To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] William F. Buckley on charter schools
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:48:43 -0700
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.