OPINION:
Every now and then, the District gets something right. Washington now ranks in the top three — below only Florida and Arizona — when it comes to having laws friendly to charter schools, according to a scorecard released last week by the Center for Education Reform.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees this as good news. The D.C. bureaucracy is already scheming to reverse the progress the District has made in providing autonomy to the publicly funded alternative to the traditional school system.
Charter schools bypass the usual red tape so local educators can reach the next generation using creative methods. That provides a real choice for parents unsatisfied with the one-size-fits-all approach one usually finds in public education. Nationwide, moms and dads have been so enthusiastic about having options that 8,000 charters have popped up to meet the demand.
Of course, private schools have always been around, but low-income parents aren’t always able to afford the tuition. Even if they could, they might not be able to get past the waitlist one finds at the best private schools in the city.
In the District, 46,400 students are enrolled in charter schools — just under half of the city’s K-12 population. This is possible only because the District, unlike many states, places no artificial limit on the number of charters. As happens in other jurisdictions that are doing things right, charter schools here receive the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, ensuring that neither has an unfair advantage.
This set up real competition, which forced the D.C. public school system to respond by introducing a few elements of flexibility. The system had no choice but to up its game if it was to have any hope of keeping students. Thus, no matter which side one chooses, the big winners have been D.C. children and their parents.
Unfortunately, that success has also created enemies of the charter school experiment. In an interview with The Washington Times, Jeanne Allen, Center for Education Reform founder, explained that the District’s deputy mayor for education, Paul Kihn, wants to employ his creativity in finding ways to prevent parents from taking their kids out of traditional public schools.
Mr. Kihn last year released a “boundary study” to promote the policies that would limit options available to parents. “A ‘boundary’ means we’ll cut off your ability to enroll,” Ms. Allen said.
Bureaucrats can’t help themselves, as their instinct is to micromanage the way schools are run. That impulse is what created the failed public schools that were common in the District before Congress pushed the city to overhaul its laws.
That overhaul largely insulated charter schools from D.C. politics so that people stood up to create a charter school simply to do something good for their community, offering an alternative to the dangerous public schools that were the only affordable option at the time.
“You can’t have charters that meet local needs without independence,” Ms. Allen said.
Many states still haven’t learned this lesson. In fact, Virginia is only one of three states to merit a failing grade on the charter school scorecard. That’s something Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a strong advocate of education reform, needs to address. Fortunately, he need only look across the Potomac for a blueprint on how to do it right.
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