Bill Ritter, education funding and the schools of New Orleans

Everybody wants something for nothing. For instance, the state education fund will be insolvent by 2010. But Governor Bill Ritter's plans to fund it - first by using federal mineral-lease royalties, then by freezing the mill levy - have met with stiff opposition.

Next up, Ritter follows the President's lead and borrows the money from China.

But what if solutions aren't what the GOP is after? What if it wants to create seemingly unsolvable problems as an excuse to foist charter schools upon the state?

Charter schools certainly seem to be on the agenda of Dr. Barry Fagin, an Independence Institute senior fellow and adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (A name which ought to raise a red flag for many of you.)

Fagin's column in the Monday, March 19 print edition of The Denver Daily News sang the praises of Daniel Hudson, who Fagin says he first read of in The Atlantic. Fagin lauds Hudson as a "tough disciplinarian" who is fighting "Big Easy bahavior" in the emerging schools of New Orleans. Coincidentally, I also read The Atlantic. So I know the article was ambivalent about Hudson's methods and results:

[Hudson's story] seemed to make no impression on the young man. I couldn't tell whether it was because the student was already too far gone, or because Hudson was so busy talking, and yelling, that he had forgotten how to listen... As Hudson himself knew well, the time he spent in the halls, the endless meetings with parents, meant he knew little of what was happening in the classroom. What was clear, in the time I spent in classes, was how little of the training Jarvis had mandated for teachers seemed to have taken.

Fagin calls the education experiment in New Orleans "unprecedented in American history... Parents have complete freedom to send their child wherever they want. The money follows their child, period. In response, schools are springing up like wildfire." In fact, New Orleans' "experiment" has led to a scary reality - school administrators who want to screen out underachievers and blacks:

Huger would have preferred that his school have selective admissions, by which students are screened on criteria like test scores and grade-point averages. He also would have preferred more of what he delicately called "diversity" - as in white children. But under the guidelines, choice ran only one way: Huger would have to educate any child who chose him.

The same article reports that across America, charter schools are failing to meet academic benchmarks. In Washington, D.C., "the latest numbers showed that only four of thirty-four charter schools had met academic benchmarks. And in Philadelphia, the most recent data showed schools run by educational management companies - which Huger saw as the best bet when run in partnership with local nonprofits like his - lagging behind public schools in improving performance."

As Ritter said at a recent Bell Policy Center event, education is the key to opportunity and economic growth. And there's little doubt that our schools need an overhaul; Democratic leaders like Andrew Romanoff are leading the way. But charter schools are far from the silver bullet the free market fundies make them out to be.