Senator Elizabeth Warren’s for education will make it harder to start charter schools and could make it more difficult for existing charters to survive.

Warren’s plan, a school choice publication suggests, is “a reflection of a growing skepticism about charter schools among Democrats.”

In “A Land Without Charters,” published in City Journal, Jamil Jivani, managing director of Road Home Research and Analysis, a nonprofit, fouses on the experiences of low-income kids in Toronto to show just how important charters can be to such young people.

The article is based on a study by Road Home, which seeks to improve the lot of low-income Canadian youths.  It deals with such issues as fatherlessness, education, and crime.

The study dealt with Toronto’s Jane and Finch community, which has a population of around 800,000, many from Africa or the Caribbean. Some of Toronto’s worst schools are located in Jane and Finch. It is a high-crime neighborhood. Going to school doesn’t seem to help kids from Jane and Finch:

Over the last four years, Jane and Finch students lag city-average testing scores by 11.3 percent in primary school, 14 percent in middle school, and 24 percent in secondary school. Such numbers indicate, unsurprisingly, that students perform worse the longer they stay in Jane and Finch schools.

Jane and Finch is an outlier when it comes to schools. Most of Toronto’s public schools are good or even excellent. Yet, according to Jivani, the Toronto District School Board’s response to the situation is characterized by a “lack of urgency.”

There are no charter schools in Jane and Finch but a group called the Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education, does some of what charters do. It provides supplemental education, including instruction for kids falling behind academically and sports programing. The Road Home case study looks at this charter-like program.

The study shows how grouping students by their performance levels increased literacy and math scores for YAAACE students over a period of seven weeks. YAAACE’s experiment also highlights the limitations of supplemental education programs, however, and the unique challenges that community groups experience when they’re relegated to serving students during out-of-school time, instead of being able to create their own institutions, like charter schools.

One of the biggest challenges is resource limitations. YAAACE would have a bigger academic impact if it were able to hire more counsellors and staff, for example, to work with students and help them through both learning and behavioral challenges.

As is the case with U.S. charters, YAAACE faces opposition—and from the same sources that oppose our charters:

The most significant limitations to programs like YAAACE concern school boards and teachers’ unions. School boards treat supplemental education programs, even in communities that desperately need them, as secondary priorities. This year, the Toronto District School Board approved permits for the YAAACE summer program to use public school gym facilities and classrooms, but days before the program was to begin, the board revoked the permits and displaced hundreds of students and program staff to an alternative facility, with fewer amenities. Weeks later, school board officials relocated the program again.

Teachers’ unions are another obstacle. As a condition for receiving financial support, YAAACE agrees to use union teachers chosen by the school board. But union restrictions limited the amount of orientation time YAAACE could provide the teachers in new instructional strategies for students scoring low in literacy and math—and teachers complained throughout the summer that they weren’t sufficiently prepared.

The bottom line, here and in Canada, is that charters empower families:

As many American parents already know, school choice changes the balance of power between school districts and families, giving community groups more opportunities to improve public education.

Where charter schools don’t exist, such as in Toronto’s low-income neighborhoods, these groups struggle to provide students with a meaningful alternative. Certainly, some charter schools fail, and others require more oversight, but they have achieved more equality of opportunity for children who would otherwise be trapped in low-achieving schools. In Toronto, if given the chance, they would likely do the same.

This article has relevance for the coming political season when we will discuss charters. I urge you to read the entire article. It will help us focus on what matters: giving parents choice and kids opportunities.