Two fundamentally different views of charter schools | Eastern NC Now

    Should North Carolina remove the cap now existing on the number of public charter schools in the state? That is the issue that was debated on Wednesday (2-2-11) in the N. C. Senate Education Committee and was the target of the Beaufort County School Board chairs comments at a community meeting at Southside High School the night before.

    The Observer sent a reporter to Raleigh and he was present in the Senate committee room. The video below will allow you to hear Sen. Richard Stevens, R-Wake explain the bill and you will also hear a committee staff person review the bill section by section. If you watch all of the videos you will hear the Democrats on the committee argue against it, and try to weaken the bill by making it more difficult for charter schools to be created and exist.

    You can click here to read the News & Observer's report of the hearing.

    In the event you do not wish to listen to the entire video, here's the deal in a nutshell.

    The idea behind charter schools is that it gives parents a choice of which school to send their child to. Usually parents have to provide transportation and charter schools get some state and local funds but not all the funding per student that regular public schools get. But charter schools don't usually have all the bureaucratic supervision and control that regular schools have.

    Traditionally, the teacher unions have opposed alternatives to the traditional public schools. Some believe they fear that parent will abandon the public schools is they are allowed to choose. Others say that the fears expressed by many opponents of alternative schools simply have not proven to be true in actuality. But as a compromise, to get charters allowed, the proponents had to agree to limit their numbers. The number was set at 100. The bill being debated now would remove that cap. It has received a positive reception from Republicans who now control both houses of the legislature. So it appears that it will pass. Whether Governor Perdue will veto it and then whether the Republicans can get about six Democrat votes in the House to override a veto is the question.

    That situation is apparently what provoked Chairman Belcher to attack the bill before a group of most school employees Tuesday night. He urged them to contact Rep. Bill Cook to urge him not to support eliminating the cap. Cook told The Observer Tuesday that he strongly support the bill because he believes parents should have a choice and that competition will improve the traditional schools as well as the charter schools. "Choice makes the parent a customers. The school, be it traditional or charter, must then satisfy their customers to get the students which produce the money. I think that is a good thing." he said.

    Belcher argued that the traditional schools will lose money for each student they lose to a charter school. What he neglected to mention is that when the traditional school does not have to provide services to the students their costs go down by more than the money lost because of a lower number of students. Because these marginal costs do not equal the marginal revenue, the traditional schools get more money than their costs for the students they can keep from going to a charter school so that is why Belcher opposes them.

    But after Belcher made his pitch for the group to lobby Rep. Cook, the Beaufort superintendent made, what we found to be an amazing statement. What he said was "what we want to do is make the Beaufort County Schools so good that parents will not want to take their children out and send them to a charter school."

    Here are the videos of Wednesday's hearing:




    Here is the second clip, which is an extension of the first:



    Commentary

    To Dr. Phipps' statement we want to say "Amen and Hallelujah!" That is exactly the approach our public schools should be taking. And that is exactly the kind of thinking that should replace Mr. Belcher's archaic elitist attitude that "we, not the parents, will decide what is best for everyone's children...just give us more money."

    It is precisely Mr. Belcher's attitude that makes charter schools so important. As a retired principal, Mr. Belcher is steeped in the elitism that dominates public education. Dr. Phipps, on the other hand, offers a fresh, new attitude that focuses on welcoming competition and a determination to make the public schools so good that charter or choice will not be a threat to them.

    Lead on Dr. Phipps!

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.