Six days passed after Election Day before news outlets were comfortable reporting that Washington would be the 42nd state to allow charter schools. But a victory is a victory: 50.81 percent voters in the Evergreen State finally said yes to charter schools, after having said no three times before. What’s more, the measure succeeded in spite of the fact that the state’s largest county, which includes Seattle, rejected the initiative 52-48 percent. With such a polarized electorate, advocates and charter operators will have plenty of work ahead to assure voters—especially those in Seattle—that the forty schools they’re empowered to open over the next five years will add quality, innovation, and variety to a public-education landscape that has done little to accommodate a multiplicity of approaches. Given the fact that opponents to the initiative still hadn’t conceded defeat as of Monday night (there were still 237,000 votes to count statewide), and given the fact that supporters of the initiative outspent opponents by $10 million, that job won’t be easy.
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