Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 5, 1994 TAG: 9412060054
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They commendably would lend more bite to academic standards, support the spread of instructional technology, and sustain targeted efforts for at-risk children in kindergarten through third grade. They also include a few gestures having more to do with politics than with learning - such as requiring formal parental permission for sex education.
In its centerpiece, though - a proposal to allow alternative public, or "charter," schools - the commission has grasped onto an excellent idea with potentially far-reaching implications. State lawmakers and other Virginians should embrace it too, albeit with careful attention to details in the implementation.
Under the commission's proposal, teachers, parents or other groups (including existing public schools) could apply to charter new schools that would be free of most state rules, and free to experiment with administration, curriculum, teaching methods and mission. Public funding would follow each student enrolled, as it does with regular public schools.
These charter schools would be held accountable in two ways. Formally, they would sign performance contracts promising specific results. Informally, since parents would enjoy a choice of where to send their children, the schools would have to offer an alternative sufficiently attractive to stay in business. (They'd also have to be able to attract teachers.)
The concept may seem less radical in the Roanoke Valley, which has some experience with public-school choice and magnet schools. But its promise is large, and its merits many.
Charter schools would trade regulation for results, bureaucracy for accountability. They could encourage educational diversity and innovation, by empowering teachers and parents who think they know a better way.
Crucially, they also could help stimulate traditional public schools to become more entrepreneurial, to adapt more quickly, to emulate successful reform models, and to pay closer attention to educational outcomes.
They could do all this, moreover, without sacrificing commitment to public schooling. Done right, they would constitute an expansion of public-school choice, not a voucher system for private education. (Charter schools, for instance, should not be allowed to charge tuition, discriminate in admissions or betray even a hint of sectarianism.) While vouchers give incentives to abandon the public system, charter schools give incentives to strengthen it.
Much will depend on how the idea is implemented. For example, the state should find a way to avoid granting local school boards a monopoly on approving new charters. School boards should have that power, but so should some other independent agency, such as a state charters board.
Charter schools, after all, are needed in part because school divisions often are tied closely to the status quo. Incentives for competition, innovation and accountability don't flourish naturally in a system where students are required by law to attend, per-pupil funding is guaranteed, regulations proliferate, and employees lobby as much for job security as for institutional reform.
Gov. Allen's commission is to be commended for championing the charter-school concept. Rapidly gaining converts in other states, it could prove an instructive foray into, for want of a better term, outcomes-based education.
by CNB