Do your homework on charter schools

For educational innovators around the state, Jan. 10, 2006 will go down as Black Tuesday. In a 8-2 vote, at a work session, the Education Committee voted against LD 1640, An Act to Permit Charter Schools in Maine.

While not dead, LD 1640 is certainly on life support, facing at best a floor fight in the Legislature. This Education Committee has been grappling with LD 1640 for more than a year, but proposed charter school legislation has been before the Maine Legislature since 2000. The Education Committee asked for a task force to study the issue after public hearings in 2003. That task force recommended the state allow 20 pilot charter schools over the next 10 years, then why such a solid rejection of the department’s own recommendations?

The commissioner of education pleaded overwork as the primary reason for her reluctance to support the measure. Her concern that approval of a charter school pilot project for Maine would negatively impact the other work of the department drew strong sympathy from members of the Education Committee.

Anyone who has spent any time working with the Department of Education or in the schools knows that educators in Maine work hard. However, should the challenge of a “full plate” be the basis for making crucial policy decisions? Educators in every state are grappling with the same challenges of standards-based education while the demands of No Child Left Behind hit all the nation’s schools at the same velocity. Yet, in 40 other states, educators have learned how to work with these demands and also incorporate charter school development in their states. How do they do it?

For one, they do their homework. The commissioner and most members of the Education Committee had very little information about charter schools. Their questions were ones that did not reflect the fact that they have been having hearings on the subject for more than a year and that charter schools have been on the radar screen in Maine for five years. They seemed not to understand the enormous resources available from the federal government and nonprofit organizations to help states implement charter schools.

For another, they turn to the vast national network of charter schools and organizations that support them. Sadly, the commissioner and most members of the Education Committee did not attend an October workshop sponsored by the Department of Education, which brought to Maine five of the nation’s leading charter school experts as well as the head of the Rural Schools Network in Colorado. The experts were here to help, but there were few in the audience to listen.

Perhaps the best question of the afternoon came from Rep. Emily Cain, D-Orono, who asked why there are so many different voices inside the charter school movement. Charter schools serve the full range of students. People are drawn to charter schools for a wide variety of reasons, some personal and some educational, some supporters are Republicans and some Democrats.

In Maine, charter legislation has been introduced by both Republicans and Democrats. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have supported greater school choice as a tool for increasing academic achievement.

The question of why charter schools for Maine is a legitimate one. For an answer we can turn to the way that Maine schools have been performing. The Department of Education’s own 2005 report, the “Select Panel on Revisioning Education in Maine,” called for an educational revolution in Maine. One recommendation from the report was that the state provide more opportunities for school choice.

Recently, Maine schools received a C in a national, annual state-by-state report. One of the indicators in that survey was whether a state has charter school legislation. The essentially flat Maine Educational Assessment results over the past five years is indicator that Maine schools are not pushing all students to higher levels of academic achievement.

Let us be clear here. We are talking about a pilot project of two charter schools a year over the next 10 years. Charter schools would target at-risk students in the state. They would no doubt be small, community-based schools, similar to the alternative schools that now exist in the state to serve at-risk students. They would differ in a number of significant ways.

They could tap into federal and philanthropic funds available only to charter schools. They would be held to higher standards since accountability for charter schools is an important component of the bill. And perhaps most importantly, all students in Maine would have a choice of high schools, not just students who happen to live in communities that do not have their own high schools.

A major policy question like whether Maine could benefit from having a pilot program of charter schools might need more debate in the state, despite the recommendations of a task force, although five years certainly seems like a long time, but claiming overwork is not the way to open up that conversation. The commissioner might have better spent her time discussing how charter legislation could help push forward some of the important state initiatives like inter-district collaboration and increased efficiency. And here the potential is enormous.

I would like to urge the legislators in the state to do some homework on charter schools before they are asked to vote on the policy. A good place to start would be the federal government’s Web site on charter schools.

Etta Kralovec is a clinical faculty member at Pepperdine University and an educational consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor. She is the author of “Schools That Do Too Much” and co-author of “The End of Homework” and lives in Orland.