Political Student

Written by Dave Chase | Posted on Sep 29

Education reform is sadly one of those things that every politician says they want to take on but have absolutely no political motivation to actual do so. Democrats are too afraid of Teachers Unions and the Republican approach resulted in No Child Left Behind, a true failure.

In fact, the only real success that we have seen across the country in education reform is in charter schools. Charter schools, nationwide, out preform their district schools in standardized tests and college acceptance rates. Despite these successes, most States still have caps or funding limits on charter schools.

There are typically two arguments used against charter schools. The first is that they do well because you have to choose to attend one and that naturally draws more active and engaged children, those who will do well no matter where they are. The second argument is that charter schools divert necessary funds from district schools, thus making it more difficult for those schools to function.

As to the first argument, Harvard recently completed a study in which they looked at the success of students who entered the lottery to get into their local charter schools. The tracked student test scores on standardized tests (MCAS and SATs) and found that the students who got into the charter school out preformed the students who did not get into the charter school. Since both groups took the active step of choosing to go to a charter school, this study eliminates the argument that charter school’s success is attributable only to their students.

Now, the diversion of funds from district schools to charter schools does have some merits. However, since charter schools operate on considerably smaller budgets and yet achieve considerably better results the question must be asked, why could district schools not achieve those results pre-charter schools, when they had even larger budgets?

Money is clearly not on only thing standing in the way of educational success.

Now the most vocal opponents of charter schools tend to be teacher unions, which should be a clue as to where we might look to find what is standing in the way of educational success. There is little questions why teacher unions oppose charter schools, charter schools demonstrate how schools can succeed without teachers unions.

It would be outrageous to blame our education woes entirely on teacher unions but with policies like teacher tenure, time based raises and mandatory work hour limits, it’s hard to not at least question the wisdom of charter schools (even if I get kicked out of the Democratic party for asking such a question).

Fortunately we finally have a few charter school advocates at the national level — President Obama and Education Secretary Arnie Duncan. In fact, the Obama Administration is such a supporter of charter schools that they wrote into the Stimulus Package a requirement of States to lift their caps on charter schools to receive federal stimulus money aimed a school improvements. The tacit has lifted the cap in many states and at least sparked the debate in many more.

Stay tuned for more on the debate in MA.