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June
5, 2003, 9:15 a.m.
Charter Tantrum
The New York
Times takes on President Bush through charter schools.
By Chester
E. Finn Jr.
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 ove
over New Yorker. Out of the way, Updike and Bellow. The New
York Times is fast becoming one of America's foremost sources of fiction.
Tuesday's "editorial observer" column by veteran Timesman
Francis X. Clines ("Re-educating
the Voters About Texas' Schools") abounds with such biased and
erroneous allegations about charter schools in Texas (and beyond) as to
prove once again that fealty to the facts wins no points at the nation's
former "newspaper of record," especially if the untruths can
be used to savage Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular.
The nominal
point of Clines's tantrum is that charter schools — independently operated
public schools, freed from many of the usual bureaucratic encumbrances —
are sapping scarce resources from "real" public schools and putting
them to no good use. Clines views charter schools as an education failure
so enormous that it's forcing Texas to lower statewide academic standards.
The subtext, however,
says the education-reform initiatives that Bush launched in Texas —
an energetic combination of standards, tests, consequences and competition
— and then went national with via his signature "No Child Left
Behind" act are not working in the state where they were piloted.
The public-school establishment dislikes them. Hence readers are encouraged
to conclude that the president is steering America in the wrong direction.
Perhaps Clines belongs
to the National Education Association or the Democratic National Committee.
He's certainly singing their tunes. He's also wrong in almost every sentence
of this column. Four examples will suffice:
He terms charter schools a "beloved conservative stratagem"
that, at public expense, provides "a nonpublic alternative to public
schools." Wrong. Charter schools have bipartisan roots, supported
by Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Roy Romer, and the Democratic
Leadership Council as much as by conservatives. Indeed, many on the
right are wary precisely because charters are not truly independent. Embrace
them or not, however, everyone save Clines recognizes that they're a genre
of public schools: publicly financed, zero-tuition institutions that are
open to all comers, obliged to teach to state academic standards and administer
state tests, and dependent for their existence on decisions made by government
officials.
Clines alleges that Texas is one of the "states that have had to
ease their own third-grade reading test standards to avoid failing thousands
of students" — and that the failure rate is especially high
in charter schools. The fact is that Texas has, in recent years, been
toughening its academic standards and the new ones are just being phased
in, more rigorous than before, albeit not so rigorous as one hopes they'll
become. (Instead of starting high, Texas has a long history of slowly
ratcheting up its academic expectations for schools and pupils.)
Clines cites the demise of an eighth of Texas charters as proof that this
reform strategy is a fiscal and educational failure. Nationally, some
200 charter schools have closed. Yet most people celebrate this as a victory
for accountability. Instead of keeping unsuccessful schools on life support
as the regular school system does, the charter movement buries its dead.
Like many education establishmentarians, Clines uses verbs like "siphoning"
and "divert" to describe what charter schools do to the funding
of conventional public-school systems. This canard makes sense only if
you believe the money belongs to the school system, not that it was appropriated
for the education of children in whatever school they opt to attend. (Does
a college student attending Rice with the help of a state scholarship
or loan "siphon" money from the University of Texas?) Whose
money is it and for what is it being spent?
No point in saying
"shame on the New York Times" because that paper's shamelessness
has long been on display. Perhaps we should simply view it as America's
only major daily source of fiction — and then plead for less predictable
plots and more finely drawn characters.
—
Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas
B. Fordham Foundation and a former assistant U.S. secretary of education.
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