A Case For Charter Schools
Yesterday, OpinionJournal published an editorial by Dr. Henry I. Miller which tells the tale of a successful charter school in San Jose, CA. While the story itself sounds like a screenplay in the making, the inherent political ramifications are still addressed:
Do charter schools take money from the traditional public school system? Of course they do, because they take students. And school districts with a lot of infrastructure and rising costs will get hurt if their enrollments are static or declining. As it happens, Downtown College Prep siphons off many difficult, underperforming students. They are the least likely to attend public schools regularly or to graduate–and require expensive extra services from traditional schools. So the financial burden on the district, in this case and some others, is minimal.
Will charter schools force traditional schools to change? Let’s hope so, if only by embarrassing them with success. Certainly if noncharter public schools are forced to compete for students, they will have to improve simply to survive. But Ms. Jacobs makes no grand claims. Her task is mainly one of fidelity to the case at hand–a success story worthy of Hollywood.
It would be nice to see.