A golden opportunity knocks at Rhode Island’s door.

No less than seven promising new charter schools have either been approved by the Department of Education’s rigorous vetting process or are in the pipeline for approval. And those seven don’t include the extension of Paul Cuffee to high school grades, which was approved long ago as part of the original charter for a K-12. This means that within the foreseeable future, the state could give its families eight schools’ worth of creative, responsive education.

We can ill afford to turn down the opportunity.

But legislators say these schools can’t open because there is no money. They mean no new money, because in fact, Rhode Island spends tons of money on education. There is money. But to liberate some of it for badly wanted charters, the state would have to close a few dysfunctional schools.

I know, the very thought is heresy in this hidebound state. No matter how long a district has maintained a school showing little or no promise of improvement, we just keep financing it.

But the annual budget process is not yet done. So the state still has time to grow some guts and do the right thing by its families.

It would be a mercy to have these new charters replace some deeply unhappy, ineffective schools. Other states have done just this. We could look to them for lessons on how to do the job well, responsibly, and as gently as possible. After all, some wonderful teachers and administrators are as trapped as the kids in schools, strangled by accumulations of bureaucratic restrictions. They too are badly served by outdated educational assembly lines, with harsh disciplinary codes, poor performance and disaffected staff, kids and parents.

We have nothing to lose but our reputation for being too dumb to get out of the 19th century.

The facts are these:

Recently, the state’s 11 charter schools held their annual lottery to fill vacant seats for next year. Just under 4,000 families applied for a paltry 694 available seats. And there’s an unquantifiable number of families who’ve given up hope because of their horrible odds of success. Charters enroll about 3,200 kids, but more are on the charter waiting lists.

Families have made their wishes painfully clear. They want different educational options for their kids. They want charters. I’m sure they’d also be happy with a range of choices of district schools that behave much more like charters, which some do.

Rhode Island charters generally outperform their district counterparts, in some cases spectacularly. The only two schools in the state to have 100-percent graduation rates are charters. When you look at the data in www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu, you see that charters have strong teacher teams; the kids feel cared for, and the parents report a level of satisfaction you don’t see except in the wealthiest districts in the state.

But what distinguishes most charter schools from most district schools is creativity, and lots of it. Yes, districts can sometimes be wonderfully creative, and some charters are in lockstep and rule-bound. But because charters only survive if they succeed — attract families, maintain quality — they tend to be models of 21st-century skills — teamwork, innovative thinking, strong interpersonal and communications skills, high expectations, and healthy risk-taking in the service of intellectual discovery.

Steve Nardelli, director of the League of Charter Schools, says, “If a charter takes on a particular schedule, curriculum or evaluation that doesn’t work, they jam on the brakes. They don’t have to stick with anything wrong because of a three-year labor contract or an across-the-board textbook purchase, or a policy that needs school committee approval.”

The governor has allocated only $1.5 million for new charter-school seats. This is not the jolt that Rhode Island education badly needs. Two charters might be able to squeeze through the eye of that budget needle, maybe not.

I looked up a few chronically dysfunctional schools in Information Works and found that closing one of those biggish schools would make $5 million to $7 million available. Two charters could share the newly empty building.

In any case, let’s be bold, at last. It’s high time to move some of our educational investment into 21st-century, creative, caring, responsive academic dynamos that will improve the state’s work force, reputation and attractiveness to families. We’ll be waiting forever if we try to hang on until there’s enough “new” money. Furthermore, there’s stimulus money around to ease the pain of change.

Of course, the landscape for financing charters would improve greatly with a funding formula. I’ll discuss this next week, when we at look why we’re the only state in the nation that doesn’t have one.

Our lack of a formula is another one of our uniquely unfortunate qualities, like being the only state in the nation that allows indoor prostitution. We have too little shame. Closing a bad school and reinvesting the money would be good for our collective self esteem.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.