Obama Supports Charter Schools

The Washington Post could have been writing about Richmond when it said earlier this year that officials in D.C. "may well have come up with a way to stem the exodus of children from the troubled public schools: Just make it harder for popular charter schools to set up shop. A mean-spirited proposal to impose new restrictions on charter schools threatens to undo one of the few good-news stories in Washington education." Much the same has happened here in River City, where the school administration has fought an attempt to launch the state’s first elementary charter school, in the old Patrick Henry elementary building south of the James. On Tuesday night the School Board deadlocked on a contract for the Patrick Henry initiative – a contract that would have given the school none of the freedom a charter school ought to have, and more onerous reporting requirements than any other city school is obliged to meet.

Leaders of the Patrick Henry initiative evidently were willing to accept its terms. They’d probably crawl over broken glass, too, if that’s what it took to get permission to open the school’s doors. But that doesn’t make the contract a good one.

The entrenched opposition here to even a modest attempt at innovation underscores a point made by one of the panelists at the Ed Challenge for Change symposium in Denver, just prior to the Democratic National Convention: When the children’s agenda bumps up against the adults’ agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often."

DELAWARE’S legislature, for instance, recently passed a one-year moratorium on charter-school applications – the current 19 such schools evidently amounting to 19 too many for some folks up there. But that’s still 16 more charter schools than exist in Virginia, which has nine times as many residents as Delaware does. The Old Dominion’s temperamental aversion to change has left it far behind the rest of the country: According to Kara Hornung of the Center for Education Reform, there are now more than 4,200 charter schools nationwide.

Many of them are in Louisiana – although, as School Reform News noted in a recent edition, it took an act of God to bring about the development. New Orleans was a cesspool before Hurricane Katrina, a cauldron during the storm, and afterward has become an Erlenmeyer flask of educational experimentation. In a city where "low expectations were the norm" and students passed time "just watching movies," says one school principal, more than half the students (53 percent) now attend charter schools. Before Katrina only 2 percent did.

The jury is still out on how well those charters will serve their charges. But in some ways that is precisely the point: An educational landscape calcified by years – decades – of bureaucratic sclerosis is slowly seeing fresh approaches sprout up across the petrified forest. Some will fail. Others will succeed – sometimes spectacularly. Two KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) academies in New Orleans already have tripled math scores and more than doubled reading scores. And all charter schools "have the freedom to change, to get better," as New Orleans KIPP director Jonathan Bertsch explains.

Maybe that’s the real reason the forces of reaction in Richmond don’t want the Patrick Henry school to get off the ground: They’re not concerned that it might fail – they’re petrified that it might succeed. Back in May, School Board member Evette Wilson worried (in the words of a Times-Dispatch news story) "that by allowing this group to proceed, it would open the door for any other group that wants to create a school."

THE EDUCATIONAL establishment’s hostility to change has begun to wear on the nerves of those even in quarters that were once its wholly owned subsidiaries. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has shaken up the District’s schools by appointing a take-no-prisoners chancellor, Michelle Rhee. In Denver, Fenty joined Newark Mayor Corey Booker and former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer as they called on fellow Democrats to stand up to the teachers’ unions and encourage charter schools and school choice.

In a recent column for the Chicago Observer, former Times- Dispatch Op/Ed Page editor Bob Holland noted that "Democratic lawmakers in such states as Louisiana, Maryland, and New Jersey are advocating increased parental choice. Democratic governors in Arizona, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have signed legislation expanding existing choice programs or starting new ones."

And then there’s Barack Obama. Back in February, he sat down for an interview with The Politico, which asked him to "name some issues where you’ve been willing to stand up against your party." His reply: "I’ve consistently said, we need to support charter schools . . . I think that’s something we really have to pay attention to."

Now that’s change Richmond should believe in.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent – just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

– Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.

Originally published by Barton Hinkle.

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