Another One Bites the Dust?

WaPo reports that the District of Columbia Board of Education is thinking of getting out of the charter authorizing business in D.C. My colleague Andrew Rotherham and Mark Lerner both think this is a good thing. I'm not so sure.

Don't get me wrong: Quality authorizing is critical to the success of charter schooling, bad authorizers do the movement no favors, the Board of Education has some significant problems as an authorizer, and if it has neither the will nor the capacity to become a top-notch authorizer, then it should get out of the business.

But I would be sorry to see that happen because I think that, if the Board of Education would get its act together, chartering could become a powerful part of an overall strategy to help reform DCPS.

Bear with me here: Fixing DCPS is a Herculean task, and I'm increasingly convinced that the system is just too dysfunctional in too many ways for any kind of top-down, one-fell-swoop reform to solve the underlying problems there. The best chance of achieving real, positive educational results for D.C. kids may be to hive off large parts of the system until what remains is a manageable, semi-functional core into which the Board of Education and DCPS leaders can pour reform energies. The ultimate result would look like the portfolio model Paul Hill has been talking about. And chartering--specifically converting traditional schools to charter status, or closing them down and opening new charters in their place--is the obvious tool for achieving this kind of radical paring down the system needs to thrive.

Moreover, there are a lot of gaps in D.C.'s current educational system--neighborhoods with no good schools, lots of kids who need alternative placements but have nowhere to go, and the like. High-quality chartering--in which the Board of Education would request proposals and recruit successful charter operators to open the kind of schools the city currently lacks--strikes me as an efficient way to address this problem.

It's important to note that both of these functions are ones that the Board of Education is uniquely situated to perform. The D.C. Public Charter School Board is a good (though not perfect) authorizer, and it has been critical to the growth of D.C.'s strong charter sector. But it can't help DCPS pare down or diagnose and fill gaps in the existing DCPS options. The Public Charter Schools Board's strength is its ability to independently create space for new schools in the District. The Board of Education's potential strength as an authorizer would be using chartering to complement and support DCPS reform efforts.

That's not to say it would be easy for the Board of Education to shift to this role. Even though it's become much more effective since the institution of the hybrid board in 2000, the Board of Education still behaves too often as if it were designed to be dysfunctional (and, in some ways, it is). Moreover, the Board still has an "us versus them" attitude towards charter schools, seeing them as competition rather a potential complement to DCPS reform, and its charter monitoring responsibilities as a distraction from running DCPS, rather than a potential tool to help the system work better.

While there are some very smart and talented board members who support high-quality charter schools, I'm not sure the Board of Education overall has the will to change its perspective on charter schools or the capacity to manage charter school oversight effectively. If this is the case, then it would be best for the Board to get out of the business entirely. But I'm still holding out hope they can find the will and ability to prove their critics wrong.

UPDATE: Andy Smarick at Charter Blog has some good comments on this. But I also think he's wrong about the KIPP deal. (Sorry, Andy!)