I thought it would be amusing to light this fire again.
The Washington state Supreme Court ruled (6-3) that charter schools are unconstitutional according to the state constitution. This undid a voter initiative passed in 2012 and will force one charter to shut down while preventing eight others from starting up. Schools that receive public funding should be answerable to the voters and tax payers in a way that charter schools are not, they said.
What I see is that charter schools seem to outperform regular public schools. One reason for this might be that they can shun the teachers’ unions, and thus not be hampered by NEA/AFT arm twisting.
Another reason they show better performance might be that they are able to cherry-pick and cull their student body in a way that public schools may not. If this is the case, one could see charter schools showing great strides in educational improvement while public schools decline because they are left handling the academic dregs, spiraling to the point that the entire education system is privatized.
Did the state court step out of line with this ruling? And are charter schools just what we need or just more of the race to the bottom, with union busting thrown in to spice them up?
Charter schools have, at best, a mixed rating against public schools. Ohio has had to shut down numerous charter schools, both for misuse of funds and because the students were not being served.
As to your other claim I would offer that the ability to cherry pick which students were enrolled would have rather more bearing on performance than whether or not the teachers were members of unions. No charter school in Ohio is within sight of the top performing public schools, (which tend to serve wealthier communities).
Page 37 of this pdf of the state constitution covers education. How exactly they concluded that charter schools are not “common schools” is hard to tease out of the text.
The Washington state constitution says “But the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.”
Why do you think charter schools are common schools? :dubious:
Note that the cherry-picking needn’t be overt. There are several local charter schools. They do not provide transportation, instead encouraging carpooling among parents. They do not have cafeterias, instead requiring students to bring lunch from home. These two program deficits result in an extremely monochromatic, middle-class population. Students in poverty often lack family cars, and even if other students’ parents are willing to give them a ride, the social divide between folks in poverty and middle-class folks can make this a highly uncomfortable situation for parents in poverty. And the lack of free/reduced lunch and breakfast can be a significant burden on families who struggle to feed themselves.
Entry into these schools is all by lottery, so there’s no overt discrimination. But the covert discrimination is very effective.
I guess one could argue about what is meant by “common”, since it has at least two sort of disparate meanings. Given that that text was probably first put down in 1889, I would assume that its meaning is coherent with “the commons” (as in “tragedy of”).
If that is the correct understanding of the word, it means every student should have equal access to a “common school”, with no entrance requirements. Which means charter schools would thus be required to accept any and all applicants up to capacity, probably by queue. If a charter school were to reject a student for any reason other than it being at capacity, or if it were to reorder the application queue in any way, I would assume that it would not be a “common” school.
This, of course, ignores schools specifically tailored for special needs students and students with extreme behavioral problems (who, actually, might benefit from a different learning environment), but the general idea is that “common” schools operate in a fair way. As I understand it, charter schools are often selective, in which case, they are not “common”.
I actually had a thread about this initiative back when it was on the ballot, and I voted against it, largely for reasons like the one you outlined here. Despite having voted against it, I’m disappointed that the SCOWa seems to be ruling out any experimentation in this direction. I wonder if proponents will find a technical fix wherein the taxes for the charter schools can be levied separately, so that they can be spent on “uncommon” schools.
If I’m reading the Washington Constitution correctly, and understanding how the WaSC applied it, no, there is no “technical fix” short of changing the state constitution; see my post above (post #6) for the pertinent quote.
Also, Section 4 might be problematic: “All schools maintained or sup- ported wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free from sectarian control or influence.”
When it was on the ballot, many people thought it would be found unconstitutional. This isn’t a surprise.
“common schools” in WA are schools that are “common to all children of proper age and capacity, free, and subject to and under the control of the qualified voters of the school district.” Charter schools aren’t. And only common schools can get funds from the common school fund. From what I understand, with a new initiative and new taxes to support them, charter schools could be paid for from the general fund.
I worked in a regular public school for 11 years, then I switched to teaching at a charter 3 years ago. I will NEVER go back to regular public school. Also, we are open enrollment which means we have to (and do) take anyone who wants to go there. As a public school employee, I was told the horrors of charter schools just like all the others. However, once I made the switch, I actually got to see what a charter was like and they’re not the bogeymen they are made out to be.
I hear you. Charter schools are really tempting, as an educator. I have several friends who’ve switched to teaching at charters, and I have zero friends who have regretted the switch.
As a teacher, they sound great. As a parent, they sound great.
My hesitation about charter schools is as a member of society.
At least in my area, charter schools are far more racially segregated than public schools: they overwhelmingly serve middle-class white students with highly involved parents. Taking these children out of public schools (public schools in one of the worst-funded states in the nation, by the way) removes vital resources, both financial and volunteering, from public schools. It decreases racial integration in our society. It makes parents of charter-school children less concerned about what’s happening in public schools.
We have one local charter school that goes out of its way to recruit poor families: they pay for transportation, and they pay for lunches, for children living in poverty. This one school has demographics that reflect our community. I have exactly zero problems with this school. But the others? I’m seriously not okay with the de facto segregation that so many charter schools encourage.
It is not a matter of charter schools being boogeymen. It is a matter that they are inconsistent from state to state, (and district to district). This does not make them evil and it is probably a good thing that, as a nation, we consider experimenting with new methods of education.
However, they are also not the panacea that their proponents claim.
Though the entirety of the state constitution was linked to above, I think a focus on Article 9 is needed. Additional background on Washington State educational policy must include mention of the ongoing McCleary case, based on the first clause of article 9 of our constitution, that education funding is the paramount duty of the state. State budgets have been found by the courts to be unconstitutional because they did not fund education sufficiently… there were even suggestions that legislators should be held in contempt of court for not abiding by the McCleary decision in the course of deciding on budgets.
So, state politicians allocating money to anywhere other than the common school fund is additionally forbidden because the courts have already found that they’re not complying with their constitutionally paramount duty under the state constitution to fund it. This doesn’t mean that charter schools would be constitutional if common schools were fully funded, but it is an additional constitutional violation for any state funds to go elsewhere while common school funding is deficient.
Finally, I agree with Snowboarder Bo that section 4 also forbids public funding here. Any school that is subject to sectarian influence cannot constitutionally be supported in wholly or in part by Washington State public funds, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that charter schools are, by design, subject to sectarian influence.
Just as an aside, I read the title of this thread as referring to the Supreme Court of the State of Western Australia. And yes, we are talking about charter schools here in Australia as well.