Walter Russell Meade on why charter schools matter.

The big reason?  They are a market solution – the intellectual market, rather than the financial one:

This isn’t because they are a magic bullet solution to our education problems. The research surrounding the effectiveness of charter schools is controversial and politicized. Some schools work better than others — and that is likely to be the case going forward. However we organize our educational system there will be good schools and bad schools, good principals and bad ones, good teachers and bad. And no type of school can consistently overcome the consequences of parental negligence and demoralization. A majority of New Orleans students may be attending charter schools these days, but that is not going to turn the Crescent City into the Athens of the Delta overnight.

So I don’t say charter schools are on the cutting edge because they are going to turn our inner city kids into Singapore-style math whizzes anytime soon. But they are doing at least as well as the schools we have — and they are pointing the way to the kind of political and social transformation that can take us past the stagnant and dysfunctional world of Big Blue Bureaucracy into something more sustainable and more hopeful.

And this being a conservative blog, I can be forgiven for seeing a silver lining for conservatism:

The first thing they’ve done is to open the first serious debate among Blacks about the deficiencies in the blue social model. The weakness at the heart of blue politics today is not the divide between people who love government services and those who want the government to shrink. That reaction is a problem for the blues, but it doesn’t split the blue coalition. The widening gap, however, between the interests of the consumers of government services and the producers of those services has the potential to split Blue America down the middle.

And when he says “Blue America”, he means in part the bluest Americans – black Americans:

The charter school movement has exposed the fallacy in this argument to increasing numbers of Black parents by showing that the dysfunction in urban schools is not simply a problem of money. It is also a problem of incompetent teachers who can never be fired, of dysfunctional work rules that give senior teachers a viselike grip on choice assignments, it is a whole system that all too frequently puts children last.

Black parents who have seen charter schools at work like school choice more than Democrats. In New Jersey, Blacks like charter schools more than Republicans!

Here in Minnesota, they are certainly more committed to them than the GOP is.

The whole thing is worth a read.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Democrat Party, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.