SACRAMENTO - You can get your fill of it over at the National Alliance For Public Charter Schools' thoughtful blog: The Charter Blog.

I'd particularly direct you to this post, about a session yesterday on how to bring adequate funding to charter schools. As it has at many sessions here, the issue of "quality" wasn't specifically on the agenda for the session but it was hanging there over everyone's heads and became the most spirited part of the discussion.

Some of the tension stemmed from which hat people were wearing: school leader/authorizer/lobbyist/etc. Most everyone seemed to agree that bad charters need to be shut down, for example, but lobbyist-types warned strongly against letting the Legislature determine what counts as quality, suggesting it could be a trap.

People from schools that serve targeted student populations (autistic students, kids who have already dropped out of high school and are years behind, etc.) worry that everyone will want them to match up shoulder-to-shoulder with successful college prep charters, despite having completely different missions. There is a nervousness to it all for some folks.

The Chalkboard likes tension and believes it makes conferences like these a bit more interesting. But I also think the "charter school movement" runs a risk of being overly arrogant if it makes the whole closing bad schools issue appear so black-and-white. The gray area, while complicated and often depressing, often puts charter schools in a larger reform context that is crucial for the public to understand.

When closing down a low-performing charter school, it can't be enough to stand up and pound your chest about how great it is that charter schools can be closed, that the concept of accountability is working, etc.

That is certainly part of the message. But don't we also have to go beyond that and own the reality that we often are sending the children in those schools back to district schools that are just as bad as the one we are closing (but that have been allowed to remain open for generations without serving anyone)??? This dilemna makes for messy talking points, for sure, (because we have to admit that we're screwing some kids in our accountability push) but isn't that the real story about the kind of educational triage charter schools represent at this point?

We act like we are doing the kids in these bad schools a favor by closing them down, but it sadly isn't always the case. Aren't we letting the local school system off the hook too easily by merely arguing that "the charter accountability system is working"??

Particularly troubling is our tendency to look at this issue primarily through the eyes of the authorizers. Yes, it's hard for them to close down a school because of the "political pressure" and authorizers have an important job to do in this regard. But dismissing the cries of parents who WANT a charter school to stay open (and who know full well what hellholes await their kids once they leave) as mere "politics" on the part of unsophisticated dupes unfairly diminishes the tragic nature of what we're talking about here.

I want to make clear: I'm not suggesting that any bad charter schools should stay open. But I think at some point the charter movement needs to trust that the public can handle a more complicated description of what is really going on. Those pain-in-the-ass parents who want the school to stay open may not be the enemy. They just may be the best spokespeople alive for the profound problems we have on our hands with regard to public education.