State PTA: Add charter schools to reform agenda

The Washington PTA wants charter schools to be a part of the state’s education reform agenda, even though the idea has twice been rejected by voters and repeatedly shot down by lawmakers.

PTA members from around the state added charter public schools to their agenda when they met last weekend near Seattle. The organization’s policy brief on the issue says the independent schools are an effective tool against the achievement gap.

“This is an additional way of looking at schools and what we need to be doing differently,” Shelley Kloba, the Washington PTA’s state legislative director, said Thursday. She emphasized that the charter school issue was just another tool in a wider PTA agenda.

This is the first time in Kloba’s memory – she’s been involved in setting the organization’s legislative agenda for about nine years – that charter schools have been part of the discussion.

The topic was hotly debated at the statewide meeting last weekend and Kloba said discussion over this issue may not be over.

“They still had concerns about what exactly this would look like if we were going to advocate for charter schools,” Kloba said, adding that the PTA will not automatically support any legislation proposed in Olympia. The bill must meet the state and national PTA principles, which include adhering to existing state laws.

The PTA platform notes that charter schools are one of the ways the federal government allows school districts to attempt to fix struggling schools – a tool Washington cannot access. The Washington State Board of Education’s 2010 Achievement Index identifies nearly 300 schools with about 55,000 children as struggling. The PTA supports charters as an equity issue, allowing more school choice for parents and their children.

Washington is one of nine states that do not allow charter schools, according to the Center for Education Reform. The other states without charter school laws are Alabama, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Charter schools have been back on the agenda in many of these states, including bills introduced but not passed in five, while some of the 41 states with charter school laws have voted to expand their use, according to the Center for Education Reform.

Washington education reform advocates like the League of Education Voters and the Washington Policy Center seem excited to see charter schools back in the spotlight, but the state’s largest teachers union considers the PTA idea is an unnecessary distraction from the real issues before the Legislature.

Lawmakers gather for a special session at the end of November to figure out what to do about a $2 billion budget deficit. They’ll likely break for the holidays in December and then get back to work again as scheduled in January, with the focus likely to remain on what to do about the lack of money available to pay the state’s bills.

“We can’t fund the schools we have. Who thinks this is the time to put public money into experimental schools? It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Mary Lindquist, president of the Washington Education Association, said Thursday.

Sixty-four percent of Washington voters rejected an initiative to the Legislature calling for charter schools in 1996. Over the next seven years, five charter bills were proposed and then rejected by the Legislature. Then in 2004, a charter bill narrowly passed the Legislature and was signed by the governor, but that November voters rejected that idea again.

Washington state failed to get any federal dollars in the Race to the Top competition for education reform and most state officials and education reform advocates say it didn’t make the finals because its application did not include a plan for allowing charter schools in the state. Expanding the use of charter schools was just one way to gain points on the Race to the Top application, but every finalist except Kentucky added or expanded charter schools before turning in their application.