RALEIGH – North Carolina’s statutory cap of 100 charter schools is going to disappear sooner or later. It’ll be sooner if charter-school advocates in the General Assembly and elsewhere can marry their case, based on the merits of the policy, with the prospect of North Carolina running afoul of the Obama administration.
That’s what happened this summer in neighboring Tennessee, where the state legislature rescinded its statewide cap on charter schools. Gov. Phil Bredeson signed the legislation in June.
There were reportedly several factors in play in Tennessee. Bucking the national trend, Republicans had a good year in 2008 and took over the legislature for the first time. Generally speaking, GOP lawmakers are more receptive to charter schools than Democrats are, though Bredeson and many charter supporters in Tennessee are Democrats. Also, charter advocates invested a tremendous amount of time and effort making their case, both in Nashville and in local communities.
But another key factor was the prospect of losing federal dollars. President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, has made it clear that states with artificial limits on charter school creation and expansion will have a hard time securing their full share of “Race To The Top” federal grants.
Tennessee Democrats took the threat seriously and signaled to their party’s legislators that it was okay to vote for more charters. So did their counterparts in Illinois, which also raised its cap. Here in North Carolina, where Democrats retain control of both the governor’s office and the legislature, will a similar argument prevail?
It hasn’t yet. During the 2009 session, charter-school advocates pointed to the Obama administration policy as a reason to lift the 100-school cap, to no avail. JLF’s Terry Stoops has chimed in with additional, timely arguments: that increasing charter schools would save local taxpayers millions of dollars in school construction costs and that charters would help satisfy the need for more career and technical education.
If anything, the case for lifting North Carolina’s cap is more pressing than in Tennessee or Illinois. The cap here is truly limiting the ability of North Carolina families to access charter schools, whereas in the other states the cap hasn’t even been reached yet. There are already applications from experienced charter-school operators to open new charter schools in underserved North Carolina counties. They’re just waiting for permission from the state to proceed.
But do charter schools in North Carolina really provide better educational opportunities? In recent years, there was some basis for questioning whether they do. But in the ABC performance composites just released by the Department of Public Instruction, the state’s charter schools outperformed the district-run schools with 73 percent of charter students testing at grade level compared to 70 percent of other public-school students.
The best-run charters have long been pacesetters in public education. And as a whole, North Carolina charters have delivered academic performance roughly similar to the district schools while spending thousands of dollars less per pupil. So on the merits, ridding the state of the charter-school cap has always made sense.
It’s time for Democratic politicians and the education establishment to ask themselves a question. Is their intransigence on charter schools worth rising hundreds of million of dollars to maintain?
I’m no fan of federal involvement in education. But they are. Now, they have a choice to make. Here’s hoping they opt for, well, choice.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation