A pot of federal education money should be enough to entice legislators to strengthen North Carolina charter schools.
The federal government has $4.4 billion to spend on its "Race to the Top" public-school innovation program. Gov. Bev Perdue has said that she will aggressively pursue some of it.
But our own short-sightedness and obstinacy over charter schools could disqualify the state before a penny ever gets here. President Obama is a big fan of charter schools, and the U.S. Department of Education recently told McClatchy Newspapers that a state's policies toward charters will factor into whether it gets any of the money.
That is not good news for North Carolina.
Enacted in the mid-1990s, North Carolina's charter-schools law was designed to contain the charter movement. The Democratic-led Senate consented to charters despite opposition because House Republicans, who controlled that chamber, held out for them. But since then Democrats have led both chambers of the legislature and the governor's office and they refuse to improve the law.
The law's biggest failing is that it caps the number of charter schools at 100. There are 36,000 students in those 100 schools, some of which are recognized nationally for innovation and excellence. Charter supporters want to either remove the cap altogether, or at least raise it. But they have had no success. A House-passed bill to raise the cap to 106 is sitting in a Senate committee now.
North Carolina's law also stifles innovation. Administrative restrictions keep the schools from operating as true charter schools -- that is, as public schools with good public financing and considerable freedom from the oppressive conventionalism of public-school regulation and administration. A national assessment of financing equity and operational independence showed last week that North Carolina's charter schools are among the nation's weakest.
There is no denying the political power of the educational establishment in North Carolina, a force opposed to charter schools. But they have been shown both here and across the country to provide excellent educational opportunities for specifically defined groups of children, such as the academically challenged and scholastically elite.
North Carolina needs a new attitude about charter schools. The legislature should raise the cap and set a schedule for raising it further in the future. Our universities, public and private, should be encouraged to help put innovative educational ideas into practice in these schools. And the financing inequities in the current law should be corrected.
Added to the other innovative programs in our schools, such a new approach to charter schools would almost certainly prod the feds to recognize that North Carolina is a great place to invest in "the race to the top."
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