It’s not too late. The state Supreme Court has one more chance to get it right.
In the legal equivalent to a 70-yard Hail Mary pass into the end zone, the Georgia Charter Schools Commission’s existence is dependent upon one of four judges — in response to a pending motion for reconsideration — reversing his or her position and voting to not strike down a law that catapulted Georgia to win a $400 million federal Race to the Top grant and recognition as a leader in public school choice.
As an attorney, a former Atlanta Public Schools elementary teacher and a once bright-eyed judicial intern in our state’s highest court, I have struggled to understand the court’s unnecessarily harsh decision. Despite their vote, I do not believe that the four judges who decided to dismantle the commission based on historically inaccurate and intellectually dishonest reasoning condone the mediocrity that permeates our public schools.
Nor do I think that any member of the court believes that low-income Georgia families stuck in these mediocre schools have access to political and economic capital of the magnitude expended by local boards of education in their efforts to preserve sole control over charter schools. But I do suspect these judges, on a very basic, instinctual, “gut-feeling” level, under-appreciate the magnificent danger posed to returning to the pre-2008 days of leaving charter school authorization in the exclusive hands of locally elected school boards.
That anyone, including our Supreme Court members, harbor instinctive prejudice against charter schools should not be surprising in light of the two decades that some interest groups have spent spreading misinformation about public school choice.
Most anti-charter arguments, including those unleashed in this litigation, are rooted in a sentimental defense of “traditional” schools, despite Will Rogers’ poignant caution that “public schools are not as good as they used to be, and they never were.”
The most respected charter school advocates do not suggest that school choice alone is a silver-bullet solution to our education dilemma. But the greater public must appreciate high-quality charter school authorization as a public service no less important than reliable sewage treatment, trash removal or highway maintenance.
For years, evidence mounted that high quality public school options were stymied in Georgia because local school boards frequently turned away excellent prospective charter school operators, prioritizing turf control over student achievement.
Indeed, recent school board train wrecks throughout our state leave any informed observer questioning local school boards’ ability to authorize and support high-quality charter schools, much less retain an exclusive monopoly over them.
Critics of the state Charter Schools Commission argue that the appropriate response to this problem is for Georgians to fire their school board members at the ballot box.
They’re absolutely correct that voters should hold school board members accountable, but this argument misses the practical reality that the commission presents a more reliable and responsive solution for public school choice than the dismal sphere of school board politics; that an alternate authorizer such as the commission does not suppress, but rather invigorates residents’ involvement in the politics of public education; and that the mere availability of one democratic option at the local level should not foreclose a well-reasoned and constitutional democratic option at the state level.
Local school systems did not create the current racial achievement gap by restricting high-quality charter school options, but this practice certainly frustrates innovative and grass-roots efforts to equalize educational opportunities for all children.
Our legislators responded to this problem in constructive bipartisan form in 2008: They created a publicly accountable commission to authorize public schools of excellence with full per-pupil funding, an impressively bold step for a state whose students historically have performed at the bottom of nationwide measures.
Now the court has a narrow but critical opportunity to issue a new ruling that respects our state constitution and the imperative of public school choice, and it should do so by the time we host U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and charter school leaders from across the country in Atlanta later this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference.
In fact, should all the Supreme Court justices choose to attend the conference (I’m sure the planners would gladly comp their registration fee), they will meet some of the most brilliant educational innovators working to shift the course of our country’s future by increasing opportunities for all young people, especially those in the poorest, most challenged communities.
I also would introduce them to the parents of my former fourth-grade students, (residing in one of Atlanta’s roughest neighborhoods) who decided to enroll their children in Atlanta’s first KIPP charter middle school instead of sentencing them to another generation of poverty endured by graduates of the local middle school in their ZIP code.
We teach children that one person can change the world by acting courageously in the face of adversity. This is an opportunity for a member of our highest court to provide such a lesson in courage upon reconsideration of the future of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission.
Douglas Rosenbloom is an Atlanta education law attorney and a former teacher in Atlanta Public Schools.
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