Washington Court Strikes Down Public Funding for Charter Schools
The state's high court rules that because charter schools are not public institutions, they don't qualify for taxpayer money.
One of the more grotesque attacks on the concept of an American political commonwealth has been the steady – and, sadly, bipartisan – assault on the concept of public education. Whether it comes from uber-wealthy, oft-liberal dilettantes like Bill Gates at the elementary and secondary levels, from outright grifters like Michelle Rhee at almost every level, charter-school messianics like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, slumping goons like Chris Christie, or opportunistic weasels like Scott Walker, the very idea of public education is fighting a war on a hundred fronts against a hundred enemies, many of them camouflaged as "reform." At the end of last week, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington gave every one of these people, and everybody behind them, as resounding a kick in the ass as any court ever has delivered to anyone anywhere.
In a 6-3 ruling issued late Friday afternoon, the high court said that the privately operated, publicly funded charter schools do not qualify as common schools under Washington's Constitution and thus cannot receive public funding. The decision, which came nearly a year after oral arguments in the case and just after eight new charter schools opened, did not specify what will happen to the schools or the students who attend them. Instead, the justices sent the case back to King County Superior Court "for an appropriate order."
The Court fairly well demolished any notion that charter schools in Washington qualified in any way as public institutions to be financed with public money. It also quite pointedly made its case that the lack of democratic transparency and accountability was a big part of why the charters were not public schools.
In the lead opinion, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen said the case wasn't about the merits of charter schools, simply whether they were eligible for public funds. Citing state Supreme Court precedent from 1909, she said they are not eligible because they are not under the control of local voters. Washington charters are run by private nonprofit organizations that appoint their own boards. Most, including Tacoma's charters, are also under the oversight of the appointed Washington State Charter School Commission.
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(On Diane Ravitch's invaluable blog, Peter Greene has a simple solution for the charter-school panjandrums – submit to the authority of an elected local school board. Yeah, that'll happen.)
Because it happened on Friday of a holiday weekend in which Donald Trump is still running for president, this was a huge story that got buried in the news cycle, but it remains a signifying decision in the fight against the school "reformers." This latest attempt was the result of the fourth statewide referendum on charter schools. This latest one squeaked through in 2012 because the pro-charter side brought in all the pros from Dover – Gates, the inexcusable Jeff Bezos, Ms. Rhee and her consort, Kevin Johnson. There is now great scrambling among the masters of the universe because public accountability and democratic institutions can be so damned…inconvenient. (Not that they're done. There are higher courts.) Public education should be conducted in public schools. Period. Good on the Washington Supremes for reinforcing this simple truth.Washington Court Strikes Down Public Funding for Charter Schools:
