November 4, 2004
Washington Votes Down New Format for Schools
By SAM DILLON, NY TIMES

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Washington State, which has been battling for nearly a decade over whether to legalize charter schools, will not be opening any such schools soon. For the third time in 10 years, the state's voters have rejected a proposal to create charter schools.

The referendum, backed by Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and other entrepreneurs but opposed by a coalition of parents, labor unions and educators, went down to a lopsided defeat, with nearly 6 of every 10 voters rejecting the measure.

Forty states have laws permitting charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately run; the measure would have made Washington the 41st.

"We're pleased that we won't be distracted further by charter schools and that money won't be leaving the existing public schools to fund them," said Charles Hasse, the president of the 76,000-member Washington Education Association, the largest teachers' union in the state.

Voters also rejected charter school measures in 1996 and 2000.

One of the charter schools' most vocal advocates said he considered them to be virtually a dead issue now.

"Charter schools will never have a future here now until there is conclusive evidence, nationwide, that these schools really work,'' said the advocate, State Representative David Quall, a Democrat who has worked unsuccessfully to pass charter school legislation for nine years. "Until the issue of student achievement gets resolved, I'd not even attempt to start over again in the Legislature."

The charter school measure was closely watched by educators across the nation, partly because it had drawn the support not only of Mr. Gates, but also of several other prominent entrepreneurs, who together donated $3.9 million to the campaign. It depended heavily on television advertisements recommending the creation of charter schools as a tactic to reduce the state's high dropout rate.

In addition, the charter school movement, which grew rapidly after the first such school was founded in Minnesota in 1992, has reached a plateau in recent years, and with 3,000 of the schools operating in 40 states, the subject has become contentious in many parts of the country. A Chicago plan to replace some poor-performing schools with charters has provoked demonstrations, and in Michigan the teachers' union and some parents persuaded the Legislature to block a proposal by a wealthy businessman to donate $200 million to create 15 charter schools. In Florida and California, officials have tightened regulations after corruption scandals.

Washington's charter school measure would have allowed nonprofit groups to create up to 45 charter schools over six years and convert some poor-performing public schools to charters. Washington voters also soundly defeated a ballot proposal that would have increased the state sales tax to finance public schools. They also re-elected the superintendent of education, Terry Bergeson, who has been a strong defender of the state's standardized testing system. Taken as a whole, the three voter actions amounted to a vigorous endorsement of the current course of public education in Washington, said Stuart Elway, an independent pollster here.

"People want to keep the attention and resources focused on the school system that we already have," Mr. Elway said.

Todd Ziebarth, an education analyst in Denver, said the defeat of charter schools in Washington would most likely have little effect on the fortunes of charter schools elsewhere, especially since they are popular and proliferating in dozens of states from Florida to California. In Ohio, however, budgetary problems in the regular public schools have aroused public sentiment against charter schools, and the teachers' union and other opponents have been seeking, so far without success, to stop their spread through litigation, Mr. Ziebarth said.

Now, drawing on Washington's experience, those opponents may seek to put an anticharter measure on the Ohio ballot in future elections in an effort to mobilize voters against the new schools, he said.

Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform, said, "Sadly, the union machine won the day."

But Ms. Allen predicted that Washington educators who believed in charter schools would find some new strategy for making them legal.

"Charter schools are not going away; there'll be another battle," she said. "There are too many children being undereducated, and this idea is still gaining momentum among too many kinds of people."



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