DON'T FIGHT CHARTER SCHOOLS; EXPAND THE IDEA

It is, we are sorry to say, a sad episode in recent American history. A great movement of grass-roots Americans is gathering force nationwide, seeking to give parents greater choices in the education of their children. These folks are looking for all manner of alternatives to the one-size-fits-all system of public education.

Arrayed against these parents, neighborhood groups and the precious few brave academics willing to rally to their cause is what has come to be known as the education establishment. The latter group may be understood as composed of the groups claiming a stake in public education or, more precisely, in the current governance structure of public education. We have the school boards and their state and national associations. We have the teachers unions, who may be defined as aspiring to and, in some cases, achieving double monopoly status as monopoly providers of labor inside a government-monopoly-financed public system. And we have the associations of superintendents who, together with other public school administrators, are a powerful interest that, despite many good instincts and much constructive work, too often blindly fights to preserve the status quo. Then there is the Parents and Teachers Association, which despite its benign image from 30 or 40 years ago has increasingly become aligned, at the national level, with one of the unions, the National Education Association, and its radical, far-left agenda. Add to this the all-powerful state education bureaucracy, which answers to an unelected state school board, and you have a nearly immovable and impenetrable creature some have called Big Education. Suggest any but the approved line and these folks will demonize you as being "against public education."

The latest exhibit of this establishment opposition to giving parents more choices is Missouri's experience with charter-school legislation. In 1998, as part of a remarkable bill to get Missouri out of the two urban desegregation cases that have cost us so dearly, the Legislature enacted a charter school measure for St. Louis and Kansas City. Charter schools are public schools that operate free from much state regulation. Each school occupies a niche. Taken together, charter schools, by their variety back-to-basics, phonics reading instruction, a French immersion academy, military training or whatever offer parents more choices. With the exception of the unions, which gave grudging and belated support to charter school bills (as long as they were so watered down that they offered little chance to work as intended), the education establishment was united in either its open or clandestine opposition to this most promising reform.

It comes as no surprise that our friends in the state school board association have joined in a lawsuit filed by the St. Louis School District to have Missouri's new charter-school law declared unconstitutional. This is a most disappointing decision by the school board association. We regard the St. Louis schools' lawsuit as bogus, laughable nothing less than a scandal -- and look forward to its prompt dismissal. If that seems extreme, consider that St. Louis officials took the increased money the Legislature generously voted them and used it to sue the state, attempting to void the very reform those lawmakers deemed most important for our failing urban schools. Now our state association of school boards joins this unwise effort to thwart reform. Shame on them. Rather than strangling this baby in the cradle, we'd like to see charter schools statewide and not just in our two largest cities.

Instead of seeking to halt any reform, no matter how promising, why don't school board officials, and others of these stakeholders, join in an effort to enact a law permitting charter school districts? That's right: Why don't we move in the direction of deregulating all public schools, or at least those that through demonstrations of merit show they deserve charter status? Then maybe you'd have an opportunity to free up truly great teachers and principals to innovate and create and teach and do what they do best. In the bargain, such an approach, grounded in deregulation, would free up hundreds if not thousands of jobs in the state education bureaucracy for more productive work. Now there's a 21st century cause worth fighting for.