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January 16, 2008

School Choice Showdown on the Editorial Pages

Two interesting commentaries in today's Morning Shots – one an editorial in a Colorado paper on a charter proposal that lost on appeal to the State Board of Education, and the other from Tom Needles, who served as then-Gov. George Voinovich's education adviser at the time Ohio's charter and voucher laws were put in place during the 1990s.

The Colorado editorial, harkening to some imagined "why can't we all just get along" détente among Democratic presidential candidates (that's your first clue), chastises the charter parents' vow to "continue their effort to create an alternative to the local public schools. This is unfortunate. Their efforts would be better placed working within the school system to implement some [of] the laudable educational features they desire."
 
Although the charter proposal in Colorado would have served a small rural community (the editorial offers the argument: "In a small town such as Ridgway, there simply does not exist a scale of economy to support duplicating educational facilities"), and Mr. Needles' comments regard the 86,000 mostly urban schoolchildren who are exercising choice in Ohio through charters and vouchers, his points get at the real reason why parents continue to fight for educational choices to address districts' shortfalls, even in self-proclaimed "good" districts.
 
"Critics of school choice either don't understand or are too caught up in their tired arguments to see that at its most fundamental level, school choice became a moral issue.... We understood the simple concept that competition within any industry, including education, is absolutely necessary to guarantee results.... I wish [the education bureaucracy] would stop blaming kids and their families, rather than themselves, for failure.... Here's an idea for all those public school leaders who continue to fight so hard to preserve one of the last monopolies left in America: Join with us to compete so that all ... schools, both public and private, continue to improve."
 
Because while districts might claim to embrace the goal of providing "the best education possible for our youth," families shouldn't have to wait around, begging at the school house door to be heard, while deaf bureaucrats fail, year after year, to deliver on that goal.

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