DILLINGHAM: Charter Schools Show Their Work

(Rhonda Dillingham is Executive Director, NC Association for Public Charter Schools and a lifelong NC educator. In this op-ed, Dillingham outlines key highlights from the 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report by the NC Office of Charter Schools that will be sent to the North Carolina General Assembly.)

I spent two decades in the classroom before I became a full-time education advocate and one experience that is still so fresh in my mind is when I required students to show me their work — how did they arrive at the answer that I would grade? I know fellow educators and parents (who’ve become virtual educators over the last year during the COVID-19 pandemic) understand exactly what I mean. Students think we’re just trying to make their lives more difficult, to punish them or make learning unnecessarily harder. Not true. We do it because in the real world — just like the classroom — you can’t just say your solution is the right answer without backing it up.

So, as we celebrate National Charter Schools Week, I say to our state and national leaders who oppose public charter schools: Your math is wrong, so please show us your work.

Just like with my students, I’m not trying to make our lawmakers’ jobs more difficult. In North Carolina we have an amazing opportunity to provide more quality public education options to our more than 1.5 million K-12 students, but bad math and misperceptions are holding us back. According to the soon-to-be-released 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report by the NC Office of Charter Schools that will be sent to the North Carolina General Assembly, the last 25 years of public charter schools in our state have changed our education landscape for the better. Since that time, more than a million and a half students have enrolled in NC public charter schools because their families believed those schools provided the best path for success. Currently, there are 200 schools in our state and that number has doubled in the last 10 years. That’s what I call exponential enthusiasm. In fact, an estimated 76,000 students are on waitlists to attend public charter schools in North Carolina. Now, opponents to increasing educational options in our state will dispute that number saying that it could double and triple count the parents who put their children on more than one public charter waitlist. I believe most people would agree that students on more than one public charter school waitlist makes that 76,000 figure a stronger indicator, not a weaker one.

The 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report also highlights progress and opportunities on an issue that I care deeply about: serving our state’s diverse students and promoting and supporting diverse school leaders and educators. Our North Carolina Advancing Charter Collaboration and Excellence for Student Success (NC ACCESS) program works to increase charter schools slots to educationally disadvantaged students through a five year federal $36.6 million Public Charter Schools Program (CSP) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The NC ACCESS Educational Equity Aspiring Minority Leaders Program also helps train and support school leaders of color who then share best practices to public charter as well as district-run public schools. However, the continuation and expansion of this program depends on our representatives in Congress, and we have to make sure they know that less or the same is not more where our children are concerned.

Furthermore, the 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report does reveal where we can improve. We must do a better job of explaining what public charter schools are, dispel the myths, and educate families and communities about the educational choices available to them to give their children the best opportunity to succeed. We must let parents know that it is not just their duty, but their right, to hold whichever public school they choose accountable. The 2020 Report is a reminder that public charter schools must help our students perform or face the consequences.  Seventeen public charter schools closed because their licenses were not renewed over the last two decades. This level of accountability doesn’t exist for North Carolina’s traditional public schools who survive regardless of whether their students are thriving.

When lawmakers in our state and Washington, DC rely on that bad math and misperceptions it affects our children’s futures — more than 126,000 current public charter school students in our state alone. Our focus shouldn’t be protecting one type of public school over another; our full attention must be our students’ success and the best types of public schools that will help them achieve it. Why would we ever dream of restricting public school educational choices when the numbers tell a different story? Class, that just doesn’t add up.

(Rhonda Dillingham is Executive Director, NC Association for Public Charter Schools and a lifelong NC educator. In this op-ed, Dillingham outlines key highlights from the 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report by the NC Office of Charter Schools that will be sent to the North Carolina General Assembly.)