I’m having trouble understanding why you and Bo are saying this. The actual initiative specifically forbade sectarian influence in the charter schools it set up:
bolding added, from here.
I’m not sure how that section of Washington’s constitution would be relevant.
As amarinth mentions below, I don’t see how that quote would rule out using a separate funding source for charter schools.
One of my concerns is school performance assessment, which applies to both public and charter schools. This was an issue that arose in the afterglow of NCLB: if funding is dependent on performance, and performance is measured with standardized testing, a school will focus too much on teaching students to ace the tests. This is boilerplate education, which does not seem to me to be genuine education. One can present all kinds of data and stats on the performance of a given school, set of schools or type of schools, but the data relies entirely on a rectangular metric (the little boxes on the tests that get colored in) that may in fact not be broadly meaningful. Determining whether charter schools are effective is a matter that must be at least half subjective – how does one objectively test for the critical thinking skills of hundreds or thousands of students, and how does one adjust for the outliers?
I also want to know how transparent the education process is. I see lots of little cracks where teachers could slide in sectarian or ideological blather without getting caught, at least over the short term.
There do seem to be issues with public education that really ought to be addressed. I believe that pasting another separate system on top of it is not the way to do that: it it subtraction by addition.
There could be a semantic chink in the legal armor: it says “… may not be a sectarian or religious organization …” – but a non-sectarian organization could still be influenced by another sectarian organization (e.g., receiving additional support from a church, which would almost certainly be conditional wrt curriculum).
Yeah, something very similar to charter schools have existed in countries like Sweden and done generally very well. But as implemented in America I think the “weight” of charter schools have done worse than public schools, often spectacularly so (to the point of having to be shut down, which is very rare for a public school–albeit that isn’t a wholly fair comparison because it’s much harder to shut a regular public school down.) Like much that is wrong with American education, I think the problem comes to our hyper-localized school systems. A more standardized approach to granting and governing charters could probably keep the “real bad egg” charter schools from ever getting off the ground, but hyper-local control of education is nigh-untouchable politically in America.
There are of course a sizable minority of charter schools that have worked almost miracles. When they work they tend to work really well, but a lot of them don’t work at all.
Perhaps, but in a hypothetical where a non-sectarian, non-religious organization influenced by a sectarian organization were running a charter school in Washington, and the funding for charter schools in general passed Constitutional muster, wouldn’t the correct remedial action be against that particular school for acting in a way not free from sectarian influence, rather than against all charter schools?
There is no “remedial action” to be taken against a charter school that violates the constitution. It would simply lose its charter and with it its public funds. As far as I can tell, it would be allowed to remain open if it could secure sufficient private funding, but I could be wrong about that.
But that point is moot. Charter schools are not an option, unless they are required to operate under the full supervision and control of the public school system. Which kind of defeats the apparent intended purpose of the concept.