Montgomery County finally takes the charter school plunge

The Baltimore Sun
Editorial:  Montgomery County finally takes the charter school plunge

...That episode was the clearest example of a serious weakness in Maryland's charter school law, which allows local school boards to reject charter school applications for virtually any reason at all, including the personal biases of individual board members. The most the state board can do is review the local board's decision to see whether it meets the minimum requirements of the law and, if it doesn't, send it back to the local board with a recommendation that the matter be reconsidered.
What the state board can't do, however, is overrule a local board's decision to reject a charter school application, or independently authorize such schools to operate in a district. That's something lawmakers need to look at, because at present there's no independent agency empowered to authorize charter schools if a local board objects, even though the Obama administration has signaled that under proposed changes in the No Child Left Behind law it may require states to increase access to charter schools as a condition of continued federal aid.
Maryland should either establish such an independent authority for chartering new schools whose applications are rejected by local boards or give that power directly to the state board of education. The difficulty of opening new charter schools is one reason that aside from Baltimore City, which has 33 charter schools, only a handful of other districts in the state have permitted them to operate. Beefing up the state's charter school law, and establishing their right to compete for state school construction funds, would encourage more of the kind of innovation and experimentation Maryland needs to happen in its schools...