In a new NEPC policy memo, Duke public policy professor Helen Ladd argues that charter schools “undermine” good education policymaking by making it needlessly complex.
More specifically, according to Ladd, charters “disrupt” four core goals of American education policy: “establishing coherent systems of schools,” “appropriate accountability for the use of public funds,” “limiting racial segregation and isolation,” and “attending to child poverty and disadvantage.”
That’s a lot to tackle, so what follows isn’t meant to be comprehensive—but for simplicity’s sake, I am using Ladd’s “goals” to structure my response.
Goal 1: “Establishing coherent systems of schools”
It might surprise readers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, and any number of other places to learn that their nation’s school systems are incoherent. Yet that is the logical implication of Ladd’s first line of attack, the upshot of which is that a system in which public dollars can follow students to schools not run by the government creates unworkable complexity. Either that, or she’s claiming there’s something unique about the United States that argues against the creation of a such a system here—though she never says as much, and it’s difficult to see why that would be the case.
Veterans of the charter school movement will recognize many of Ladd’s arguments. For example, she asserts that “given public funding follows students to charter schools on a per-pupil basis, the outflow...
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