US/ NCLB and Charter Schools: A Future of Hope?

In point A-1 of a section entitled Public School Choice: Non-Regulatory Guidance, part of the No Child Left Behind legislation, the Bush Administration’s sweeping 2002 act of education reform, we read the following:

Public school choice is a critical component of NCLB because it offers a student enrolled in a Title I school that is identified for school improvement, corrective action, or restructuring an opportunity to attend a public school that has not been so identified. The process of turning around a low-performing school is difficult and typically takes time, and during that time the school’s students are at risk of falling further behind if they do not have additional options. Together with the school improvement activities undertaken under Title I, public school choice can provide all students in low-performing Title I schools – including students with disabilities and limited English proficient students – the opportunity to obtain a high-quality education. In addition, expanded parental choice gives schools a greater incentive to undertake reforms and make the changes that are needed to improve student learning and reach academic achievement goals.

The above language, of course, includes the option to send children to public charter schools. Under the current administration, however, which sees education reform as focusing primarily on assisting poorly-functioning school districts as its first priority with regard to funding allocation, will the viability of charter schools be compromised?

In New York City, where 1.1 million students inhabit what has historically been one of the toughest school systems in the nation—from the point of view of both management and student/teacher life—Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s control of the system has sought to expand charter schools while it has elevated test scores and graduation rates. But Bloomberg’s supervision will expire in roughly one month, and the United Federation of Teachers is working very hard to see that it doesn’t continue.

While President Obama’s stimulus package is in the process of sending $100 billion dollars into the nation’s school districts, some have expressed alarm in places like New York State, where the legislature has frozen funding for charter schools while more than $400 million dollars has been sent into the public school districts. Yet according to Matt Anderson, a spokesperson for the New York State Budget Division, the main source of aid to charter schools comes from what is called foundation aid—a consolidation of various forms of aid that took place a few years back. “Since New York State faced an $18 billion deficit,” Anderson told me, “we needed to maintain foundation aid at the current year levels. We’ve also maintained per pupil charter school aid at prior levels as well,” he went on, reiterating that as much as possible within budget constraints, New York State is still committed to charter school development.

In Washington D.C. last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s decision to not admit any more students into the voucher program next year has elicited much controversy. Yet while President Obama has stated that he opposes vouchers but would have been willing to admit their viability if he saw results, it became apparent that his number one education man has chosen to avoid putting these results into the education equation by simply neglecting them. This has been a double whammy for many families, given the fact that public charter schools in the District are maxed out as far as enrollment goes for next fall.

Theories have abounded as to what this current administration’s stance will be on Bush’s No Child Left Behind Legislation. While some critics have accused President Obama of maintaining the status quo, others look forward to a Congressional rewrite of the law in order to make teacher requirements more stringent, raise academic standards, and intensify help for failing schools. Under NCLB, states are currently permitted to define their own academic standards, and because critics have claimed that often, states have dumbed down curricula in order to demonstrate achievement, under Obama’s administration, governors must comply with four basic measures in order to receive federal aid.

One of these is that they must pledge to improve the quality of standardized tests (although Obama himself stated in the same speech of March 10 that assessing educational progress meant more than training students to pass bubble tests). Another is that they must equitably distribute quality teachers among all students in rich and poor areas alike—and this raises concern about another issue that thus far has gone unmentioned: will the ability of parents to move their children to either better-performing public schools or public charter schools be something this administration will continue to support—or will this legislation be revised in the anticipated Congressional rewrite?

John McGrath, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education’s Office of Communications and Outreach doesn’t foresee this down the line. “Both the President and Arne Duncan say [charter schools] are not the solution but a part of the solution,” he told me when I raised the question to him. “President Obama has reiterated that the solution is to first assist failing school systems. However, he has pushed states to lift the cap on the number of charter schools, as he said in his March 10 speech.” He reiterated that “any effort to limit the number of charter schools is not in line with this administration.”

For the time being, criticism has come from authorities like education historian Diane Ravitch, who believes President Obama thus far has simply upheld the Bush status quo, and others who see his insistence on using the stimulus package to simply buttress currently failing schools and districts as a head-nod to the United Federation of Teachers—who out of all of the interest groups have the biggest investment in seeing to it that schools remain open no matter the cost to students.

According to John McGrath, however, in any future revamping of NCLB, there will still exist the possibility for public charter schools to exist, and despite the administration’s propensity to focus on the system first before the individual, in McGrath’s words, kids already in better schools “should be able to stay there.”