Charter schools cope with others' failures

Charter schools are once again in the news, and different observers are drawing different conclusions from the limited evidence now being reported.

Charter schools are public schools that are freed up from many regulations imposed on most public schools by the state.

They are answerable to the institution that granted them their charter -- usually a public college or university -- and to the board that governs them. They are answerable to parents in ways that other public schools aren't: Parents can move their children out if they aren't satisfied.

One fact emerging is abundantly clear, though:

The oft-quoted fear expressed by charter-school opponents -- that these innovative schools would skim the cream of the best students off the top of the mainline public schools, leaving them with those students hardest to educate -- is being conclusively disproven.

Consider this from the Associated Press story reporting on charter schools in Kansas City, as charter-school officials attempted to evaluate the pupils newly in their charge:

"Pretests taken during the first few weeks of classes identified 39 percent of the second-, third- and fourth-graders as 'non-readers' -- meaning the children couldn't sound out words.

"Many didn't know their alphabet. Some could recognize simple three-letter words like 'the,' but that was about it."

Nor is the crisis of non-readers limited to the elementary grades. Later in the same AP story, the principal of Kansas City's Southwest Charter School was heard to address officials of the elementary school whose students are the subject of the above-quoted material: "You think you have it bad? I have ninth-graders as non-readers."

Let's be clear:

These non-readers are pupils who, until the advent of charter schools, were being passed through grade after grade by the existing public-school system, year after year and routinely. This is a scandal and a major black eye for Missouri's education establishment.

Now some officials, such as the usually sensible Kent King, commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, sound as though they're ready to pull the plug on charter schools. This would be exactly the wrong way to go. Charters are a promising experiment.

We need more, not less, of such concentrated efforts to save children the public system was letting fall through the cracks.