Why Choice Alone is Not Enough

NACSA's Greg Richmond has a terrific Education Week op-ed about what the charter school movement must do to build quality at scale. You should read it. Conveniently for me, it's also directly applicable to the point I made in the previous post. Richmond's key graph:

If we are to establish high-quality charter schools at scale, it is not sufficient to simply knock down barriers and get out of the way. We must create new systems of support based on innovation and flexibility.

As Richmond explains: "The prevailing 1990s philosophy was that the best role for government was to eliminate barriers and get out of the way," but that approach led to serious quality problems in states like Texas and Ohio. As charter school leaders and others who care about both improving outcomes for poor students and improving choice in education think about how to expand choice, we need to take seriously the lessons of the charter movement to date that removing barriers and increasing choice alone don't solve the problem: We need accountability and concerted effort, by a diverse coalition of private, public, and community organizations, to build and support quality schools at scale