Editor’s note: Washington state is one of only nine states that don’t have charter schools. But voters can change that in November if they approve Initiative 1240, which will allow up to 40 charters statewide over five years. Chris Eide, who heads a Seattle-based ed reform group called Teachers United, tells redefinED in this emailed Q&A that it’s the students who struggle the most who will benefit if voters say yes.

This is the fourth time Washington voters will go to the polls to vote on charter schools. They said no the first three times. Why will this time be different?

The last time voters looked at the option of charter schools in our state was eight years ago. Over that time, we have been unable to significantly address the needs of our struggling students. Moreover, the families of those students are often without high-quality options that can adapt to and address the needs of their children. Additionally, over the past eight years, high-performing charter schools across the country have demonstrated success for struggling students. Families in 41 other states have this option now, and Washington voters are faced with an easy decision to help struggling students.  

Why does Washington state need charter schools?

Like other states, Washington has had a difficult time addressing the needs of struggling students. In some schools, nearly 40 percent of students are dropping out and far too many who do graduate are not prepared for college or their career. Public charter schools would be an option that will allow those students and families to attend a school that might better address their needs. If we hope to have more of our students graduating high school prepared for life after K-12, we are going to need all of the high-quality options that we can get.

You pointed out in a recent Seattle Times column that Initiative 1240 will only allow high-performing charters. How is that defined? And why did you stress that distinction? (more…)

The dilemma Natalie Hopkinson faces in finding the right school for her 11-year-old son is not limited to the African-American neighborhoods of the District of Columbia, and the winners and losers she decries as part of new education reforms have a much longer history in the field of public education.

Ms. Hopkinson, writing Monday in The New York Times, looked across Rock Creek Park in D.C. to see a mostly white, affluent community with a new middle school that includes rugby, fencing and an International Baccalaureate program and concludes: “Such inequities are the perverse result of a ‘reform’ process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system.”

Unfortunately, such inequities are a powerful reminder of history. They bring us back to the end of the 19th century, when a U.S. Supreme Court pretended that separate was equal, and to a young black girl in Topeka, Kansas, nearly a half-century later who refused to pass by higher-quality white schools on her way to one whose students matched the color of her skin.

Ms. Hopkinson’s anguish is genuine, even if her analysis is askew. Yes, educational choice can produce what amounts to winners and losers, as some schools tangle with waiting lists and others battle to keep open their doors. But the historic winners and losers fell almost exclusively along lines of race and class in an assignment system defined principally by geography. Live in the right neighborhoods and you had access to the best schools.

One of the ugly realities of our half-century struggle to break apart legally sanctioned racial segregation in public education was that schools in black neighborhoods were often bulldozed or converted to magnets that primarily served white students from other areas. As such, black students tended to be bused away from home, and their neighborhood options, as Ms. Hopkinson still finds to this day, were limited or nonexistent.

The educational options that are proliferating in D.C. around the nation, though, have the effect of breaking down the geographical divide by enticing parents to look beyond their assigned school for learning options that match the learning styles of their own children. That, indeed, could involve charter schools or magnet programs or career academies or online courses or scholarship schools where the parental demand exceeds the educational supply. But the answer to that dilemma is not fewer, but more, options.