Will charter schools act as students’ saving grace?

If public education designed schools in a variety of shapes and sizes, Nelson Smith doubts the charter school movement would be as vigorous today. “But they didn’t,” said Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “They stuck with one size fits all.”

Because many parents feel conventional public schools don’t fit their child, a national movement is under way to develop alternatives in the form of public charter schools. Charter schools operate on a publicly approved customized contract that frees them from most state regulations. They also vie for students to win public funding, making them accountable both through their charter and through the marketplace.

Despite the mounting enthusiasm for such schools, Smith acknowledged that it’s fair to describe the performance of the nation’s 4,100 charters as mixed. “Some are knocking it out of the park. A lot are in the middle, and some are at the bottom and we need them to go away,” he said, in Atlanta earlier this month. “The question is whether charters are moving kids along a good clip. And they are.”

Today, 74 charter schools serve 26,000 students in Georgia; more will open now that state laws are welcoming to them. The Legislature has become enamored of charters, passing a law this year that creates a new state-appointed commission to approve charter-school applications over the objections of a local board of education. The commission also has the power to redirect the school system’s per-pupil funding, including local money, to the charter.

In visiting charter schools, I’ve found that many look a lot like the regular public schools down the road. In fact, most charters are conversion schools, existing public schools that embrace charter status to win greater leeway from bureaucratic dictates. While most charters are smaller than their traditional peers and keep kids in school longer, few are incubators of radical reform.

However, the charter movement’s bedrock principle —- that schools and classes should not be cookie cutter and public education should offer a buffet line of schooling choices —- contradicts the philosophies of the countries we often cite as role models. Most countries that surpass us academically follow tightly stipulated and scripted national curriculums. Here at home, by contrast, each state loosely designs its own curriculum, telling teachers what to teach each year but not necessarily how to teach it.

Even in the wake of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, American teachers still have a great deal of autonomy when they close the door to their classrooms. That can be positive and spur creativity, but it also means that successful practices of effective teachers are seldom shared between schools. Often, the practices don’t even spread to the classrooms next door. Other cultures maintain greater homogeneity of teaching methods; teachers collaborate on lesson plans, fine-tune those that work and then adhere to them faithfully.

Rather than expect their children to adapt to school, American parents increasingly expect schools to adapt to their children. It’s hard to argue with the belief that kids learn differently, and that parents are smart to look for a school that fits their child’s style. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the results that other nations are getting, especially in math and science.

I’ve heard little debate about these potentially conflicting aims: We want students taught in environments and manners that accommodate their individual temperaments and learning styles, but we want all of them to meet the same high benchmarks. Is it possible? Is there a model somewhere of a country that has decentralized education down to the individual school level yet still maintains high achievement?

mdowney@ajc.com