(From the New York Daily News, Jan, 14, 2008)
By JOE WILLIAMS
Be Our Guest
New York's charter schools – islands of innovation that are giving thousands of parents new and better choices for educating their kids – are under assault, yet again, by the forces of the status quo in Albany.
It's time for all those who care about improving city schools to say: enough.
The latest salvo is state Controller Thomas DiNapoli's plan to send teams of auditors to pick apart charter schools' finances and their academic performance numbers. We must see this for what it is: One piece of a broad bureaucratic and political campaign to slow the growth of a promising movement that happens to threaten the public education establishment. Kudos to the 13 city charter schools that have stood up and filed suit against DiNapoli.
There's a dangerous myth out there: that charter schools – which educate more than 30,000 students on 96 campuses across New York State – are not held accountable under the current law. In fact, charters are subject to an extraordinary level of oversight.
Before approving a given school – and before reupping a charter every five years – regulators look closely at each school's finances and the academic performance of its students. In fact, the 13 city schools in the lawsuit already require the approval of two authorizers, meaning they have to prove themselves to both the city Department of Education and the state Board of Regents.
Charter school students have to meet all the same standards as traditional public school students; they take all the same tests. And charters get less money per pupil than their peer schools.
And unlike most traditional public schools, when charter schools don't live up to their promises, they suffer real consequences – including outright closure.
But those who want to burden charters with still more oversight aren't satisfied. They want to suffocate charters with even more layers of red tape.
DiNapoli's gambit is just one example among many. Charter schools this year are reporting unprecedented levels of interference and questionable demands for paperwork from the State Education Department.
And charter schools, already forced to exist without funding for facilities, are now being told they must build schools using the prevailing wage rates to which government-funded building projects must adhere – significantly driving up the cost of construction.
This much must be said without equivocation: Charter schools have a far, far better record of teaching reading and math to below-grade-level students in Bushwick, Harlem or the South Bronx than do the auditors, accountants and other officials in Albany.
In fact, schools like KIPP, Harlem Village Academy and others are setting the standard for what urban public schools can accomplish. Housed in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods, for example, seventh-graders at Harlem Village Academy earned one of the highest math scores in the state with a 95.7% pass rate.
So if this isn't about the kids, what is it all about? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
The controller's audits are being used as swords to settle political battles among grownups. State Assembly Democrats – and DiNapoli was one just a few years ago – have never been big fans of charter schools. Instead, they tend to follow the line of the teachers unions, who pay lip service to charters on the one hand but take steps to slow their growth on the other.
After all, charter school teachers generally don't have to join the union. To some, that makes them a threat.
Charter schools can continue delivering on the promise of providing a high quality education for students only if we keep the politicians in check. Teachers and innovative school leaders are more important in the lives of our children than auditors, compliance officers and state bureaucrats. Let's get out of their way and let them do their jobs.
Williams is executive director of Democrats for Education Reform.