Charters and Vouchers: The Threat to Public Schools is Real
Across the nation, educators have awakened to the reality that charter schools are a threat to the health and even survival of public schools. For that reason, charters have become a major point of contention in teacher strikes, from Oakland to Los Angeles, and even in West Virginia.
But at Education Week’s blog, Charters and Choice, staff writer Arianna Prothero tells us these fears may be overblown. She acknowledges that charter school expansion is “a salient issue,” but only for those who live in urban areas like Los Angeles and Oakland, where charters enroll as many as 30% of the students.
But after acknowledging this, she asserts:
But are the expansion of charter schools and school vouchers really an existential threat to traditional public schools? In most parts of America, it’s hard to argue that they are.Charter schools educate only about 3 million students, or 7 percent of all public-school students, according to federal data. It’s taken charter schools more than 25 years to get to that 7 percent enrollment share—and it looks as though that growth has been slowing in recent years.
By “most parts of America,” the author seems to be referring to rural areas, which are the focus of the rest of her post. She writes:
…areas with less population density struggle to support robust school choice, which requires lots of schools clustered close enough together that families can reasonably get to them.
She then notes that “it’s mostly rural states that still don’t allow for charter schools…”
And then she suggests that the West Virginia proposal recently defeated by a teacher strike was no real threat:
In West Virginia, lawmakers wanted to allow up to seven charter schools to open and to create 1,000 education savings accounts, a voucher-like program, for students with disabilities.Make no mistake, this would have been an important symbolic victory for school choice advocates, especially charter school supporters who have been pressing to get charters in the state for a while.But based on the rate of charter school growth so far, and where charters have been successful in expanding, it seems unlikely West Virginia would have been overrun by charter schools anytime soon, if at all.
