Maine moves closer to allow charter schools to operate

In Maine today, the Senate advanced a preliminary bill that would push the state to allow charter schools to operate. The measure now moves to the state House.

A copy of the bill can be found here. The Sun Journal reports:

Proponents say charter schools bring flexibility and innovation to Maine education, offering students and parents the choice of a private school-like education without having to pay tuition. Sen. Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls, the bill’s lead sponsor, said charters can tailor their curriculum to create specialized schools, such as an arts-based elementary school or a one that focuses on agriculture. Mason described Maine’s current public education system as “one size fits all” that doesn’t work for every student.”Sometimes we have square pegs that don’t fit in the round holes,” he said.

Opponents have countered that charters aren’t the panacea to education problems. They said charters, which are publicly funded, take students and resources from traditional public schools that are already underfunded. If successful, critics say, charters can destroy the public schools in their communities. Sen. Margaret Craven, D-Lewiston, said charters in other states like Massachusetts were “hoovering up” high-performing students from public schools, leaving them with fewer students but the same costs to keep the facilities running.

If Maine passes its charter school legislation it would become the 41^st state to do so,according to USCharterSchools.org. Vermont, Alabama, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Washington,  Kentucky, and West Virginia are the other states without charter school legislation. The site also explains charter schools offer similar results to traditional public schools but involve less public funds, with average per-pupil fundingdisparity of $1,800.

The jury is still out on the effectiveness of charter schools. In 2010, the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty completed a study examining the charter school effect on post-Katrina New Orleans, finding the biggest school re-organization effort in the country has led to “‘a separate but unequal tiered system of schools’ that sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective, high-performing schools, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty, low-performing schools.”

In another study from 2010, a team at the University of Colorado in Boulder followed the graduation rates of displaced students who were relocated to new schools after administrators closed down ones in which they were enrolled. The dropout rates among these students doubled, and their likelihood of graduating fell from 71 to 49 percent.

US News and World Report published its list of the top 100 public high schools in the U.S. which included 15 charter schools last year, a high representation given the majority of K-12 programs are not chartered. The article explains most charter programs admit students based on a selection process. With few exceptions, traditional public schools do not maintain an application system.