Celebrate charter momentum

Charter schools are public schools governed by boards of citizens with considerable independence from local districts. That format facilitates educational innovation, school choice and parental involvement.

That made the opening of the Charleston Charter School for Math & Science this week a cause for celebration, and not merely for the group of local volunteers who strived for two years to bring it to fruition. The new school at the old Rivers Middle School site on King Street starts with an enrollment of approximately 200 sixth- through ninth-graders and will add a grade each year until it runs through high school. The school's founders aim to provide a high-quality focus on math and science for a wide range of students throughout the Charleston County School District.

Some community leaders, including some school board members, had warned that the school was being created to serve a "privileged few" of mostly white families who otherwise would have sent their children to private schools.

Yet admission to the Math & Science school is determined by lottery — no entrance test. And the school's first student body is 47 percent black, 46 percent white and 4 percent Hispanic, with the remaining 3 percent either coming from another minority or not choosing to identify their ethnic background. About three-quarters of the school's students attended public, not private, schools last year.

Meanwhile, charter schools here and elsewhere already are producing impressive results — including improved classroom performances from minority students (see George Will's column on today's Commentary page).

Recent studies from the Florida and Massachusetts departments of education, Stanford University and the Chicago school system report that black students in charter schools have been doing significantly better academically than black students in traditional public schools with similar demographic enrollments.

Some community leaders objected to the Math & Science charter getting rent-free access to the district-owned Rivers property.

They pointed out that the only other charter schools in the county to receive that advantage were "conversion" charters (James Island Charter High School and Orange Grove Elementary Charter School), while the Math & Science school is a "start-up" charter. They further pointed out that other "start-up" charter schools had to find — and pay for — their own facilities.

But the best solution to the fairness question on which charters get school sites from the district is to provide more, not fewer, sites for that purpose. The Math & Science charter's organizers presented a strong case that their school would be an effective use of that property.

Thanks to the Charleston County School Board's decision to approve that use, the Math & Science charter now has a fair chance to deliver on its promise to students, parents and the entire district.

It's another welcome advance for educational choice — and it won't be the last.