Charting a Better Course

Belief in charter schools was part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign. He appointed Richard Riordan, another charter fan, as education secretary. And the elected state schools superintendent, Jack O’Connell, recently created a charter school office within the state Department of Education. To head it, he appointed Marta Reyes, who ran a charter school in El Dorado County and headed an advocacy group for such schools.

This gives the flagging charter school movement some important champions in high office. The challenge now will be for them to take the necessary steps to reignite the push for innovative schools.

The charters -- publicly funded but semi-independent schools -- seek to foster teaching innovations and breakthroughs by motivated educators and community members. The hottest ideas from those schools are then supposed to spread to regular public schools.

After a gung-ho start in California, the charters’ growth slacked in recent years because of scandals involving a few schools and a slew of new regulations that made them harder to open. That’s where Reyes comes in. For now, her plan is to find out what the top charter schools do right and get them to share those successes with one another and the public schools. That’s good, but charters, often spurned by local districts and struggling to get their fair share of money, need more. If Reyes wants to boost these schools, she can pay heed to:

* Launchings. Starting a charter is a costly, complicated process. Reyes should push for legislation to ease paperwork that threatens to choke the most innovative charters -- those started by community members or local teachers. Her office could provide help in filling out documents and give start-up grants faster. Charter groups can apply to the state only after they have been rejected at the local and county levels, a sometimes long and costly process; this could be streamlined.

* Fairness. Local districts often charge charters excessively for administration and oversight and refuse to give them state-guaranteed money for buildings, then don’t bother to look seriously at their achievements -- or foibles. Reyes must forge a role in mediating disputes and ensuring that districts carry out required yearly visits to charters.

Los Angeles’ Accelerated School engages inner-city students with a stimulating curriculum and scores well in state rankings. The Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana brings poor Latino teenagers into a top performing-arts program with students from throughout the county. California would be poorer without such options. It should work harder at increasing them.