What a Senator’s confusion about charter schools illuminates
It would be entirely understandable for some people to be confused about the nature of charter schools.
Funded by the public but privately operated — sometimes by for-profit companies — and allowed to operate outside rules that demand transparency from traditional public schools — some people make the mistake of thinking that charter schools, or at least some of them, are indeed private schools.
And the confusion can grow when judges and government regulators themselves are asked to decide whether charters are public or private — and sometimes come down on the side of less than public. (For example, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in an employment case in 2010 decided that in regard to federal U.S. civil rights law, a charter school in Arizona was not a “state actor.”)
And confusion can grow when charters go to court to fight state audits (as happened in New York) or to fight efforts by their teachers to unionize (as happened in Chicago and Philadelphia). Or when charter schools counsel out students who are problems, or limit enrollment, or refuse to accept students mid-year. Or when nonprofits who win charters to operate these schools funnel public funding through their own for-profit real estate companies that charge big rates for a school building. Or when scandals are exposed in which a great deal of public money is mismanaged or stolen by charter operators.
But it’s another thing when an elected official with education policy-making power — and who happens to support charter schools — is confused.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Republican from Tennessee who was once U.S. secretary of education and is now the chairman of the Senate education committee in charge of spearheading the Senate’s rewrite of No Child Left Behind, revealed his own confusion about the nature of charter schools at a Washington event about school choice hosted on Wednesday by the nonprofit Brookings Institution. During a discussion, my colleague Emma Brown reported in this post, that the conversation went like this:
“Well they’re all — charter schools are public schools,” said Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.
“There are some private charter schools, are there not?” asked Alexander.
“Charter schools, I guess as we define it, are public schools that operate What a Senator’s confusion about charter schools illuminates - The Washington Post:
