K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers’ Union Attempts To Strangle Charters:

Teachers’ unions are using the same kind of approach to kill charter schools that abortion opponents use to shut abortion clinics down: pile up expensive regulations that make it increasingly difficult to operate. . . .

There are, however, other ways that school districts can address legitimate concerns about whether charter schools are serving hard to serve children. The unions may hate it because it isn’t punitive, but state and federal education should be topping up the reimbursement that charters get for enrolling kids with special needs or other problems, including poverty and home problems, that put them at risk. Increasing the value of the voucher that parents of such children get, or increasing the per-pupil payment that government pays charter schools will help ensure that charter operators will make special efforts to reach out to these communities.
The hostility between many teacher unions and the charter school and voucher movement is a tragedy of modern American life. What we really need is a proliferation of teacher-owned, teacher-managed cooperative educational ventures—operating either in public school buildings or in churches or in other community spaces. These coops should receive favorable regulatory and tax treatment, and give teachers the latitude to teach in an environment they control. Different coops would cater to different kinds of students, or different age groups, or offer different educational philosophies. Parents would be able to chose among many alternative programs, and teacher assessment could be something that the community would do in a much richer and holistic way—good coops would get good word of mouth.

Developing an education approach that offers more choice, that prioritizes the needs of poor students, that offers rewards for good teachers while setting them free to run their own programs rather than kowtow to administrators: this is something America can and ought to do.

In fact, of course, charter schools are the last hope for public schools to hang onto parents before they’re abandoned entirely — which abandonment, in the numbers in which it’s happening in a lot of systems, is enough to precipitate a death spiral of shrinking enrollment and declining public support.