Published January 29, 2005
Nebraskans understand that issues have more than two sides. This is certainly true of the current attempt of the Legislature, supported by the education establishment, to force Nebraska's hundreds of Class I (elementary-only) school districts to merge with larger school districts.
Right now, the choice is black and white. The Class I school districts will surely resist, and the outcome is unknown. But why not allow the parents of children attending Class I schools a third choice?
Nebraska's constitution requires that we educate our children, but it poses no barriers to organizing a "charter school" to fulfill that requirement.
A charter schools guarantee that students meet certain educational outcomes. The operators of the school, generally the teacher(s), sign the contract. School charters can be co-signed by a mayor, a County Board or a school board.
Charter schools are public schools and receive tax money for the children in attendance. In such schools elsewhere, that amount is much less than the average spent per child in Nebraska's public schools.
If outcomes were not met, the contract is pulled, and the school closed.
An administrator in Bellevue told me of a Sand Hills school near North Platte that had closed. The ranchers who had been its patrons purchased a trailer, and the teacher now teaches their children in the trailer. The other difference is that the ranchers pay her salary.
This is the perfect example of the benefit of a charter-school option. The need was there, the desire was there, and the teacher was there. The legislative options was missing.
Were charter schools to be authorized, parents would have the option of sending their children to a traditional public school or setting up a charter school. In this respect, it would be a win-win situation. (Colorado has passed a charter school amendment since this article was published so their children were not bussed over the mountains to consolidated schools.)
Parents choosing the charter school would elect a parental advisory board. They would expect to volunteer, help with maintenance, provide transportation, etc.
The rural charter school would be much like those of our past. My mother taught in rural schools and answered directly to the parents. Parental control gets defused as control moves up the bureaucracy.
And charters need not be limited to rural schools. Here are other options to increase choices and extend outcomes for kids:
• To attract good-quality professional staff, a large medical facility provides day care. Offering a K-6 charter school in their facility might serve the same purpose.
• An international engineering firm recruits engineers by giving them summer jobs during college. A highly challenging math and science curriculum taught to 17- and 18-year-olds on-site in a charter school could serve the same purpose.
• A teacher promises to cut the dropout rate in half if given a charter school in an inner-city neighborhood. If she succeeds, she keeps her school and her charter. And she saves some kids from certain poverty and lives of lower fulfillment.
Charter schools offer a choice for parents. They offer competition to the existing monopoly of public school administrations. Charter schools are public schools, too, but are run by parents, not administrators or bureaucrats. If no parents send their children to a charter school, it is closed.
Running for the Legislature taught me the power of the education establishment. The teachers union (the Nebraska State Education Association) can and does deliver votes. Its questionnaire for candidates is much more about finance and control and much less about improved student outcomes and choices.
I'm pro-education for our kids, and I want more choices, not fewer. I hope that Legislative Bill 126, which would eliminate Class I districts, might be amended to permit charter schools.
Ronald Reagan said it best: "Our system freed the individual genius of man. . . . We allocate resources not by government decision but by the millions of decisions customers make when they go into the marketplace to buy.
"If something seems too high-priced, we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things people want most at the price they are willing to pay."
Today, too many of our education decisions are made by government, not by the customers of education - the parents.
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Excerpt from article from Hillsdale college about New Zealand's reforms:
New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children—especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.
It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration. Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.
But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools. More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.
Now consider taxation and competitiveness: What many in the public sector today fail to recognize is that the challenge of competitiveness is worldwide. Capital and labor can move so freely and rapidly from place to place that the only way to stop business from leaving is to make certain that your business climate is better than anybody else’s. Along these lines, there was a very interesting circumstance in Ireland just two years ago. The European Union, led by France, was highly critical of Irish tax policy—particularly on corporations—because the Irish had reduced their tax on corporations from 48 percent to 12 percent and business was flooding into Ireland. The European Union wanted to impose a penalty on Ireland in the form of a 17 percent corporate tax hike to bring them into line with other European countries. Needless to say, the Irish didn’t buy that. The European community responded by saying that what the Irish were doing was unfair and uncompetitive. The Irish Minister of Finance agreed: He pointed out that Ireland was charging corporations 12 percent, while charging its citizens only 10 percent. So Ireland reduced the tax rate to 10 percent for corporations as well. There’s another one the French lost!
For Immediate Release
July 26, 2007 Contact: Jon Hussey (202) 822-9000
Education Programs Constitutional; Growth Steady
Studies document court decisions on charter schools and rising enrollment among minorities
Washington, D.C., July 26, 2007 - State rulings on public alternative schools have been issued in the last decade confirming that charter schools are legal instruments of state power. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on integration, charter schools are permissible, voluntary integration options that have demonstrated steady growth particularly among minority students. These facts are addressed in two reports released by The Center for Education Reform (CER).
State legislators are challenged by opponents of these alternative education programs, who claim that charter schools are unconstitutional. Cases filed in the past eight years in more than 12 states have reached state Supreme Courts, which have found that charter schools are constitutional entities and thus entitled to the same rights and funding as conventional public schools.
Despite legal challenges, charter schools grew by 11 percent in 2006 and continue to serve a student body that is on average 53 percent minority and 54 percent low-income. Charter school popularity continues to grow among children most in need. In 2006, 42 percent of charter schools served an "at-risk" student population over 60 percent and 44 percent served a minority student population over 60 percent.
"The courts by their review and the people by their actions have ruled on this issue," said Jeanne Allen, president of The Center for Education Reform. "Those who suggest otherwise deliberately hamper important legislative efforts and must be challenged. We believe this information will help reasoned leaders in their work."
For copies of the two reports: Understanding Constitutions & Charter Schools and the 2007 Annual Survey of America's Charter Schools, please call Jon Hussey at 1-800-521-2118. For information about The Center for Education Reform (CER) go to www.edreform.com.
To update your email or unsubscribe, go to My Account, or send email to newswire@edreform.com.
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