Category: Education

In the previous essay I considered the monopoly argument for them. On this view, charter schools break the state’s harmful monopoly on education. It is worth noting that the state does not have a monopoly on education (there are private, non-charter schools). Instead, the state schools often have a monopoly on public money and charter schools break this monopoly by receiving public money. This, it is argued by charter school proponents, allows for more choice. They are right. But not all choices are good choices.

Without charter schools, people have one less type of alternative to publics schools. But there are alternatives. One is home schooling. While this is appealing to some, it has obvious limits and doing it well demands much of the parents. Another alternative is attending a non-charter private school. While these schools can provide excellent education, they are also often known for being expensive. As such, they are usually only an option for those who can afford them. Because charter schools receive public money, they can provide an alternative to public schools for those who cannot afford a private school. However, there is the question of why there should be such a choice and why people would take it.

Proponents of charter schools often claim charter schools provide better education than public schools or have some other advantage, such as being safer. Proponents of charter schools point to failing public schools and their various problems as support for their view. While this is a rational argument, it does raise some concerns.

One concern is that while there are bad public schools and excellent charter schools, there are also excellent public schools and awful charter schools. As such, there is nothing intrinsic to the public system that necessitates its badness nor anything intrinsic to the charter system that necessitates its superiority. This raises the question about what factors determine school quality.

The easy and obvious answer is funding. It is no accident that the best schools tend to be in affluent neighborhoods and the worst schools tend to be in poor areas. After all, most public school funding is local and based on property taxes. As such, high value property generates more funding for schools. Low value property generates less. Naturally, this is not the whole story for school funding, but it is an important part. It is also worth noting that it is not just community wealth that is a factor. Community health is also important for the quality of education. After all, stable communities that have families actively involved in the school can create a very good educational experience for the children. However, wealth and health often travel hand in hand.

Parents usually prefer their children to attend the best schools. This is why parents who have the income buy houses in the best school districts. This provides another limit to choice: while anyone can attend the best public schools, they must be able to afford to live in the districts that have the best schools. This public school is analogous to private schools; one must pay to be able to choose to attend. An appealing promise of charter schools is that children can escape the poor schools and go to a superior charter school, using public money rather than needing to rely on the resources of the family.

While this is appealing, there are obvious problems. One is that poor schools will become poorer as they lose students and will decline until only those who cannot escape remain as students. This is like spending a fortune on lifeboats for an ailing ship rather than using the money to fix it.

Of course, this analogy could be countered by saying that the public-school ship is doomed and the only viable option is to escape. This is a reasonable counter. If a school is so badly wrecked that it cannot be saved, then escaping to another school would be as sensible as fleeing a sinking ship. The challenge is, however, showing that this should be a charter school and not a new public school.

 Another concern is that it would seem to make more sense to use the public money to improve the public school so that parents would want their children to attend. After all, if parents want to choose good schools, the best use of public money would seem to be to make public schools better. Since there are excellent public schools, this is something that can be done with proper funding and a strong community. As noted above, there is no special magic to charters that makes them inherently better than public schools. To use another analogy, the charter school argument is like pointing to the poorly maintained roads of a community and saying that the solution is not to fix the roads, but to use the public money to put in another set of roads adjacent to the existing roads. It would seem to make much more sense to fix the existing public roads rather than building charter roads.

Given the above discussion, the choice argument for charter schools based on quality does not appear compelling. Unless it can be shown that charter schools are inherently better than public schools in virtue of being charters, then it would be better to improve the quality of existing public schools rather than siphoning away public money to charter schools. There are, however, other factors that figure into offering choices in education. In the next essay I will look at the appeal of ideological choice: charter schools can offer an ideological or theological alternative to public schools.

Before discussing charter schools, I need to present factors that might bias me against them. Like many Americans, I attended public schools for K-12. Unlike some Americans, I got a good education that provided the foundation for my undergraduate and graduate education. Both of my parents were educators in public schools.  My father taught math and computer science and my mother was a guidance counsellor. I went to a private college for my undergraduate degree and then to a public graduate school. This led to my current career as a philosophy professor at a public university. I belong to the United Faculty of Florida, the NEA and the AFT. As might be suspected, my background inclines me to have some suspicions about charter schools in the context of the political climate of today. Because of this, I take special care to consider the matter fairly and objectively.

As with most politically charged debates, the battle over charter schools is long on rhetoric and short on logical arguments. Proponents of charter schools lament the poor quality of public education, rail against indoctrination, and crusade for choice, and praise the profit motive as panacea. Opponents of charter schools sometimes see them as harmful to the public good, places of indoctrination, and as profiting at the expense of the children.

 While there is some merit behind these rhetorical stances, charter schools should neither be accepted nor rejected based on rhetoric. As liberals and conservatives have pointed out, the American public education system has problems. Charter schools have been advanced as a proposal to address some of these problems and should be given objective consideration. I will begin with what can be called the monopoly argument in favor of charter schools.

Proponents of charter schools assert that the state holds a monopoly on education and employ arguments by analogy to show why this is a bad thing. For example, the state monopoly on education might be compared to living in an area with only one internet service provider. This provider offers poor service and there is no competition. While this is better than not having any internet access at all, it is a bad situation that could be improved by competition. If the analogy holds, then the harm of poor-quality schools could be addressed by allowing competition.

This analogy can also be used to argue that people who do not have children in school should not be forced to pay into the education system. This would like making people pay for internet access they do not use. But this is another issue.

While the analogy does have some appeal, the state already lacks a monopoly on education. There are already private schools that operate without public money. These provide competition to public schools. By going through the appropriate procedures, anyone with the resources can create a private school. And anyone with the resources to afford a private school can attend. As such, there is already a competitive education industry in place that provides an alternative to public education. There is also the option of home schooling, which also breaks the monopoly.

Supporters of charter schools can counter that there is a monopoly without charter schools. To be specific, without charter schools, public schools have a monopoly on public money. Charter schools, by definition, break this monopoly by allowing public funds to go to schools outside the state education system.

This can allow privately owned charter schools to enjoy what amounts to state subsidies, thus making it easier to start a privately-owned charter school than a privately funded private school. Those who are concerned about state subsidies and things like welfare might find the use of state funds problematic, perhaps because it seems to confer an unfair advantage over privately funded schools and funnels public money into private hands.

Supporters of charter schools can counter these criticisms by turning them into virtues. Public money spent on charter schools is good exactly because it makes it easier to fund competing schools. Private schools without public funding need to operate in a free market. They must compete for customer money without the benefit of the state picking winners and losers. As such, there will not be as many privately funded schools as there would be charter schools funded by taxpayer money in a form of school welfare.

As such, charter schools would break the public-school system’s monopoly on public money, although there is not a monopoly on education (since privately funded schools exist). The question remains as to whether breaking the funding monopoly is a good thing or not, which leads to the subject of the next essay in this series, that of choice.