Every school is different. The country is filled with people who try to expand a successful program until it no longer works. A good school is one that helps its children and that is enough. We need a critical mass of these autonomous schools so that all students and parents have choices. The final principle is accountability.
Charter schools are a new movement that seeks a different kind of authority.
They should be even more accountable than other public schools. We have already discovered that it takes more time than we thought and there are more failures than we would like. We have not quite figured out how to do it yet, but we are still working at it, because there is no other choice. It would be much easier if we could hire somebody else, like the government, to do for us what we should be doing ourselves. Massachusetts had a university 250 years before my state was even founded.