Posted on: Sunday, January 16, 2005

EDITORIAL
Lid on charter schools should be kept for now

A recent review by the state auditor suggests Hawai'i launched its experiment with charter schools unprepared, underfunded and without a clear idea of what it hoped to accomplish.

The audit does not conclude — nor should we assume — that the charter school effort is a failure. But it does underscore the wisdom of keeping the number of charter schools at a manageable level for some time to come.

Proponents of charter schools, including Gov. Linda Lingle, have urged the lifting, or at least the expansion, of the current ceiling of 27 charter schools. That's not a prudent course, given the unresolved issues raised in the report.

There has been resistance to the charter school movement within some sectors of the Department of Education and among some legislative policy-makers. This suggests the auditor may have discovered a pattern that is less one of failure to act and more one of deliberate neglect.

That would be a shame. The charter school movement deserves a chance to fail or succeed on its own merits.

It can be argued that charter schools represent abandonment of our existing public school system. Rather than fixing what is wrong, advocates of charter schools are simply walking away to try something different.

We understand this argument.

But another, more optimistic, thought is that charter schools represent innovation, where new ideas, new approaches and new leadership are put to the test.

For instance, we are encouraged by the idea of Kamehameha Schools becoming the chartering agency for new, or restructured, schools in areas with high concentrations of Hawaiian children.

The charter school experiment will produce both failures and successes. That's a given.

But the key is to learn from both and adopt proven best practices into the public school system at large.

Until that testing out period has run its course, it would be wise to limit the number of charter schools so that adequate resources and administrative oversight can be brought to bear.