The study suggests, however, that it’s not too early to draw some broad conclusions, based on the phenomenal growth of charter institutions, which operate relatively free from centralized control while continuing to be supported by public funds.

Although Rowan County has only one charter school, Rowan Academy, 75 of them have sprouted up across the state in the three years since charter legislation was established. Nationally, nearly 1,700 charter schools have opened, serving approximately 350,000 students. So while the jury may be out, clearly, the students are flowing in.

From this growth, we can draw several lessons that educators and officials should bear in mind as they wrestle with education reform and funding priorities at the local and state levels:

• Parents, and apparently a strong contingent of educators, want choice and change. The merits of specific methods of offering choice — vouchers, tuition tax credits, Florida’s “Opportunity Scholarships” — provoke disagreement and debate. But the charter movement shows that, given an alternative educational choice, many parents will take it.
  
• The desire for greater school choice cuts across lines of color and economics. One of the early fears about charter schools was that they would siphon disproportionate numbers of white students away from conventional public schools. Instead, the Public School Forum study shows large numbers of minority students in charter schools. In North Carolina, roughly half of the charter schools have predominantly minority enrollment.
  
• Parents and teachers value true local control — that is, a measure of autonomy for individual schools — over new buildings and fancy equipment. Although charter schools receive public funds, they usually must operate in existing facilities, which usually means older buildings, with fewer resources.
  
• People like smaller schools. By now, that shouldn’t need to be restated. But given our region’s burgeoning growth, it cannot be repeated too often.

Charter schools aren’t a panacea for education problems. Some have failed. Others may prove to be less effective than good, conventional public schools — and let’s not forget that we have many of those. The charter movement should not be misread as an indictment of schools as a whole.

But the movement’s momentum shows that many communities will embrace the chance to take more control of their schools, while bearing more responsibility for the outcome. Charter growth shows there are ways to offer parents flexibility and choice, to let educators and parents determine what works best at the local level while maintaining a vigorous commitment to public education.