Charter schools have been tried across the country for 20 years. They are no magic bullet. They are just an alternative way of organizing schools that runs the risk of reducing oversight, and especially local oversight, of the expenditure of public funds.

In 2009, Stanford University published the only comprehensive assessment of the performance of charter schools. The study, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, encompassed more than 70 percent of the charter school students in the United States.

The study found that 37 percent of all charters had significantly worse academic outcomes than traditional public schools, and 46 percent, or nearly half, did no better than a traditional public school with similar demographics. In other words, there was an 83 percent chance that a randomly selected charter school would either do significantly worse or no better than a traditional public school.

The study did find that 17 percent of charter schools provided "superior educational opportunities," but this is also true of the best-run public schools. Quoting the Stanford report, "this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS (traditional public school) counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.

The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face." Why would we want to go there?

-- William Pennell, Pasco