Editorial

Editorial

Let All Be Champs

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Some recommendations in the preliminary report of the Governor’s Commission on Champion Schools will find widespread support both inside and outside the education community.

Others, like the proposal for charter schools, will likely provoke intense debate. The concept is that parents should be given a choice between the public schools and alternative facilities, called charter schools. These schools would be publicly funded, but would be exempt from most state and federal educational mandates, including curriculum guidelines and instructional requirements. As long as the schools maintained academic excellence, these exemptions would remain in place. «

The governor’s commission, in essense, is pitching charter schools as just like the public schols, only better, j, If the freedom granted to the charter schools is such a good idea, why didn’t the commission recommend that those guidelines be adopted by all the state’s public schools, instead of creating a parallel system of schools?

Though the commission vows that the charter schools will be non-discriminatory and open to all students, they have the potential to skim off the best students, leaving the traditional public schools with the students who, for one reason or another, don’t make the grade. The arguments advanced by the charter school advocates sound suspiciously like those put forth by the school choice advocates a few years back — who w'anted parents to have the option for tax credits or tuition vouchers applied to private or religious schools if they preferred to send their children there.

In any guise, those proposals still lead to a dangerous undercutting of the public schools, and thus equal access to educational opportunity.

There’s no question that Virginia’s public schools aren’t doing the best they could to educate our childreri. But Gov. Allen’s Champion Schools recommendations, in their enthusiasm to boost school choice, seem to ignore the need to make existing schools better. Making the system work, rather than undermining it, should be the objective of the Governor’s Commission on Champion Schools.

Gov. Allen’s objective, as well, should be to make each and every Virginia school a Champion School.