President Obama made news last week for trumpeting charter schools. He called for states that have caps on the number of charter schools to lift them, arguing that placing a limit “isn’t good for our children,our economy or our country.”
While the head of the Democratic Party was praising charter schools, some of his DFL counterparts in Saint Paul were trying to bury them.
First came a proposal to forbid the creation of new charter schools within one mile of a closed district property. That attempt to protect incumbent district schools does nothing to help students or the economy. Fortunately, on March 10, members of the K-12 Education Finance Committee of the Minnesota House voted that proposal down, though only by a vote of 11 to 9.
Ironically, the day after President Obama’s speech, Sen. Kathy Saltzman (DFL-Woodbury) proposed an amendment to a senate subcommittee that would … impose a cap on the number of charter schools in the state. Of all the restrictions that legislators across the country put on charter schools, a cap is the bluntest and most damaging. Other restrictions contained in amendments offered by Saltzman and other legislators would impose additional shackles on existing charter schools.
So what’s going on here? Concern for children? Not exactly. The very existence of charter schools threatens the control that Education Minnesota has over public education. Though charter schools are public schools, only a handful in the country are unionized, and by design they operate free from many of the bureaucratic deadweight that is larded on traditional public schools by the bureaucracy and teacher unions.
Minnesota was the first state to implement charter schools, and its laws have been–at least until now–among the best in the country on the subject. If legislators enact the proposals being discussed in Saint Paul this week, they will have strangled the best hope that education reformers have.