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CHARTER SCHOOLS: SUBSTANTIVE SUCCESS
by Jeanne Allen, President
The Center for Education Reform
An edited version of this letter appeared in US News and World Report,
May 25, 1998
To the Editor:
Nearly fifteen years to the day since the landmark report A Nation at Risk, the condition of education has progressed little. Your April 27 Cover Story, "The Great School Experiment" is, therefore, perplexing. It uses a selective bag of information to paint a misleading picture about the start-up, progress and purpose of charter schools nationwide. Most education observers would agree that in order to understand whether or not charter schools are succeeding, more than "weeks of reporting in two states" is necessary. Instead of cherry-picking suspect anecdotes, US News and World Report could have better illustrated the charter school movement s by seriously evaluating just how they compare to, contrast with, and catalyze the system as a whole.
Charter schools are noteworthy and successful precisely because they are doing what few other public schools are permitted to do - they are setting up programs to educate children whose parents believe they would not be or were not well-served by the existing, traditional public school to which they were assigned. Increasingly, reputable survey data shows that parents do not believe the existing system serves their children well. They are both enormously frustrated and enormously devoted to the public schools, which is why for them charter schools are the answer.
The Center for Education Reform provided much substantive information and resources to your reporter for use in his analysis. In addition to the few facts actually reported, an inclusion of the broad range of research available, much of it detailing charters' successes in the face of great odds, would have provided a more thorough and realistic picture of the extraordinary effort by ordinary citizens to create, through charters, safe havens of learning for children.
Whether a reform serves 166,000 or 1.6 million children, the litmus test should not only be how well its doing, but how it compare to the alternative - in this case, the status quo. Charter schools have been super-scrutinized and vilified since the first one opened less than a decade ago, but the rising tide of public sentiment against the same old excuses, mediocrity and stonewalling in public education has helped charters grow and succeed. Reforms like charter schools should and will be embraced and expanded until all children are provided the best education possible. Only when the school systems of Phoenix, Detroit, Chicago and even small town America, can say that they are graduating all children with a guaranteed education they can take to the bank, will charter supporters and schools no longer have a cause to champion. Until then, our children are not well served by looking for specs of dirt under pebbles when large stones haven't moved or been turned for years.
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Jeanne Allen is publisher of THE CHARTER SCHOOL WORKBOOK: Your Roadmap to the Charter School Movement, and president of The Center for Education Reform, an independent, non-profit group providing support to individuals seeking school reform. For more information, please call (202) 822-9000 or (800) 521-2118, or send e-mail to cer@edreform.com.