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Charter Schools

Much has changed in the education world since the United States was declared a "nation at risk" in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. We've been reforming and reforming and reforming some more. In fact, "education reform" has itself become a growth industry, as we have devised a thousand innovations and spent billions to implement them. We have tinkered with class size, fiddled with graduation requirements, sought to end "social promotion, "pushed technology into the schools, crafted new academic standards, revamped teacher training, bought different textbooks, and on and on.
Most of these alterations were launched with good will and the honest expectation that they would turn the situation around. But the problem with much of this reform churning is that the people who courageously addressed this issue in 1983 basically took for granted that the public school system as we knew it was the proper vehicle for making those changes and that its familiar machinery could produce better products if it were tuned up, adequately fueled and properly directed. In short, requisite changes would be made by school boards and superintendents, principals and teachers, federal and state education departments, and would be implemented either in time-honored system-wide fashion or through equally familiar"pilot" and"demonstration"programs.
Yet despite much effort, decent intentions, and billions of dollars, most reform efforts have yielded meager dividends, with little changing for the better. Test scores are generally flat, and U.S. twelfth graders lag far behind their international counterparts in math and science, although our school expenditures are among the planet's highest. On the reports of the National Education Goals Panel which monitors progress toward the ambitious objectives set by President Bush and the governors in 1989, most years we see the number of arrows that point upward just about equaled by the number pointing down. Combining large...