Charter Power

IBD Editorials ^ | June 17, 2008

[Kaslin]

Education Reform: An inner-city public school in Los Angeles has a zero dropout rate and a college-bound senior class. What's the secret? Hard work, high standards, flexibility and choice. Do the candidates notice?

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This year's graduating class at View Park Preparatory Charter High School is impressive by any standard. Fifty-eight of the 67 seniors, all African-American, will be attending four-year universities, with one heading to the Air Force and the others going to two-year schools.

Remarkably, all the students who started at View Park in the ninth grade were in the graduating class — this in an area where the dropout rate is believed to exceed 50%.

Is this school an exception to the rule? Up to a point, yes. Most public schools in inner-city L.A. don't come close to this level of success. The same goes in other big cities.

But View Park is not wholly unique, either. As a charter school, it is part of a broad movement in American public education that now includes nearly 3,000 schools and 1 million students nationwide.

In Los Angeles, charter schools enroll some 40,000 students, or about 6% of the school population. View Park may be academically more rigorous than most, but in other ways it is typical.