Will the charter school movement live up to its promise?

Walter Russell Mead writes today about charter schools and teacher unions:

Pushback against the spread of charter schools is one of the Left’s most important goals. This is not really about education; it is about power and, particularly, the power of the blue model state to fight the future. And it is part of an increasingly sophisticated fight by teacher unions to preserve their power.

...As it stands, in many school districts good teachers stick with teacher unions because, given the irrational and rigid policies of bureaucracies and the atmosphere of cronyism and even criminality in city governments, individuals need to band together for protection. Teachers embrace teacher unions because the alternative is to be an unorganized individual at the mercy of an uncaring political machine and incompetent administration. The achievements that teacher unions are proudest of, like tenure and seniority, have, as we know, large social costs, but they make sense in a situation in which teachers must organize to protect themselves from meddling politicians and a predatory bureaucracy.

There was a time when teacher unions were on the cutting edge of reform, and it would be a mistake now not to recognize those accomplishments, and not to understand the good reasons many people still have to support them. But the future of our schools isn’t more of the same: more big box, one-size-fits-all cookie cutter educational institutions in which everybody moves at the same pace through the machine. As the American economy changes, our schools must change too. Big box schools prepare people for big box jobs: in government bureaucracies, in bureaucratic stable corporations, on jobs for life assembly lines.

...we don’t want the next generation to spend most of its formative years under the guidance of people who have been socialized into the jobs for life in behemoth institutions.

Smaller, teacher-led and teacher-managed autonomous schools offer students and parents more choices (of curriculum, of educational philosophy, of discipline, of learning style) than the big box systems can. They also produce smarter teachers: people who know what it is like to build an enterprise and keep it going. Those are exactly the skills the next generation of students need; we need an educational system that produces teachers who can teach toward the future rather than the past.

If the charter school movement is to live up to its promise, it has to do more than privatize the existing school system. Franchised chains of for-profit charter schools may make sense as an element of competition that forces public schools and others to up their game to attract students, but we need more. We need teacher-managed schools that are rooted in the local community and that good teachers recognize as an opportunity, both for them and for the students in their care.

Read more here.