For-profit charters were not the idea

Charter Schools USA is a Florida-based, for-profit company that could earn more than $2 million a year running a new charter school on the fast track for Cary. The school would draw students mostly from western Wake County, and the student body would likely have an affluent profile.

Bill Fletcher, who represents much of Cary on the Wake school board, said, “It will be a highly profitable school because you won’t have the children in poverty. It’s somewhat cherry picking. I don’t think it’s good public school policy, but that’s what we have in this state.”

And it’s why western Wake is a magnet for a new charter.

Doubtless the Florida company does a fine job running charters, but are such arrangements really the point of charters, as alternatives, to have as many of them as the state can have? No. Charters, approved in 1996 by the General Assembly, were seen as laboratories where new educational techniques would be tried and if successful, could transfer to regular public schools. But now some advocates see charters as alternative public schools, quasi-private, almost part of a separate school system. Republican legislators, who lifted the cap on new charters, clearly see them that way.

In time, that will weaken the traditional schools that have served North Carolina, and the vast majority of its families, for more than 100 years. That’s not the fault of charter school operators, or parents. It’s going to be the consequence of school policy dictated by politicians more concerned about ideology than education.

This story was originally published October 25, 2017 at 11:07 AM with the headline "For-profit charters were not the idea."