01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 11, 2004

The governor's veto of the budget gives the General Assembly a golden opportunity to go back and fix some of the copious and destructive nonsense in that state budget, including the stealth moratorium on charter schools.

That's right, just as Rhode Island's school districts are implementing program cuts, teacher consolidations (positions eliminated) and the school-ruinous "bumping" of less senior teachers by those consolidated, the General Assembly has decided to suspend the development of new charter schools.

Article 23 of the new budget states: "The Board of Regents shall not grant final approval for any new charter school to begin operations in the 2005-2006 school year." Just as two district-affiliated charters and several site-based managed schools are being destroyed by bumping, the legislature shuts off the public's best hope of growing other alternatives.

So depressing.

The charter movement came about because here, as elsewhere, regular district schools had become radically over-determined by labor contracts, ossified district policies, state regulations and even legislation, which means they have very little control over how their resources are spent. Charter schools are intrinsically more flexible about how they design their programs, and those free of traditional union contracts are able to be especially nimble.

In some states, regular district schools suddenly began working to be much more consumer friendly when families started voting with their feet. This is a good thing. Families have too long been captive of frustrating, unhelpful, substandard schools. And according to national comparisons, Rhode Island pays top dollar for its mediocre educational results. Charter schools have been one very bright spot on an otherwise lackluster horizon.

This year, Rhode Island's legislature chose to give the public school districts only exactly whatever they got the year before, in a practice they call "level funding." School costs are always going up, but the public has become increasingly aware that districts take care of the adults first, often in irresponsibly lush ways, and only secondarily pass the dregs of the resources on to the children. The hope was that level-funding would force the districts to stand up to their powerful unions and negotiate contracts that would rein in the huge expenses that merely feather adult nests without contributing to the quality of education for the children.

The existing nine charter schools, most of which are still growing by a grade a year, were not "level-funded," but given money to support their growing populations. Charter schools generally grow by starting with two or three grades, letting the third grade, for example, become the new, and previously nonexistent fourth grade, while accepting a new class of kindergartners. Without the money to grow, does the school suddenly ask that matriculating third grade class to go elsewhere, or do they stop the pipeline of new students? Charters have no district to fall back on.

So when the state's budget first went public, the charters -- and the Met School, which is charter-like -- appeared to be getting fiscal windfalls. The increased allocations covered only the new students at the old level of funding, but regular public schools saw no increases at all.

However, the Providence district also has a growing student body, so level-funding to the districts is structurally and hugely unfair. But that's not the charters' fault. In general, state aid to education should always be allocated on a per student basis. Always. But Rhode Island has not yet done the heavy-lifting of designing a per-pupil aid system.

Allow me to be clear about what I consider to be the conditions that can grow a good school, because charters have a much better shot at it than regular district schools.

First, know that the opposite of a good school is what for decades scholars have been calling a factory-model school. The factory model creates an assembly line along which a child receives a squirt of English, math and so forth, without anyone much consulting with each other about the effectiveness of their efforts. A factory-model school has little purposeful interaction among teachers, between teachers and students, teachers and administration, school and home, or school and neighborhood. Factory schools are a curriculum delivery mechanism, and if the kid has some issue that prevents her from listening or learning, including being bored by tedious pedagogy or curricula, well, that's not the school's issue.

To my mind, a good school is motherly -- nurturing, supportive and careful of the school community's interactions, highly communicative and skilled at orderly house-keeping. You know a good school by how well its internal communication systems cultivate responsiveness in teachers, administrators, families, communities and students.

Techniques such as student advisory systems and common planning time insure that the children are known well by at least one adult and that teachers are pooling useful information about the children and always reflecting on how to improve teaching and learning. Site-based management gives the teachers, administrators and parents the flexibility, power and responsibility to make decisions regarding the children and the school itself. Good districts support the school's autonomous high-functioning by providing professional development, rich, well-aligned curricula and well-organized social supports so the teachers know where to turn when a child needs professional help.

Sadly, few regular district schools have an array of strong internal communications systems, at least not in Rhode Island. Mainly it's the charters, the charter-like schools and well-supported site-base managed schools that have cultivated this kind of responsiveness and a culture of ongoing reflection and improvement.

So as the regular district schools find themselves cutting programs and services to children because their obligations to the adults take legal precedence, charters offer learning communities flexible enough that the adults pull together -- through the thick and thin -- to put children first. As Rhode Island's regular public schools cut music and art while giving raises to some of the highest paid teachers in the country, it seems obvious many more charter schools will be necessary to encourage districts to develop responsive schools.

If anything, the legislature should remove the current restrictions on charter growth so charters can bloom wherever parents, teachers and the public do not feel they have good options for educating the children.

Instead, just as the value of autonomous, responsive schools has become painfully obvious, the legislature has seen fit to suspend our best hope of creating new ones.

Still, this veto gives them the chance to go back and make this wrong right. For once, legislature, be strong champions for the children.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net or c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.