Trump, Clinton double-team charters: Column

The list of failed school reforms launched since 1983’s A Nation at Risk is embarrassingly long. Worse yet, these sputtering reforms appear to be stacking up at a faster rate: Common Core, evaluating teachers partly on student test scores, luring top teachers into low-performing schools.

Nothing seems to work out, with one very big exception: Districts that fold high-performing charter schools directly into the mix of schools offered to parents.

Denver is probably the best example of a traditional school district taking that path, called a portfolio strategy. In many other cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, Washington and New York, charter schools that are independent of districts — but in some cases experimenting with district collaborations — offer the best opportunities for kids growing up in poverty.

In Denver, business groups, foundations and community organizations were all fed up with the traditional district’s failures. When the board hired a new superintendent in 2005 — today’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet — he quickly realized they were right. His decision to embrace charters had support from both sides of the aisle.

Back then, Denver had the lowest rates of academic growth of Colorado’s medium and large districts. Since 2012, it has had the highest. By fall 2014, the percentage of students scoring at or above grade level in reading, writing and math had increased 15 percentage points (from 33% to 48%), far faster than the state average. On a new state test last year, Denver took a huge leap, its middle schools surpassing the state average. Charters are among the biggest reasons.

Now, just when other cities should be greenlighting similar reforms, Denver-style innovations could be at risk.

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The cause? Look no further than the Republican and Democratic conventions that just wrapped up. On the surface, that might sound odd. Who cares what happened in Cleveland and Philadelphia? Cities are free to choose their own school designs.

Here’s the problem: Denver-style reforms get launched via a unique confluence of liberal and conservative thinking. Conservatives, who have long been advocates of “school choice,” especially vouchers, reluctantly concede that vouchers haven’t produced much compared with charters.

Liberals, who might otherwise embrace the teachers’ unions’ anti-charter views, reluctantly concede that charter schools give thousands of poor and minority kids a shot at the American dream.

A similar confluence of liberal and conservative support brought New York and Boston their high-performing charters. To this day, a Democratic governor in New York and a Republican governor in Massachusetts are the biggest charter boosters in their states. Illinois got its liberal charter law at a time when Republicans assumed control of the legislature and Democrats were sickened by school corruption.​The result: charters as a compromise.

And now come Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In theory, they should agree on continuing the bipartisan approach. After all, Trump speaks repeatedly of giving parents school choice, and Clinton has supported charter schools.

But Trump’s inchoate “choice” language, repeated once again Monday in Detroit, lacks specificity. Charters? Vouchers? Whatever — just so it disadvantages the teachers’ unions who oppose him. As for society’s obligation to provide high-quality public schools to all children … that appears to occupy zero percent of his thinking.

What happens if Trump starts promoting charters? Just one example: In Massachusetts, where in November voters will consider a ballot proposition to expand the number of charters schools, you can pretty much stick a fork in the initiative. Trump’s pro-charter? Well, then, we’re against.

What about the Democrats? Surely, considering President Obama’s full support of charters as a civil rights issue, Denver-style reforms will find refuge in the Democratic Party. Not likely.

An early endorsement by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is a determined charter foe, will require payback from Clinton. And the Bernie Sanders wing of the party pushed the Democratic education platform into a near repudiation of Obama’s education agenda.

True, Clinton has not completely turned her back on charters. She concedes there might be lessons to be learned from successful charters (a stance that got her booed at a recent union gathering).

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Listening to Clinton’s carefully parsed rhetoric reminds us of New York City Chancellor Carmen Farina, who visits only niche charters while mostly ignoring large, successful charter groups such as KIPP, Uncommon or Achievement First that do a far better job than her schools at educating poor and minority kids — and do it at scale. Farina, who comes out of the “progressive” camp that pushed Clinton to the left, apparently sees them as threats to her system.

In New York City, the only standout collaboration between a charter group and traditional schools is funded by the state — not Farina’s department.

Here are two possible nightmares: Clinton becomes the Farina of the White House, allowing all but niche charters to drift from the Democratic agenda. Or, Trump turns charters into a right-wing cause overseen by a Republican Congress that deep down only wants to fund vouchers.

Either way, charters get stripped of their consensus backing. And for fragile Denver-style reforms — among the nation’s best hopes for repairing our troubled urban schools — that’s a lose-lose proposition.

David Osborne, director of the project on Reinventing America’s Schools at the Progressive Policy Institute, is co-author of Reinventing Government. Richard Whitmire is the author of The Founders, on the shared roots of top charters. Follow them on Twitter: @OsborneDavid and @richardwhitmir

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