The only reason a traditional public school should feel threatened by a charter public school is if the former is doing a poor job of educating students.
Where public schools are competently run, are staffed by qualified, motivating teachers and have strong parental support and involvement, then there will be no demand for a charter school and zero threat of losing students to one.
But where that is not happening — where administration is dysfunctional, where teachers don’t know their subject matter or are terrible at communicating it, where parental apathy is the norm — Mississippi has an obligation to try to create a viable alternative for those students and their families who want better but can’t afford private education.
This week, the Legislature voted to send to Gov. Phil Bryant a bill to expand on the charter school law enacted three years ago. The legislation, which Bryant is expected to sign, is designed to make it easier to establish charter schools in rural areas, such as the Delta, where they are heavily needed given the high number of substandard schools and districts.
The legislation would allow students in school districts with academic ratings of C, D or F — on the state’s A-to-F scale — to cross district lines to attend a charter school. Up until now, charter schools could only draw students from the D and F districts in which they were located.
That restriction has made it more difficult for these alternative public schools to be established in more thinly populated areas. For a school to make it financially, it has to have a critical mass of students. It’s tougher to reach that mass where districts have smaller enrollments. Of the four charter schools that, under the 2013 law, have been started or in the process of being established, all are located in Jackson.
Mississippi is late to the charter school movement because of a history of either ignoring it or putting stumbling blocks in its way. This legislation will remove another one of those obstacles so that this state can truly see — not just in Jackson but elsewhere — whether charters can break the monopoly of mediocrity where it exists.
