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This week, Governor Frank O’Bannon signs a bill that allows charter schools in Indiana. Some will react to the signing with a sigh of “finally.” Charter schools are now a fairly tried and tested innovation and thirty-four states already have already beaten us to the punch. Others in this state will no doubt think this or any other year is too soon for an idea they vehemently oppose. Our challenge as a state is to make the timing like Goldilocks’ stolen porridge--just right.

We have some advantages. Indiana’s new law is one of the strongest in the nation according to charter school experts. Indiana is also a relatively high-spending state on education. While our spending patterns may have some negative consequences even beyond tax day, those dollars are likely to spawn more vitality and growth in the charter school sector. This is particularly true in troubled urban areas where more money has not translated into more opportunity for inner-city children.

Already, our timing has helped us learn important lessons from other states. Some states restricted growth or limited charter school authorization to local school boards. The result was a small number of charter schools and, in the latter case, charter schools that tended to look and operate exactly like traditional public schools. The intent of these states is of course to minimize failure. The practical effect has been to minimize dynamism and new ideas.

Critics have long charged that school choice is a notion designed to benefit the rich at the expense of poor students. Time has taught us that the opposite is true. Charter schools’ greatest benefits and growth occur in inner cities with the greatest need. So Indiana’s law allows the Mayor of Indianapolis to authorize new schools.

Our new law thus reflects lessons learned. But if we are to really get the timing “just right,” we must recognize exactly what charter schools really are. First, charter schools are no fairy tale. There will be failed ideas launched in charter schools, just as there have been in public schools. These failures will be taken note of, probably publicly, possibly hyperbolically. Our task, then, will be to admit the experiments that did not work and avoid them. This is how good ideas get adopted and bad ones eliminated. This is how improvement works.

Second, we must recognize that the essence of charter schools is freedom for teachers and school operators to respond to students’ needs as they see and understand those needs. Charter schools allow for innovation to take place unfiltered. Ideas in the charter world do not just grow out of university schools of education or textbook companies or government committees; they also grow ground up from local organizations responding to local problems. This, also, is how improvement works.

Third, we cannot see charter schools as something separate from our public school system. If Indiana’s law works well, the benefits of innovative ideas will not be limited to just the students in charter schools. Instead, new ideas of how to teach and engage students in the importance of learning will be adopted by more traditional public schools throughout our system. Charter schools must be a compliment to traditional schools, a vital force for systemic change. A few years from now, when we drive by a local public high school and then a charter school a block or two up the road, we should think of both as different parts of a whole package with a single intent--to make our public education system the best in the world.

Finally, we should take the benefits that will come from experimentation and realize that a little experimentation can be a mighty good thing. There is an Ark’s worth of new ideas about education out there, from new testing techniques to new ways to expand choice and opportunity for students and parents. Indiana is known as a conservative state and, truth be told, we probably like to think of ourselves that way. But conservatism at its best is not stubborn for the sake of resistance. It is judicious for the sake of improvement.

Charter schools do not betray our conservative or even stubborn roots all that much, anyway. Their structure is remarkably similar to the governance system behind local schools at the turn of the 1900s. Those schools worked pretty well for their day. They provided a foundation upon which an important culture and incredibly successful industrial economy was built in the first half of the last century. The challenge of timing, then, is to make sure theywork just as well at the beginning of this century.