Charter schools are the R & D laboratories of our public education system. Each one is unique, exploring different solutions for a different group of students. Some charter schools perform exceptionally well and have long waiting lists. Other charter schools have struggled. And when it becomes clear that an experiment isn’t working, we shut it down and try something else.
The whole purpose of having R & D labs is to discover new and better ways to do things. And when it comes to educating our children, we have a moral obligation to our children to take the solutions we are discovering in our charter schools and cross-pollinate them into our neighborhood schools so that every child can benefit from what we are learning.
I was disappointed to read in a recent Deseret News op-ed the leader of the UEA continues to spread so much misinformation and resentment toward charter schools (“Data do not support expansion of Utah charter schools,” Aug. 20). Apparently her interests have blinded her to the beneficial discoveries that are occurring within our successful charter schools. But in reality, ignoring those advancements is the biggest betrayal of our children and taxpayers.
Fortunately, parents are not blind to the good things that are happening in our charter schools. Since the first eight charter schools opened with 390 students in 1999, charter school enrollment has increased every year. Since then, the smallest annual growth in actual charter school enrollment was 8 percent, and that still represented an annual increase of 4,099 students. Last year, charter school enrollment increased 12 percent, or 6,535 students over the previous year’s charter school enrollment.
In total, more than 10 percent of Utah children have voluntarily chosen to receive their education in a charter school. No one is assigned to attend a charter school; charter schools are not given boundaries. The decision to leave a neighborhood school and attend a charter school is often very difficult. And the only reason for a family to stay at a charter school is because they are getting a great education.
Leave it to the head of the teachers’ union to tell us why so many parents in Utah are wrong. Of course she points to an overly broad, out-of-state statistical analysis to suggest these parents don’t know what they are doing. But a recent local study appropriately explains the phenomenal growth. Instead of looking at statewide averages, this study out of the University of Utah compared individual charter school performance to the closest neighborhood schools. It found that charters consistently outperformed the surrounding schools. Additionally, the study found that the performance of those surrounding schools slowly improved after the charter school opened.
Not surprisingly, many of our best charter schools are created by certified teachers, frustrated with the stifling bureaucracy of the traditional system. In a charter school, the principal of a school has control over every aspect of the school, the budget, the curriculum and the employees (perhaps this is the fundamental concern of the UEA). In neighborhood schools, the principal has little to no authority to make any meaningful decisions on behalf of the students in that school.
I would suggest that this concept of school-level control might be the most important discovery we could cross-pollinate from our charter schools into our neighborhood schools, but it might also be the biggest perceived threat to the teachers’ union.
For good or bad, our public education system is controlled by adults whose financial interests are in constant competition with the interests of our children. What’s most troubling is that many of them are offended if you even suggest that they may have a conflict. I’m not saying we should ignore their input; after all, they are the experts. But I am suggesting that embracing their viewpoint without any consideration of their personal financial interests is dangerous for our children — like the suggestion that we should stop looking for better ways to teach our children in new charter schools.
Howard M. Headlee is chairman of the state charter school board.