Obama's Town Hall Charter School Remarks: Your Take?

Below are Obama's remarks on charter schools during his Online Town Hall last week. I'm in a rush, but have added some of my own reactions to his comments. Consider them conversation-starters. How do you read the tea-leaves in his statement?  Obama:

The definition of charter schools is pretty straightforward. And that is that in most states you now have a mechanism where you set up a public school -- so this is not private schools, these are public schools receiving public dollars -- but they have a charter that allows them to experiment and try new things. And typically, they're partnering up with some sort of non-for-profit institution.

So, in Chicago, you've got charter schools that are affiliated with a museum, or they're affiliated with an arts program, and they may have a particular focus. It may be a science charter school, or it may be a language academy. They are still going to have to meet all the various requirements of a state-mandated curriculum; they're still subject to the same rules and regulations and accountability. But they've got some flexibility in terms of how they design it. Oftentimes they are getting parents to participate in new ways in the school. So they become laboratories of new and creative learning.

Now, there are some charter schools that are doing a great job, and you are seeing huge increases in student performance. And by the way -- one last point I want to make about these charters -- they're non-selective, so it's not a situation where they're just cherry-picking the kids who are already getting the highest grades; they've got to admit anybody. And typically there are long waiting lines, so they use some sort of lottery to admit them.

Me: But they don't have to keep anybody. They can expel students who don't excel or cause problems. And they can also say "no" when their enrollment caps are met. Public schools can't. Traditional public schools also have far more special needs and non-native English language learners than charters. And public schools also can't set parental involvement conditions. And public schools don't get the supplemental funds from the billionaires, so they spend less per student than charters.

Given all of that, still, if we're going to say charters should still be supported in order to serve as those "laboratories," the missing link in all of this talk centers on this question: "What's the mechanism that will allow for that 'duplication of success' in traditional public schools?" And how will traditional public schools ever have the opportunity to duplicate charter successes when traditional public schools, as Obama acknowledges, are given neither the "flexibility" nor the extra funding enjoyed by charter schools? One dangerous answer to this is: Traditional public schools will have that "flexibility" when they are able to break union-negotiated teacher protections - to be union-free - and when they submit to the meddling of Gates, Broad, and the other billionaires at the Business Roundtable when they dangle their strings-attached money. What percentage could be shaved from, say, the military budget, to provide the funding from tax revenues equal to that of the edupreneurs?

Some of them are doing great work, huge progress and great innovation; and there's some charters that haven't worked out so well. And just like bad -- or regular schools, they need to be shut down if they're not doing a good job. But what charters do is they give an opportunity for experimentation and then duplication of success. And we want to encourage that. So that's the definition of charters.

Me: As for that, I'll quote member/guest-blogger Jennifer Parker's comment on an earlier post:

Chartered schools were conceived for flexibity and innovation, but there is no one charter law written for this reason. Charter school law consists of a body of individual state laws, with much variance.

I'll speak for myself when I say that every school needs to be flexible and innovative. It's damaging to create two systems: the chartered schools that can be "innovative" and the others that are restricted by bureaucratice constraints. I mean, if the charter concept is so great, why don't we just get rid of the restrictions for all public schools?

And either way, right now, both are judged on standardized test scores, so how innovative can we really get?

Your take?