Families deserve school choice

I respond to gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich’s call to allow local school districts to vote to disallow any charter schools from operating in that district. A wise man once said “follow the money.” This cuts a couple different ways in public education. Traditional school districts follow the money by seeking to retain as many of “their” students as possible to gain as high a share of per pupil funding as possible. Charter schools do the same by offering an alternative to students, with the share of funding that comes with that student’s choice adding to their profit margin.

Just as some public school districts are better than others, some charter schools are better than others. It is pretty easy to take shots at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which has very publicly and obviously allowed itself to become the poster child for everything wrong with charter schools, but it should not represent fodder for those who condemn the very principle of school choice that charters represent.

There is plenty of blame to go around with regard to the ECOT fiasco. Yes, ECOT tried to cook the books for financial gain, but how did they do so with such ease? Apparently they didn’t even have the means to measure whether students were enrolled at all.

Why were the oversight bodies not aware of this? Where was the monitoring? If anything, this should be fixed as opposed to throwing out the baby with the bath water by laying waste to all charters.

Families deserve options regarding where and how their children are educated regardless of the financial ramifications of that decision. To deny them the opportunity to do that is simply a disservice and should never be a hallmark of our system of public education.

Christopher Dalheim Galena