Michigan Votes Forum

Introduced in the House on January 27, 2005

Click here to view bill details.

Lift that cap! Give parents some choices.

Give students some choices and hope. Get some healthy competition started for the students that the current schools cast aside.

The folks who pushed charter schools on us in the 1990s assured us that these “public school academies” would be hotbeds of innovation that would show ordinary public schools how to get “it” done right, educationally speaking. Hasn’t happened yet. Probably never will unless some serious changes are made. A huge majority of charter schools simply offer the same-old-same-old as their traditional public school counterparts, in terms of structure and curriculum and method, and often do so far less effectively. Another failed social experiment. Expanding it by lifting the cap on charters won’t make the experiment a success, and won’t make things better insofar as public education is concerned. It only will maintain the status quo, at best, and very possibly will make things worse. Rather than lift the cap on charters, we should require that new and existing charter schools develop and implement true “magnet” specialty programs. Such programs would focus on, say, high level academics for gifted students, or intenseive support programs for struggling students, or the arts, or athletics, or vocational trades, and so on. Then, rather than replicating the all-things-for-all-students approach we find in conventional public schools, the charter schools would present real choices: alternatives that are genuinely different.

How about we open it up to try choice and competition. Why require a certain program in a charter school? If parents want the choice (and they certainly do, evidenced by the waiting lists at charters and declining enrollment in traditional public schools), then why not give it to them? Charters are agressively taking on students who are being failed by public school systems. The only way to fix the public schools isn't to saddle charters with more bureaucracy, it's to open the market and let competition decide which schools should stay open, not bureaucrats and politicians. Parents should have the power, not know it all busybodies.

>"Parents should have the power, not know it all busybodies."< Well, I'm one of those know-it-all busybodies, as you call them, who no longer has a kid in school. But I still get to foot the bill. Parents should have the power? School choice is exercised far more in the name of parental convenience than in the name of excellence in educational opportunity for the kid. That makes modern day parents seem like self-centered dunces when it comes to this stuff. Why expand the power of selfish dunces? Since I get to foot the bill, I'll continue to shoot off my mouth and let fly the typing fingers to express my belief that charter schools offer no real choice and are nothing but an unnecessary and ill-considered drain on educational funds in Michigan. A failure in delivering the innovation that we were promised. A failure in offering real choice -- which is the essence of market competition. Expanding the cap to encourage more failure is a lousy idea. I would endorse a bill requiring charters to create true specialized "magnet" programs that really do meet student needs better and offer real choice. That would seem like a sound investment of the educational money I kick into the system every year.

Typical busybody response. You know what's best! Not parents! According to you, parents are dunces. Gee, why don't you personally run all schools? Then they'd be perfect, right? Parents, schmarents. They just wander around and bump into walls, they have no clue what's best for their kids! They're selfish for trying to put their kids in the best school - of their choice. Why would a parent want such a thing? I have an idea. Force kids and parents to stay in schools that are failing, and give more money to failed school districts so they can fail even harder. Oh wait, that's already happening.

Before saying that charter schools are failing, you have to weigh in the very demographic that is being pulled into PSA's. Many of those are children who have already been failed in the public system and truely are potential 'children left behind'. Drop-outs, home-schooled students, academically struggling students, handicapped students, etc. Many of these students might lower the effectiveness stats of the public schools as well, if they were included in their accountablity stats.