Bill Clinton's stunning statement on charter schools: Why it's more striking than it looks

 Luke Brinker
Thursday, Sep 25, 2014 10:33 AM EST
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The former president sounds a note of caution about whether they should be renewed. Will other Dems follow?

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Bill Clinton weighed in on the debate over charter schools this week, warning that the publicly funded yet autonomous schools must keep their "original bargain" if they want support as alternatives to traditional public schools.
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The Huffington Post reports that in remarks before a dinner hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, the former president hailed the potential of charter schools, even as he called on them to be held to high standards. Clinton cited New Orleans, whose post-Katrina public schools are 100 percent charter. While casting New Orleans' experience with charters as a success story, he added an important caveat. Charter schools aren't worth supporting, Clinton suggested, unless they perform better than traditional public schools.
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"They still haven't done what no state has really done adequately," Clinton told the group, "which is to set up a review system to keep the original bargain of charter schools, which was if they weren't outperforming the public model, they weren't supposed to get their charter renewed."
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Clinton's statement is stunning once you consider its implications. Research shows that the vast majority of charter schools in the U.S. haven't cleared that hurdle. A study at Stanford University last year found that only 25 percent of charter schools fare better than traditional schools in reading. In math, only 29 percent of charters do better. Nineteen percent of charters actually did worse in reading, while 31 percent were worse in math; the rest weren't significantly different from traditional public schools.
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