Discussions of charter schools and school choice often end up focusing on money: Relative costs of the various alternatives, competition for scarce resources, and so on.
But those discussions tend to look at things only in terms of expenditures, rather than in terms of investments. They tend to be about preserving what we have, rather than about pursuing what we need. They tend to focus on playing defense, to the exclusion of offense.
That needs to change.
Consider this: A kid who decides to leave a regular public school in order to attend a charter school is willing to leave behind all the protections that the state has put in place for students of regular public schools. He’s like an astronaut — willing to risk going somewhere new, in order to bring back knowledge that can help everyone else.
It’s beyond dispute that our current system is broken. Consider that while our graduation rate is above 90 percent, only 40 percent of graduating students can perform at even the most basic levels of proficiency in fundamental subjects like reading and mathematics. This isn’t sustainable. But how do we figure out how to fix it?
The same way we figure out anything important. By conducting experiments. By trying new things, freed from the red tape and bureaucratic hoops that may represent best practices, but which clearly aren’t good practices. Anything we learn from these experiments, we can apply to all public schools, helping all the students they serve.
That’s what charter schools are for. And our ‘edunauts’ — the brave students who are willing to assume the risks that always accompany advances in knowledge — should get the same kind of respect, and support, that we give to our astronauts.
Remember Blockbuster Video? At its peak, it was an amazing store. They had the inventory, they had the indexing, they had the locations. But they didn’t keep up with Netflix and other competitors. They didn’t take into account changes in technology. They just kept doing the same things, in the same way. So they went out of business. Which is what should have happened.
If Blockbuster had a been the same kind of tax-funded monopoly as a regular public school, all those stores would still be there, taking up prime real estate. You’d be paying your ‘video tax’ to keep them in business, on top of whatever you were paying to other stores or businesses to actually watch movies. They’d still have VHS tapes for rent, and each rental would be around $20, because they’d have to keep raising their prices to account for a declining customer base.
The Blockbuster story demonstrates something crucial about accountability. Unless an institution can go out of business, it cannot, in any meaningful way, be said to be accountable to its customers. And an institution that is not accountable to the people it’s supposed to be serving can be counted on to serve itself instead.
Perhaps the most important aspects of charter schools and private schools is that they go out of business if they fail to deliver on their promises. That’s what makes them valuable as test beds for new ideas — we can tell whether those ideas are working by how well the schools gain and keep the support of the parents who entrust their children to them.
And more than anything else, it’s ideas that work — not money — that we need in order to finally move education out of the 19th century and into the 21st.
