From Thomas Sowell’s recent column “Moral Bankruptcy“:
The arguments against charter schools are so phony that anyone with a decent education should be able to see right through them. Unfortunately, the very failure of many traditional public schools to provide a decent education enables their defenders to get away with arguments that could not survive any serious analysis.
Consider the incessantly repeated argument that charter schools are “taking money away from the public schools.” Charter schools are themselves public schools, educating children who have a legal right to be educated with taxpayer money set aside for that purpose. When some fraction of children move from traditional public schools to charter schools, why should the same fraction of money not move with them?
What is the money for, if not to educate children? The amount of taxpayer money spent per child in charter schools is seldom, if ever, greater than the amount spent per child in traditional public schools. Often it is less.
Another argument used in attacking charter schools is that, despite particular charter schools with outstanding results, by and large charter school students’ results on educational tests are no better than the results in traditional public schools. Even if we accept this claim, it leaves out one crucial fact.
White students and Asian students together constitute a majority of the students in traditional public schools. Black students and Hispanic students together constitute a majority of the students in charter schools. On virtually all educational tests, black and Hispanic students score significantly lower than white and Asian students. If charter schools as a whole just produce educational results comparable to those in traditional public schools as a whole, that is a big improvement.
If you want to make a comparison of educational results with comparable students, you can look at results among children living in the same neighborhood, at the same grade levels — and with both charter school children and children in a traditional school being educated in the very same building.
Such comparisons in New York City showed, almost every time, a majority of the students in the traditional public school scoring in the bottom half in both math and English, while the percentage of charter school students scoring in the top half was some multiple of the percentage of other students scoring that high.
This is what the teachers’ unions and the politicians want to put a stop to. Who will speak up for those children?