Why Tennessee needs charter schools
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
I don't agree with Van Hilleary about many things. Or Lamar Alexander, for that matter. I'm not impressed with the campaigns the two Republican blowhards are running for their respective offices—governor and U.S. Senate—and I think it will be too bad for the state of Tennessee and its citizens if either man gets elected.
But having said that, I can't help agreeing with both of them on one thing: charter schools. For a variety of political reasons, most of them connected to the influence of teachers' lobbies on the Democratic party, an issue that should be a natural rallying point for progressives and liberals has been ceded in Tennessee almost entirely to Republicans.
It is Gov. Don Sundquist, after all, who has been pushing for some form of charter school legislation for the past four years. And it is mostly Democrats, at the urging of the Tennessee Education Association, who have stood in its way.
A charter school bill has a chance of passing the Legislature this year. It was approved in the House last week and, at deadline time, was in the Senate. Given the sorry state of the current legislative session, it would be something for everyone in Nashville to write home about if they at least managed to enact this minor piece of educational reform.
I say "minor," because it's important to understand what charter schools are and are not. They are not a panacea, not a cure-all for the ills of public education, not a radical change of any sort—at least not at the beginning. If the current bill becomes law, the vast majority of Tennessee students, parents, and teachers will see very little change in their educational options over the next several years.
But if Tennessee joins the other 37 states that have passed charter school laws since 1991, it will create possibilities for future innovation and creativity in ways the current public school system simply does not allow.
I started covering education as a reporter in 1992, right when the charter school movement was beginning. The first school system I covered, a suburban district in upstate New York, did not have anything called a "charter school." But they did have two "schools of choice" at the elementary level, with plans to add middle and high schools. These schools were granted an unprecedented level of autonomy from the local school board in terms of devising their curricula, their approaches to instruction, and even their calendar and school day. Although their funding still came from the central office (at the same per-pupil rate as the rest of the district), they were governed by self-selecting boards of teachers, administrators and parents. Teachers interested in working at the schools applied voluntarily. And any student in the school system could apply to attend. They all had waiting lists.
In some ways, they were similar to the magnet programs in Knox County and many other places. But the difference came in the level of freedom for teachers, the level of involvement allowed and expected of parents, and the overall self-management. The school board set strict demographic guidelines for the schools—they had to at least reflect the overall racial and socioeconomic population of the entire district, and were weighted toward "at-risk" students. At the time I was there, the schools were too new to draw any statistical conclusions about their effectiveness. But their success on a more basic level was unmistakeable: to this day, I have been in few other schools, public or private, where the level of energy and enthusiasm among teachers, parents and students was so uniformly high.
This is one of the promises of charter schools: by giving parents and educators more input into the structure of the schools, and also by making people choose to go there either as a teacher or a student—by allowing choice at all—you can inspire devotion and creativity across the educational spectrum. This does not mean a lack of accountability—rather, it's the reverse. In states with charter schools, charters are typically granted (either by a local school board or the state Department of Education) for three to five years, at which time they can either be renewed or revoked depending on the performance of the school and the satisfaction levels of its parents and students. That makes charter schools potentially much more accountable than your average public school.
It's also important to note that charter schools are not the same as either vouchers or privatization. Vouchers are a fuzzy idea beloved by free marketeers who don't understand or care much about the complexities of education. And while some state charter school laws allow private for-profit groups to open charter schools, many others—including the proposed Tennessee law—do not. Considering the ongoing bad news about Chris Whittle's struggling Edison School project, that's a good thing. Charter schools at their best allow for the benefits of competition within a not-for-profit setting.
So why are teachers' groups and public school administrators so frequently opposed to charter schools? Well, they'll give you lots of reasons: the schools will take the "cream" of the public school population (not true—studies show that a preponderance of charter schools target inner-city and disadvantaged students); it's too risky to "experiment" on our children (as if the current public school system isn't itself a giant ongoing experiment); they're an excuse to invalidate teacher labor protections (again, not true—every charter school law in the country has been the result of extensive negotiations with teacher unions); and the favorite, they're "unproven" (no kidding—they've only been around for 11 years).
I hate to be cynical, especially since I have a lot of friends and family members who teach in both public and private schools, but the biggest reason for institutional resistance to charter schools appears to be simple turf protection. Charter schools by their nature are supposed to exist somewhat outside the current public education hierarchy. They are public schools, but they are not entirely part of any public school system. People who run public school systems don't tend to like that idea.
On one hand, I'm not sure why—I mean, if a great public school in, say, Mechanicsville can get teachers and students excited about education, who really cares if the principal answers to a board of parents and educators or to the superintendent's office on Gay Street? On the other hand, I've seen too much of the petty power playing and siege mentality that dominates most public school bureaucracies to be surprised when they put their self-interest ahead of education ideals.
It is certainly true that the current state fiscal crisis means a lot more for Tennessee education than the presence or absence of charter schools. Without reliable revenues, all the school reform in the world won't add up to anything. But looking ahead, to some (hopefully not too distant) day when the state can start thinking farther into the future than the next budget deficit, charter schools offer the possibility of new approaches for a public education system that desperately needs them. As Van Hilleary and Lamar Alexander prove, you don't have to understand much else to understand that.
May 30, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 22
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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