E-mail Story
Print Friendly Front Page 
opinion guest_columns
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Charters N.M.'s Only Reform
By Doug Turner
CEO of DW Turner Inc.
It's been a tough summer for kids, school choice and New Mexico's prospects for a brighter future.
The Legislative Finance Committee recently drew a bead on public charter schools, declaring them "no better" than the usual bastions of inefficiency such as APS.
Worse, the state's behemoth school district bureaucracy was the host of a gubernatorial candidate forum on education. Between the two events, I fear the inmates are already angling to be in charge of the educational asylum going into 2011 and beyond.
Some folks tired of the status quo in education are looking to February school board elections. But these are, unfortunately, low turnout affairs typically dominated by those with an interest in more of the same.
Meanwhile, the LFC report ignores entirely parental satisfaction with charter schools and why they are choosing to send their kids to them.
The fact is, 14,000 families whose kids were not a good fit for their regular public school have found traction and success in the charters, and waiting lists are nearly universal among the 81 current schools.
The LFC recommends a cap on charters. But the right way to determine schools' destinies should simply be their academic results — graduation rates over time, scores on standardized tests, acceptance rates to college. All are easy measures for each public charter school as they should be for traditional public schools.
Schools that consistently fail these measures should be taken over by new management or closed altogether.
Before closing however, the school should receive specific intervention and help to turn things around. After that, a state statute with standard protocols for closure should be in place and utilized.
Other facets of the LFC report are also misleading. To say that charters receive more in state funding fails to control for the fact that most charters are high schools. The reality is that charters get $9,240 per student, while districts otherwise get $10,149 for each student.
It is also a mistake to compare performance with district feeder schools, since charters have an open enrollment policy and take in students from across cluster lines.
A 2010 Stanford University CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes) study shows that New Mexico charters are improving. The average age of a charter in the state is just 5 years, so you should expect the improvements to continue as well.
Regular monopoly public schools and districts, by contrast, have generally been around long enough to have already gotten the bugs out.
All too often they start out with a beautiful shiny new facility and then proceed to implode slowly under the weight of their own bureaucracies. Charters, meanwhile, get their start having to 'make due' with whatever empty public facility they can find.
At this point, a robust competition for good results between the regular public schools and the public charters is all we have.
Without competition, districts are free to exercise the time-honored tradition of scapegoating and periodic 'new deal' type schemes really meant to buy time.
The siren songs of "Pre-K," and "laptops for the kids" — lately electronic "white boards" for the teachers — and so on each have the effect of delaying the day of real reckoning and ignoring reforms like school accountability and merit teacher pay.
Until we get serious about accountability, the only hope for educational improvements on the immediate horizon is continued support for the charters.
If we do end up passing caps as the LFC recommends, then they should not be across the board, but 'Smart Caps' that would also reward strong performing schools while intervening where schools are failing.
And these tools must be applied to traditional public schools as well. No more sacred cows in education, period.
The public charter school movement has been an unheralded boon to education in New Mexico, and there are two key insights the charters have given us.
First, we must clearly define outcomes and expectations for our students and operations, as well as how they will be annually measured.
Objective measurements of performance are scary things in government, where the preferred path is simply to claim "inadequate funding" and demand that the Legislature throw more money at the problem.
Second, we must demand turn-around policies that include school closure.
We can refocus our laws, regulations and money on measurable outcomes rather than endless red tape and bureaucracy.
Using the charter concept of school autonomy in exchange for well-defined, bottom-line results will go a long way toward a brighter future for our children, and better bang for the taxpayer buck.
Doug Turner is a recent GOP candidate for governor of New Mexico and a board member of the New Mexico Coalition for Charter Schools.
You also can send comments via our comment form
|
|
