for The Hill

In Washington, presidents and lawmakers come and go, but special interests dig in and never leave. They love to burrow into the sprawling federal bureaucracy, where they can stealthily wreak havoc on laws they don’t like.

If you want to catch these bureaucratic gremlins at work, take a look at the U.S. Education Department (ED). On March 14, ED proposed new regulations aimed at retarding the spread of public charter schools, despite growing public demand for them. During the pandemic, enrollment has declined in conventional K-12 schools, while charter schools have long waiting lists — around 50,000 children in New York City alone.

The target of this bureaucratic sabotage is one of President Clinton’s trademark innovations, the 1994 Federal Charter School Program (CSP). While state and local governments are chiefly responsible for operating elementary and secondary schools, CSP acknowledges a vital national interest in ensuring that all of America’s children, regardless of their socioeconomic status, have access to a world-class public education.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case today. The nation’s poor communities have too many substandard schools, as reflected in stubborn achievement gaps by race and ethnicity. Judging by U.S. students’ underwhelming performance on international reading, math and science tests, mediocrity also abounds in many of our suburban schools.