing less well than 
the public schools is obviously based on findings which are either 
aberrational or tendentious. If a charter school is organized and the 
superintending citizens who put it together are motivated by a desire for 
improved education, why should such a school do less well than a public 
school? It is possible that the students in the charter schools whose 
reading scores were compiled were especially retrograde, bringing average 
accomplishment down for the short term. If a charter school devised to 
perform better than the public school from which the students were 
withdrawn fails to meet its goal, it should cease to exist.

Or it can go private. The unending phenomenon in Washington, D.C., inviting 
indignation and frustration, is the private schools to which all 
congressmen send their children but which are not permitted to educate the 
children of lesser creatures because they can't pay the fees, lacking 
vouchers. They lack vouchers because of the hard fist of teachers unions, 
and the underlying fear of offending racial minorities, never mind that 
these minorities plead for the succor of better education.

The charter schools will handle such setbacks as yesterday's poll — there 
is no reason for the charter school to fail. But yesterday's judicial 
finding is sustained by a hard and superstitious prejudice against any 
religion in schools. That will take longer to cope with.

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley.asp

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