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President Obama and his education secretary seems bent on betting big on charter schools to play a huge role in their national education policy. I wonder on what basis are they so willing to forge ahead with this?

In a recent national study on the effectiveness of charter schools in 15 states conducted by  Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, some major findings included the following:

- On average, students attending charters did not learn as much as their traditional public school peers.

- Charter schools were found to be  twice as likely to perform less well than public schools having similar demographics as they were to outperform those public schools.

I am all for exploring viable options, charter school or otherwise. What I find foolhardy is this seemingly wholesale faith in charter schools to deliver where public schools have failed. Why do we always want to go for the quick fixes rather than taking the time to find out what the hell is the problem we are facing with our schools.

Have we looked at public schools that are succeeding and try to understand why they succeed and why others fail? Why not start there. My own gut feelings about this is the problem in most cases may just lie in the level of leadership coupled with a lack of resources. But an issue like this is not going to be resolved by going on gut feelings. Rather we need some hard empirical evidence here to guide policy. This is no time for experimentation. The future of our children is just too important for us to be wishy-washy about giving them the tools to function effectively in an ever increasingly competitive world.

I hope this does not turn out to be a race to the top for everyone else except those this is supposed to be about – our children.

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