It’s back to school time in the District, and that means charter school advocates are again clamoring for more money. As they see it, charters are relegated to a second-class status because they receive less funding than public schools even as their enrollment continues to swell. On the surface, they seem to have a point. Charter enrollment has grown tenfold since 2001 and they now serve 41 percent of students in the District.
But the hoax that charters offer a solution to the woes of public education is just that. Charter schools require a student’s family to opt-in. You must make the effort to get the paperwork, enter the admissions lotteries, find transportation etc. On the other hand, the traditional public school is the default option—where kids are sent if they or their parents take no action at all. This means many of the most at-risk children—with busy or neglectful parents, for instance—end up at these schools. When a traditional public school is functional, it provides quality education for everyone. When a charter is the only good option, some of the most disadvantaged children are put in a dead-end situation by no fault of their own.
It makes much more sense to give financial and legislative support to the default option—traditional public schools—rather than the one that requires high parental involvement and a big dose of luck in the admissions lottery to enroll. We should not expect young students to pull themselves out of a bad school and into a charter, and we should not require that a child be born with involved parents to receive a quality education. If we are truly the land of opportunity, we must provide exemplary schooling to everyone, and traditional public institutions are the only answer.
The charter movement clearly has some success stories, but at its base the upwelling of support for them is a cop-out, an admittance we consider our traditional public schools beyond repair and don’t care to fix them. In the District and across the country, we face a clear choice: We can either pawn off our children’s education to vaguely altruistic corporations who will treat our schools as businesses and deliver education on the cheap, or truly commit ourselves to building and financing a public education system that works for all. What we need today is a paradigm shift in education reform. Supporting and improving our traditional public schools must be the first priority for lawmakers if they value giving every child the shot at a good education, and that means the D.C. government must not divert more scarce funds to the inherently unequal model of charter schooling.
