Arne Duncan recently addressed the national conference of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and challenged them to “…adapt (their) educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools.”
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has published a proposed Model For Supporting The Growth Of High-Quality Public Charter Schools. Part of this model suggests automatic waivers of educational laws and regulations for charter schools:
“To provide public charter schools with needed autonomy, states and districts waive many of the state and local lows, rules, and regulations that burden traditional public schools.” (emphasis added)
” ‘Except as provided in this Act, a public charter school shall not be subject to the state’s education statutes or any state or local rule, regulation, policy, or procedure relating to non-charter publec schools…established by the local school board, the state board of education, or the state department of education’ “
If state and local regulations are responsible for diminishing the effectiveness of public schools, why don’t we deregulate them? Which regulations and/or state and local laws are hindering the success of public schools?
Let’s face it; some charter schools are non-profit, and some are for-profit, but schools are, by their nature, not profitable enterprises. For one thing, the labor pool is outrageously expensive. For another, the money stream is unpredictable. Nobody’s getting rich operating charter schools.
Charter schools are operated by people with a vision. Sometimes that vision is blurry, sometimes it is hawk-like, and sometimes it is forest-for-the-trees myopic, but it is a vision of success for students, positive social change, and contributing to the advancement of the American Dream.
Isn’t that how public schools started out? How did they become so bogged-down in regulations that they could no longer provide the populace the freedom and power through education envisioned by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann?
What happened was, we took policy and decision-making away from educators and placed it in the hands of politicians. Politicians can be influenced by special interests. And, of course, everybody is an expert on public school because everybody (almost) spends 12 years of their lives there.
But if we have really come to a place in the evolution of public education where the laws and regulations that are supposed to enhance it are actually responsible for its failure, then maybe it’s time to put the educators back in charge.
Hey, Mr. Duncan, how about examining how public schools are hampered by federal, state, and local laws, rules, and regulations? Like NCLB? Like un-funded and underfunded mandates? Like expectations for solving societal problems that they have no power to control?
When all of the schools are charter schools, the rules won’t apply anyway.
