Casey Lambert, Princeton
To the editor:, Perhaps it would be useful to remind ourselves of the origins of the charter school movement. It developed in response to the catastrophic failure of public schools in financially devastated communities, where there was no hope of a remedy in the students’ time there., Many books were written in the ’60s and ’70s detailing these school systems, describing appalling deprivations in every area of school life — facilities, programs, teacher-student ratios, special arts or other such offerings, special education. There was no toilet paper. Furniture was broken. Labs were nonexistent. Police roamed the corridors. Charter schools were intended to take children out of such schools and place them in fresh, new classrooms with qualified teachers and give them a fighting chance. Some of these schools worked, some didn’t, and some don’t to this day. (See: Michigan.) A very good summary of this history by Diane Ravitch appears in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books., But what charter schools were not intended to do was hand a gift of taxpayer money to parents in comfortable towns simply to build a school that pleases them. The public school system has for the most part been the backbone of our country for 200 years, and the Princeton school system is particularly good. If parents perceive imperfections, it is incumbent upon them to work with the school board and teachers to make improvements. If, on the other hand, a self-selected group of parents wishes to create an entirely different educational structure they are free to found a private school, as others have done. What they may not do is strip funding from the public schools and use that money for their own ends, no matter how lofty they believe those ends to be., Those who believe that the good experiences their children are having at Princeton Charter School give them the right to run their own school miss the point. Taxpayer money should not be used for private endeavor. If this application succeeds, why not others? If one charter school group can have all the money it wants with no commanding relevance to the public good, so can any other group with an idea of its own., I strongly urge the PCS group to understand that they are running a private school and should fund it themselves. Accepting special students and using an admissions lottery do not make up for the fact that the school is not serving an identified public need and is not answerable to the citizenry whose money PCS wants., Casey Lambert, Princeton
