Charter Schools and the Next President

It is an exciting month for us political junkies. I come to work groggy from staying up late watching the victory speeches. I scour the Net for the latest polls. But the part of me that cares about schools is not that thrilled. Education issues are not stirring up anybody's electoral base, so they don't get mentioned.

One politically attuned education expert, Andrew J. Rotherham, is apparently so bummed out by this that he has produced one of those little-noticed education policy papers that are common in election years. Except this one, thankfully and somewhat surprisingly, is a winner. It's interesting, candid, clever and aimed at the heart of the most important and politically explosive trend in public education--the rise of charter schools.

Rotherham, co-director of the Washington-based think tank Education Sector and author of the Eduwonk.com blog, was an education adviser to President Bill Clinton. He now serves on the Virginia Board of Education. Like me, he cares a great deal about charter schools. These independent public schools have curriculums, hours and ways of hiring and firing staff that are not controlled by the local school system.

Many public school advocates think charters threaten to destroy regular public schools by luring away students, money and talent. Rotherham doesn't buy that, but he appreciates the fears of the anti-charter folks who tend to be Democrats like him. So he has come up with five political deals that could bring the pro- and anti-charter factions together. The deals would discourage the many mediocre charters and strengthen those that are setting records for raising school achievement in poor urban and rural neighborhoods.

Campaign strategists don't want to talk about such deals. Sweet reason and bipartisanship doesn't get voters to the polls. But a year from now, a new president -- as well as many new governors and state legislators -- will have to start figuring out what they are going to do about schools. Rotherham's five ideas, available at educationsector.org, are an excellent start:

1. Put an annual cap on charter school growth for all but the best charters: In many states and cities, public school advocates support laws to limit the number of charter schools. Rotherham wants what he calls a quality-sensitive, or "smart cap," applied each year. He says "smart caps would allow schools that have met a performance threshold to replicate as fast as they are able to. The performance threshold could be, for instance, schools that perform in the top quartile of all schools or the top 10 percent or 15 percent of similar schools. . . . Both charter opponents and supporters claim to be concerned about quality, and this policy is keenly linked to school quality."

2. Provide space for charter schools in exchange for their good test scores: Charter school leaders often complain that they can't find affordable space for their schools on the private market, while their local school system is hogging empty space in underused buildings. Rotherham cites an Ohio state law that encourages partnerships to solve this. If a system leases a building to a charter school, it gets to include the charter school's achievement scores in its performance rating. Rotherham acknowledges that this is a tricky bargain, since a change of school system policy might render a charter school homeless. Also, it only works if the charter school is performing well.

3. Give adjustment funds to school systems that allow charter schools: When students move to charter schools, their old regular school often gets less money. That seems fair to me, since the old school has fewer students to deal with, but Rotherham notes that the old school's expenses cannot be so easily reduced. "Though a school or school district might only lose 15 percent of its students," Rotherham says, "it can't cut its energy bill by 15 percent or have 15 percent less custodial or cafeteria staff." Illinois, New York and the District provide transitional aid to schools like that. Rotherham says offering the same deal to more schools and school systems would allow continued charter school growth without so much financial stress on regular schools.

4. Tie school spending tightly to individual students, and have more money for those more expensive to teach: This is a pitch for weighted student funding, a trend in school financing endorsed by some prominent Democrats and Republicans. A 2005 Fordham Foundation study said, on average, charters receive 22 percent less money than regular schools. Under weighted student funding, this inequity would cease as the allocation for each child would move with him or her from school to school, and would be larger for students with more educational needs, such as special education or English-language learning. Charter schools would get paid the same way as regular schools, and their allocations would differ only if their portion of disadvantaged students varied. Rotherham suggests charter school advocates agree to return the favor by joining school systems in their quest for more funds from state legislatures.

5. Let teacher unions organize within charters, but not too much. The unions have not made much of a fuss yet about charters being mostly non-union. This is in part because although 4,000 charters have been established in the last two decades, they still only educate 2 percent of American public school children. Also, the teachers who choose charter jobs tend to be young and less concerned about union protections. But a Democratic president or governor cannot get far without teacher union backing. So Rotherham suggests a compromise: Let charter school teachers join unions if they wish, but let charter school principals retain their right to hire only teachers who share their teaching philosophy and fire those who don't deliver classroom results.

These ideas will, of course, be ignored by the important candidates. Who needs all this detail about a low-profile issue when you can win votes with vague declarations about the economy, immigration and the war? But as charters continue to grow -- in the District, they educate more than 25 percent of all public school students -- such deals are eventually going to be on the public school agenda. Rotherham is just barely old enough to be president, but maybe his friends can persuade him to run for something less grand and get the ball rolling.