Charter school expansion being considered by the Missouri Legislature could give the rest of Missouri an opportunity to continue an experiment already being conducted in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Charter schools in those cities have had mixed results, essentially earning a grade of "incomplete." They don't have to follow the same government regulations as other public schools. Because of this autonomy, they have the potential to serve as incubators for new ideas and trends in education. Some new ways of teaching might work, while others might not.
The Missouri House on Thursday approved and sent to the Senate a bill that would expand access to charter schools in Missouri.
The schools operate with government funding but independently and as not-for-profits.
Under the bill, for each student who left a traditional school to attend a charter school, 90 percent of the state funding for the child would go to the charter school.
The other 10 percent would stay with the traditional school, so they actually would see an increase in per-pupil funding.
The legislation would allow charter schools to be established in certain school districts, including ones that have a school with an annual performance report (APR) below 60 percent.
Jefferson City could qualify because it has one such under-performing school, Thorpe Gordon Elementary, which scored 56.4 in 2016.
The local school board would have a right of first refusal to be the sponsor. If the school board declined, a charter school could open independent of the district.
State Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, told KWOS Radio on Thursday the bill would require Missouri's charter schools to have strict performance standards for staying open.
"When a charter school does not perform at or above the average of its traditional public school counterparts in the district in which its located, it loses its charter. So that is a pretty tough standard," he said.
"It gives parents another option, another choice, on where to send their child to school, and that is the ultimate accountability measure," Barnes said. "When the parent can say whether they want to send their child to that school or not, that's more accountability than any government bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., or here in Jefferson City is ever going to apply to any industry."
Just as learning is a lifelong process, learning new ways to educate our children is a never-ending process. As parents, we see teaching methods that didn't exist when we were students.
Charter schools could be a way to quicken that evolutionary process of teaching by constantly trying new methods to identify what works.