Fewer rules, better schools: charter schools are starting up all across the country, despite opposition by teachers' unions

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 9, 1996 | by Evan Gahr

With its small classes and specialized curriculum, the Arizona School for the Arts easily could pass for a private school. But like the hundreds of other "charter schools" that have opened across the United States in the last five years, it operates with government money - although it needn't adhere to government rules and regulations.

In exchange for administrative autonomy, charter schools must meet strict performance standards, an approach, contends education-guru Chester Finn, that will "reinvent public education." But teachers' unions dislike charter schools because they operate outside collective-bargaining agreements. Other educational organizations dismiss charter schools as a passing fad that will affect few children.

Still, amid the contentious world of education reform, charter schools enjoy a remarkable degree of broad-based support, widely considered a middle ground between voucher plans (which provide tax dollars for private-school tuition) and the traditional system. Indeed, charter schools have been pushed by everyone from liberal academics and President Clinton to the Republican Congress, which year earmarked $55 million for the experiment.

"There should be some public-school choice and charter schools are one way that's happening," Deputy Education Secretary Marshall Smith tells Insight. The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1991; they quickly spread to 15 other states and the District of Columbia. Now there are almost 500 in operation, and the Education Department in October awarded $17 million in seed money for future schools.

Supporters of charter schools, which have been started by former teachers, parents and even private companies, contend that they enjoy a flexibility impossible at public schools, where teachers labor under byzantine regulations and an inefficient central administration.

The City Academy, the nation's first charter school, in St. Paul, Minn., serves teenage dropouts, for example. Director Milo Cutter tells Insight that freedom from a central administration gives her the latitude that's crucial in dealing with problem kids. "We say, 'let's figure out a solution,' rather than `I have to get this approved.' That kind of figure doesn't work."

In Los Angeles, the Fenton Avenue Charter School serves largely Hispanic elementary students. Converted from an existing public school in 1994, principal Joe Alcente boasts that the school operates as a business. No longer tied to a costly central bureaucracy, it now manages its own food service and has reduced class size and hired more teachers.

"People from all sorts of political backgrounds want autonomy from the mainstream public system," says Amy Stuart Wells, an education professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Whether Afrocentric, Chicano, home schoolers - they are splintering off. I see charter schools as an interim form. We're moving toward a public system that looks different and is far more deregulated."

But Peter Cookson, director of the Center for Education Outreach and Innovation at Teacher's College of Columbia University, doubts that the movement fundamentally will alter public education: "Systemic reforms aren't going to be achieved by letting folks do their own thing."

In Rhode Island, unions lobbied for a restrictive bill that effectively hamstrung entrepreneurs attempting to open charter schools. Eight other states have authorized charter schools but don't have any, a circumstance attributable to teachers' unions, according to Joe Nathan, director of the Center for Social Change at the University of Minnesota.

California Assemblyman Louis Caldera, a Democrat, also blames unions for sinking his attempt to increase the cap on his state's charter schools from 100 to 300. In Washington, the state affiliate of the National Education Association spent more than $400,000 to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have allowed charter schools.

Sandra Feldman, an American Federation of Teachers vice president and New York teachers' union leader, tells Insight that she finds such charges perplexing, noting the AFT has favored many. But she insists that the unions will not give up the right to collective bargaining.

According to Nathan, however, the unions' willingness to entertain charter schools suggests the tide has turned: "When you can't block something you try to blunt it."