Vantage point: Silver bullets
By:
CSBA President Jill Wynns
Published: May 1, 2012
My tenure as a school board member is precisely the same as the charter school law in California, both approaching 20 years. The law was intended to give school reformers and innovators needed opportunities to make significant changes in school structure and instructional practices. The legislative and regulatory system, school boards and districts were seen as barriers to the changes that teachers, parents and communities wanted to make to their schools. Private companies saw the law as an opportunity to privatize public schools and to remove governance responsibilities from democratically elected school boards.
Although charter schools are supposed to be educational innovators, in fact charter schools have programs much like publicly managed schools. The instructional practices they use have been developed by public schools, using public dollars. It is difficult to find any that actually need a charter to do what they do, although they save time and money not working on compliance tasks.
The real difference is that governance has been transferred to a private company. Some, apparently including political leaders of both parties, do not think that democratic governance is important. We are not among them. Our commitment to public accountability and regulation is absolute. When CSBA says that public schools are the foundation of American democracy, they are not only words. The work and dedication of school board members is the embodiment of democracy, not to be taken for granted or casually dismissed without any demonstrated evidence of positive effect.
That gets us to the essential question. Are charter schools actually doing better than publicly managed schools? There are volumes of studies comparing charters to public schools. Universities and think tanks mount lengthy seminars and symposia to debate the relative merits of one research methodology versus another. Various studies may show test scores a few points higher or lower for one or the other. I think that we can all agree that 20 years of practice and research has told us that charter schools generally do no worse and no better than publicly managed schools.
But, the promise of charter schools was that they would be dramatically better than regular public schools, proving that school boards and districts are standing in the way of student achievement. This was the contention of charter proponents and supporters. Risking democratic accountability was presented as a risk worth taking because we would see significant improvements. This would be the silver bullet for public education.
Since there have been no dramatic differences between public governance and private management, what can we really say about charters?
The lesson I think we should learn from 20 years of charter schools in California is that no schools need the current expensive and complex regulatory scheme. If freedom to innovate is good for charter schools and the results are essentially the same, it is also good for publicly managed schools. Give us a level playing field. We don’t need more privatized schools, we need fewer rules and regulations for public schools. Silver bullets can kill our most precious principles, maybe even our democracy itself.