Give a pat on the back to Carter Community Charter School in Durham. Its students — all minority kids, according to the story — are achieving. State Reps. Paul Luebke (D-Durham) and Winkie Wilkins (D-Person) toured the school yesterday. North Carolina has arbitrarily capped charters at 100. For years now, charter advocates, including the Locke Foundation and the group that hosted the Durham tour, have been making the case for raising or lifting the cap.
From comments in the Herald-Sun, they seem impressed. Yet, Rep. Luebke tempered his praise by saying the school’s success “doesn’t for me answer the question of whether there ought to be an expansion in the number of” charter schools.
Rep. Luebke has a point. But the same can be said of a successful traditional public school. The important takeaway is that we should model successful operations to give more kids the opportunity to learn and excel. If they fail, they’re gone. The rules on public charters ensure that those with consistently low performance are shut down. There are no such rules for consistently low performing traditional public schools. They receive more money, more teachers, more assistance, more time. Meanwhile, the kids are trapped. No one model will serve all kids and their needs. Parents deserve to choose the model that works for them. If that’s a traditional public school, fine. If that’s a public charter school, fine. If that’s a private school, fine. If that’s homeschooling, fine. But they deserve to make their own decision.
So what would happen if North Carolina’s tough charter school standards were applied to all public schools? An analysis by JLF’s Terry Stoops shows that more than 150 would be shut down. Stoops discusses the double standard in this brief interview.
