Fortunately, most state charter laws are not as bad as Ohio's. The charter movement can act as a spur to public schools when the playing field is relatively equal. In Toledo, for instance, school officials with support from the teachers' union opened a public school to compete directly with a proposed Edison school. Two hundred students have enrolled for this fall's start up, and fifty of those students are returning from local charter and church schools. Edison, meanwhile, has delayed its school.
Competition can work.
Another two hundred students are on a waiting list to enroll in the new school. The district cannot afford to open another school to accommodate them, and it is projecting a loss of two million or more a year to charter schools, including students the charters say were previously enrolled in the Toledo district students of whom the district has no previous record. Here is the crux of the school fix problem. Toledo consistently ranks at or near the top among the state's urban districts on Ohio's proficiency tests. For 18 years it has had a tough peer review process to screen out incompetent teachers.