Thank you for your comments.

Charters are indeed not the total answer, but they have potential to be an important part of the answer, if we can overcome the closed-minded, adults first attitudes that seem to overshadow objective decisions in this and many other education areas.

Eliminate detailed mandates and administrivia from state and federal education “experts”. Encourage principals and their teachers to create their own educational environment. Allow experimentationand the sharing of best practices.

Do not force students to stay in school until age 18. Allow them to drop out at age 16. If they have not shown ability and desire for education and prefer to move on after being forced to “be educated” after 10 years, another two years won’t change that. In addition, this will add more chaos to the classrooms, harm the learning environment and boost the cost of our already costly educational system.

Finally, until the broken education system is proven to be fixed, do not fund pre-K for all. Test results indicate that the longer kids are in school the worse their test scores compare with other benchmarks in this and other countries. Putting kids into a broken system earlier simply makes no sense.

I would submit that not doing charter schools is in truth the very bad idea.

Charter legislation has now been passed in four out of five states in this country, and more legislation is pending in the few remaining holdout states. The overwhelming move to charters would not be happening if objective people elsewhere were not seeing that well-run charters are indeed making a difference.

Look no farther than the miracle in New Orleans for a great example. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans basically had to completely rebuild its school system. The state and city chose the charter school model to do that. Now, New Orleans’ charter school enrollment amounts to 80 percent of the entire public school student body.

Thanks in part to its expanding charter schools, Louisiana went from scoring about a half a point below Kentucky on the ACT Composite Score in 2007 to scoring half a point above us in 2011. In both years, participation rates on the ACT in both states were about equal, so this is a reasonable comparison, except that Louisiana has a lot more minority students, which should suppress that state’s scores even today against a very white student population in Kentucky’s schools. Louisiana’s Recovery School District, which includes the charter schools in New Orleans, went from a very low 14.5 ACT Composite in 2007 (two years after Katrina) to 16.2 in 2011. Along the way, Louisiana increased the percentage of its high school graduates who took the ACT to 100 percent in 2011. Usually, scores on the ACT go down when participation rises significantly. The Recovery School District still has a long way to go, but the rate of improvement is awesome.

The comments about funding also indicate a lack of knowledge of the facts. Charter schools across the nation on average operate for only around 80% of the cost to run the traditional public school system. Charters actually offer potential to help with the fiscal crisis.

I agree that teachers in our traditional public schools should not have to spend their own money on classroom supplies, but it is inefficiency in the traditional schools that causes this problem. So long as we throw more money at the public schools, they have no incentive to work for more efficiency. Of note, some of our public schools are now going to outsource housekeeping, which will save those school systems hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The question is, why didn’t this cost-saving plan get implemented years ago?

Very simply, our public school system has too much inertia to change very much without external stimulus like charter school competition. It isn’t a matter of the commonwealth not being able to afford charter schools. It’s a matter of us really not being able to afford continuing on without them.