CHARTER-SCHOOL PROBATION PROVES A GOOD POINT

The news out of Kansas City informs us one of that community's new charter schools has been put on probation during its first year in operation following an audit performed by Central Missouri State University on all the schools it charters. Good.

About this development, several observations are in order.

First, it demonstrates again that there is a great deal more accountability with charter schools than there is with traditional public school systems -- at least traditional public school systems of the large, urban variety. It is precisely these large school systems, such as St. Louis and Kansas City, that are most resistant to reform, no matter how dysfunctional they prove themselves year after year.

Both districts are incredibly top-heavy with central-office administrators. Both feature dropout rates for entering high school freshmen in the 40-to-60-percent range. Officials of both districts have long been famous for indifference to the real concerns of the poor, mostly minority parents whose children are trapped in their failing schools.

Second, we note that nine of the new schools CMSU chartered last year passed muster under the audits. Charter supporters always said some would work while others wouldn't and we wouldn't know which is which until we undertook this most promising reform experiment. We applaud CMSU for having a good monitoring plan in place.

We have said it before and will say it again here: The first charter school to close its doors, owing to some irregularity, malfunction or failure to comply with the law or its mission, will prove the worth of the charter school movement. The point here is that Missouri's two large, urban school systems have been failing horribly for a generation or more, and no one has come forward to close down anything. On the contrary: All officials of these two systems do is demand -- and usually get -- ever greater rivers of state taxpayer funding. St. Louis and Kansas City schools spend upwards of $10,000 or more per student, while the statewide average is well below $6,000. Most smaller outstate districts spend much less even than that.

There is a reason why so many applicants lined up that charter officials in St. Louis had to conduct a lottery for admission to the four charters set to open there this fall. Parents desperately want these alternatives for their children. That part of the debate is over.