Charters provide needed choice

By Tony Bennett

When I became the State Superintendent of Public Instruction earlier this year, I brought with me a fundamental truth I’ve learned after nearly 25 years as an educator: The stresses of society and the fast-paced change of technology have outstripped our ability to meet the needs of every student through traditional public education. At the same time, I feel it is our duty as educators to make sure every student is challenged and prepared according to their own unique needs.

That leaves a large question looming for us in education: How do we deliver on that duty in the face of our apparent inability to do so completely?

Simply put, we need competitive partners who are willing to break the molds of traditional education as they provide more learning opportunities for our children. This may take place within the public school system, through models such as New Tech or vocational education, or it may require a commitment to working with our private and parochial schools to ensure our students’ needs are met. In some instances, it may require something else altogether, something like charter schools.

Often times in traditional public education, we are fearful of what more charter schools might mean to our own institutions. But those fears miss two important points. First, a little competition could go a long way to improving schools and the academic achievement of students. Innovation, improved quality, and lower costs of doing business are the usual results of competition in the economic sphere, and evidence suggests education would improve in much the same way.

The second point that is missed in those fears is that any talk about educational institutions is almost always inherently about the adults who work in education, not about the children who benefit from it. No matter the avenue, our focus should always be on finding educational models that deliver high quality learning opportunities for Hoosier students—especially when those students might otherwise fall through the cracks. In this regard, then, charters aren’t our competitors as much as they are our partners as we seek to fulfill our duty to meet the needs of all children.

And so I go back to the phrase “competitive partners.” As we’ve watched charter schools in Indiana develop over the past several years, we can see that they’ve been just that. In some cases, charter schools have helped educate children that probably wouldn’t do as well in traditional public schools, such as children with substance abuse issues or children with learning disabilities. In other cases, we’ve seen innovation from charters, such as virtual education, that has spurred our traditional schools to examine their own methods and explore new ones.

If we really hope to reform and improve public education in Indiana, we must realize that we can no longer do it alone. We must embrace the basic tenet that gave rise to charter schools in the first place: Our children have different needs, and they should have more choices about where and how they are educated according to those needs.

Tony Bennett serves as the superintendent of public instruction for the Indiana Department of Education. For more information, go to www.doe.in.gov.