PUBLIC VS. CHARTER: A CHANCE TO DO SOME GOOD

It was somewhat surprising to see school superintendents from Southeast Missouri take such a strong stand against charter schools at a recent meeting with area legislators and Southeast Missouri State University officials.

The university has been asked to charter a school in St. Louis. Currently, state law only allows charter schools in St. Louis and Kansas City. There are a number of charter schools operating in Kansas City, but no one has yet agreed to charter a school in St. Louis.

Also surprising was the misinformation being exchanged at the meeting of superintendents. For example, one superintendent wanted to know why a parochial school in Kansas City was allowed to operate as a charter school and receive state funding. In fact, there is a charter school operating in what used to be a Roman Catholic parochial school building. But every effort has been made to mask the building's former religious connections, and the school is in no way affiliated with the Catholic church. There is also a charter school in Kansas City that operates in a Jewish community center, but that school is not affiliated with nor operated by any Jewish organization.

Another piece of misinformation that keeps getting repeated, even at meetings of school superintendents, is that charter schools get to cherry-pick the best students -- the best academic performers, the best athletes, students without special needs, youngsters who are likely to succeed no matter what. In this case, the statement was repeated by state Sen. Jerry Howard of Dexter. In fact, charter schools are prohibited from selecting only the best students and are required to open their enrollment to anyone regardless of academic ability or economic status. Most charter schools have far more applicants than slots for students and rely on lotteries or other nondiscriminatory methods to select which students get to attend.

More than that, charter schools are usually set up with the mission of producing better academic results among students who fail most often in public schools. By far the most applicants for charter schools come from students with poor grades whose parents hope can be helped by a different approach to education.

One of the most common concerns that public-school administrators seem to have is that charter schools don't have to operate under the same state-mandated regulations that hamstring public schools.

This is a good point to make, but it ought to be viewed from another perspective. Instead of complaining about fewer restrictions on charter schools, public-school superintendents should be leading the charge to get rid of the bureaucratic bonds that make state compliance not only difficult, but also costly.

One of the aims of charter schools is to find innovations in education that benefit students, parents, school officials and the community at large. If charter schools do a better job of educating our youngsters, why wouldn't public schools -- and their Jefferson City bosses -- want to adopt those changes that work?

Too many public-school administrators seem either to have given up fighting needless state rules and restraints or to have fallen prey to the bureaucracy that passes as tax-funded education these days.

On the one hand, public-school educators nowadays tend to regard students as a commodity attached to guaranteed revenue in the form of state funding. For every student lost to a private, parochial or charter school, public schools lose a unit of revenue. That's a very businesslike approach to a school's income/expense balance sheets. On the other hand, if schools want to operate like businesses, they also have to start making tough business decisions. A good place to start would be by standing up to the unelected bureaucrats in Jefferson City who call all the shots -- particularly when there is a local board of directors already in place.