THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 3, 1995 TAG: 9502030052
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Earlier this week, the House Education Committee of the General Assembly killed Gov. George Allen's proposal to permit charter schools. That's unfortunate. The concept is worth exploring and should be resurrected.
The idea is to permit interested parties - parents, teachers, administrators - to create new schools that would be held accountable for their performance. After reviewing plans, local school boards would have the power to issue five-year charters and to renew them if the schools meet their goals. The schools would be state-funded public schools but freed from bureaucratic rules and restraints that impede innovation.
It can be argued that such impediments should be removed from all schools. But political realities make that unlikely. Charter schools allow alternatives to be tested that other schools can then adopt.
Unfortunately, proponents of charter schools often oversell them. Studies have shown that students in charter schools and schools of choice are less likely to drop out. Such schools perform at least as well as public schools, often at less cost. But charter schools are no panacea, and imagining all schools can get similar results is fanciful.
To see the flaw in such reasoning, it is only necessary to ask who chooses schools of choice, charter schools or private schools. The answer: children of parents who believe deeply in education and are anxious for their children to succeed. These students are motivated to perform by family encouragement and peer pressure. Parents who have sought out an alternative school (and who, often, are willing to pay for it) expect a lot from such schools and are willing volunteers and zealous monitors of progress.
Under such circumstances, is it really a surprise that few drop out from alternative schools, that classes aren't disrupted and that students hit the books and succeed? In fact, alternative schools are a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those educated at them are preselected for success by the very fact of their choosing to enroll. Teachers, administrators, parents and students are all highly motivated. The result is a happy synergy that adds up to superior performance.
Schools that create such excitement ought to be available and encouraged. But even if the General Assembly relents and passes charter-school legislation, it won't solve the really vexing problem of school performance. That is, not how to get those bent on success to succeed, but how to motivate the unmotivated. At-risk students are precisely those who don't care about school and whose parents don't care about schools.
Charter schools may help to make good students better. That's a worthy goal. But they're unlikely to turn dismal students from families that don't value education into enthusiastic learners, if only because the apathetic will not take advantage of charter schools even if they are offered. In short, charter schools are a partial answer, but not the whole answer. by CNB