Bernie Sanders today is announcing the foundation of his K-12 education plan, which is to crack down on public charter schools. If enacted, the Sanders plan would snuff out one of the most successful social policy innovations in decades, and close off a lifeline of opportunity for hundreds of thousands of poor urban children.
The charter-school sector varies enormously from state to state, but on average, charter schools yield better outcomes for urban students (though not for other students). States with the worst-regulated systems fare no better than traditional neighborhood schools. But the best-managed charter systems produce dramatically better outcomes for low-income urban children than the same students receive in neighborhood schools.
The public charter models with the highest success are the most exciting and deserving of replication. Rather than learn what they’re doing right, Sanders would choke them off.
One of Sanders’s splashiest ideas is a good one: He would ban for-profit charter schools, a move Democrats also endorsed in 2016. More than 80 percent of charter-school students attend nonprofit schools, and the for-profit schools perform significantly worse. A complete ban on for-profit charters is a blunt tool, but probably a positive one. Ending for-profit charters would incidentally take away one of the most effective arguments against charters. Charter opponents have erroneously convinced many people that all charters are for profit, when in fact only a small minority are. (Even some professional columnists have repeated this myth.) The charter sector would be stronger if the for-profit segment disappeared.
But Sanders’s goal is not to make charters better. Indeed, nothing in his plan pays any attention to what charter methods work best. Instead his plan reflects the perspective of the teachers unions, which despise charters because they avoid the hiring and pay-scale contracts that most unions rely on. Rather than pay teachers based on seniority, requiring the most recently hired teachers be fired first, and making it all but impossible to fire ineffective teachers, charters allow schools to pay teachers based on performance and replace the ones who can’t do a good job.
Sanders would “call for a moratorium on the funding of all public charter school expansion until a national audit on the schools has been completed” and “halt the use of public funds to underwrite all new charter schools if he is elected president.” He would additionally require charter schools to match employment practices with neighboring schools, meaning they would have to replicate the same rigid contracts, eliminating one of the key innovations that lets charters do a better job of teaching poor children.