The first problem is scarce resources. DPS is staring down the barrel of serious budget shortfalls -- including a new, $413,000 increase in charter school funding.
North Carolina's 100 charter schools -- no more, no fewer -- are also public schools, where per-pupil operating expenses come from the same pool that funds traditional schools. In effect, they often act as a public/private hybrid, a stand-in for vouchers, with governing boards raising money for capital expenses and the bells and whistles not covered by public funds. Charter school students are not exempt from the testing requirements that govern students in traditional schools, but they are free to establish curriculums that bear only a passing resemblance to traditional schools'.
Educational philosophy is the second problem.
It's difficult -- in fact, it is the work of a lifetime -- to assess which schools are equipping students for the world.
The short-term numbers underline the source of some tensions: Nineteen of 22 charter schools in the Triangle reached their AYP goals in 2008-2009 (86.4 percent), a feat echoed by 23 of DPS's 52 schools (44.2 percent). Just one charter -- PreEminent Charter, a K-8 school in Raleigh -- was a low-performing school. (One more, Hope Elementary in Raleigh, was a "no recognition" school.)
Charter schools tend to attract students whose parents value education, so testing figures are not a great litmus for educational methods. Some of DPS's best experiments, including the Durham School of the Arts and Middle College High School at Durham Technical Community College, match or outperform the charters. Again, those schools are outliers because they draw talented, motivated students from the general population.
But charter and magnet schools are not the only educational labs that DPS is holding at arm's length.
New Horizons, a 33-student, 4-teacher bootstrap school, operated on a $30,000 budget this year after DPS jerked its funding. None of the teachers drew a salary while teaching kids who have been suspended from DPS for a year or more. The school has had some serious problems (and lapses in judgment) while navigating the land mines of at-risk kids, including one incident in which school officials flushed a student's stash of marijuana rather than reporting it to police.
But students are succeeding there, and it gives them a place to go when the public schools are out of options.
New Horizons, which charges no tuition, operates outside of DPS's aegis but provides a priceless second chance.
If legislators eased the cap on charter schools, we hope it would be the first in line for new charters, which would also give the state oversight and offer clear guidelines for questionable situations.
In a perfect world, charter and alternative schools would act as laboratories for curriculums and teaching methods that could be applied to traditional school systems.
In reality, tensions over resources and ideology only seem to retrench the gap.
Editor's note: This article has been corrected since it was first published.
