Throughout most of my life, I've been connected with education. Looking back, the variety of those connections seems amazingly diverse. I attended several traditional elementary schools and two rural one-room schools, a tiny Iowa high school with minimal resources, a small college, a Big Ten university, and an intense one-year technical school. I was invited to teach at the technical school after graduation but chose not to. I worked for a series of companies providing extensive computer services to public school systems and their statewide systems. I've designed systems to process standardized tests and report the results. I've designed grade and attendance reporting systems, been considered an expert on student/class scheduling, and have written proposals for and managed statewide testing projects. In private business, I've written and taught several courses, and I wrote and taught courses in adult education and at the college level. During my years as a graphic designer, I created the extensive graphics for a large reading program (Word Wizard), did illustrations for reading flash cards and college science textbooks, and worked on a number of assessment programs used by schools.

My point is that I've seen education from many angles. My interest has also been something of a personal handicap. I've always been intrigued by the process of learning... of knowledge being passed from one person to another, and of that knowledge being accumulated, examined, catalogued and, hopefully, effectively used by an individual mind. To me, learning is one of the more exciting aspects of life. That interest has been a handicap because I have difficulty working with stiff, bureaucratic organizations and putting up with politically-afficted decisions. Unfortunately, almost all of American education is controlled by such organizations.

Last week, with my naiveté in hand and my skepticism on hold, I attended a meeting about charter schools. I guess that I had some blind hope that charter schools might have the freedom to be able to avoid the constrictions that teachers and students face in traditional public school systems. The session was organized by a non-profit group that acts as a paid consultant to help charter schools get organized, approved, and hopefully, become successful. Their consulting contract is available for about $100,000 over a 5-year period. I suspect their help is well worth that cost. They have a staff of people who are experienced in starting charter schools... people who have successfully navigated through the process. They assist about a half-dozen new schools each year.

That there is such a consulting group, and that their guidance is worth $100K toward getting a charter school going is, in itself, pretty revealing, and that realization began to submerge my hopefulness.

Let me make my attitude very clear. Children are going to learn if they're given half a chance. They're going to learn from whatever they're exposed to, and they'll hunt for such exposure. Learning is as natural to kids as crawling, then walking, and then running. Learning is easy... education isn't.

Charter schools ARE public schools. They get federal financing and get paid like any other public school, and operate by much the same rules. They cannot choose their students, but must convince parents to move their kids from some other school. They have somewhat more autonomy in the way they run their school, but are still subject to the education bureaucracy.

One of the meeting participants seeking to start a charter school said that she had been home schooling her children. I asked her why she wanted to move from home schooling to opening a charter school. Her response was that other parents were asking her to teach their children too.

Consider - this mother, teaching her own children, is deemed, by some other parents, to be an educator preferred over the public schools already paid for and available to them. She must be doing something right... something that is obvious to those who know her and her children.

What a condemnation of our public schools... that an untrained parent can be preferred over the government schools that have been in full operation for decades, touting their expertise and caring professionalism. In case you're not aware, home schooling is growing rapidly, and with demonstrated success.

The charter school consulting group is similar to many other groups that form around government. They exist and survive because they know how to navigate the interminable blockades that government presents to anyone forced to approach it. From Matthew Lesko, who has written over 100 books on how to get free money from federal and state government, to groups to help you apply for Social Security disability, to those who assist in immigrating, to the giant tax preparation industry... there are many thousands of businesses who earn their money by simply getting you through the government morass so that you can reap more than your neighbors... so that you can be a Paul rather than just a Peter.

Starting a charter school is NOT like starting a typical small business. It has most of the difficulties of a small business start-up, plus the bloating and constrictions typical of making something happen THROUGH government rather than AROUND it.

An ironic side note on the initial financing of many charter schools. The Walton Family Foundation, in 2003, gave grants totaling almost $107 million, much of that to charter schools, to help them qualify for federal and state money. That foundation, of course, is from Sam Walton, founder of the big-box Wal-Mart that so many "intellectuals" love to hate.

Minnesota had the first charter school legislation in the nation, and the first charter school, City Academy of St. Paul, is in its 12th year of operation. There are 104 Minnesota charter schools, with about 17,000 students. There are over 3,000 charter schools nationally.

There is little doubt in my mind that the presence of charter schools is an improvement over having just traditional public schools. They add choices to the mixture. Unfortunately, charter schools also add to the monopoly of government-controlled schools. The growth of charter schools does prove one thing... there is no shortage of people who are dissatisfied with the current schools and are willing to start new schools to compete with them.

If the government education monopoly ever became courageous enough to be willing to compete with private schools on a level playing field, all of those inspired, determined people working hard now to open charter schools would be able to open private schools and really educate the way they WANT TO, without jumping through the governmental hoops. At that point, education might again become more synonymous with learning.