On Martin Luther King's birthday in January, New York's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, stood in front of the New York Urban League and declared a kind of war on the “disgraceful” state of education in the City of New York.

In some middle schools, he said, 95 percent or more of the students were failing to meet the basic standards of competence expected at their grade levels.

He did not blame the usual suspects, the students and the teachers, as much as he did the City's system of education. He and his Chancellor of Education, the astute and pugnacious lawyer Joel Klein, have vowed to cure the “bureaucratic sclerosis” that has been precipitated by the Byzantine administrative fiefdoms that are common in New York.

Since then, hardly a day has gone by without news of another advance in City Hall's march against the bureaucrats.

The Mayor and Mr Klein have three fairly simple objectives - getting resources and attention into the classroom where they belong, making the children in their care proficient in reading, writing and maths, and giving parents the tools to become active partners in the education of their children.

There's an air of great determination about their drive, and while it's hard for me to tell you what most people think of its chances of success in a City of this size, the doorman in the building in which I was staying last week has no doubt.

“This guy's a billionaire,” he said of Mr.Bloomberg. “You think he got that by making promises he couldn't keep?”

One of the tools the mayor is using is the establishment of charter schools, a relatively new phenomenon in American education - the first opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992. There are already 38 of them in New York. Another seven are to be established this year and ten more next year.

The key difference between charter schools and ordinary public schools is the removal from them of what Mayor Bloomberg called “the dead hand of bureaucracy”. Charter schools are independent public schools, designed and operated by educators, parents, community leaders, educational entrepreneurs and others.

They are sponsored by designated local or state educational organisations who monitor their quality and integrity, but allow them to operate freed from the traditional bureaucratic and regulatory red tape that hog-ties public schools. Clear of such micro-management, Charter Schools design and deliver programmes tailored to educational excellence and community needs. Because they are schools of choice, they are held to the highest level of accountability - consumer demand.

Charter Schools operate from three basic principles:

Accountability: Charter Schools are held accountable for how well they educate children in a safe and responsible environment, not for the degree of their compliance with district and state regulations. They are judged on how well they meet the student achievement goals established by their charter, and how well they manage the fiscal and operational responsibilities entrusted to them.

Choice: Parents, teachers, community groups, organisations, or individuals interested in creating a better educational opportunity for children can start charter schools. Local and state school boards, colleges and universities, and other community agencies interested in fostering innovation and excellence in schools sponsor them. Students choose to attend, and teachers choose to teach at charter schools.

Autonomy: Charter schools are freed from the traditional bureaucracy and regulations that divert a school's energy and resources toward compliance rather than excellence. Instead of jumping through procedural hoops and over paperwork hurdles, educators can focus on setting and reaching high academic standards for their students.

The movement has spawned some exciting success stories. Particularly in urban areas, high-profile charter schools moved into low-income neighbourhoods and proved that they could take the same kids and, with less public money, produce better results.

In suburban and more affluent areas, some newly-opened charters have made less of a dent in standardised test scores, but they have still achieved major gains in terms of parental satisfaction.

At the same time, the movement's failures have been making plenty of headlines of their own. Some schools have been poorly run, while others have been denounced as out-and-out frauds. The real truth, say some observers, is that as yet there are no absolute truths about the charter school movement.

Some charter schools are conservative, back-to-basics academies, heavy on discipline, character education and learning by drill. Others are arts-focused instructional centres designed to appeal to creative teens who prefer a potter's wheel to an algebra textbook. Still others adopt a theme curriculum, such as an Afro-centric blend of Swahili and drumming alongside spelling and multiplication.

The academic results these schools achieve range from the electrifying to the abysmal. Regulations vary greatly from state to state, making it difficult to take stock of the charter movement as a whole.

The movement began with a burst of energetic growth, with the number of charter schools jumping from zero to almost 3,000 in just ten years. But growth appears to be slowing now, and that number is still hardly noticeable among the 92,000 traditional public schools in the United States.

But they are having an impact. For one thing, Charter Schools and their hiring practices are benefiting the teaching profession. Research shows that charter schools are more likely than traditional public schools to hire teachers from selective colleges, and also more apt to attract teaching candidates with better-than-average academic records.

In addition, Charter School teachers tend to work differently. Charter school instructors seem to spend more hours on academics - tutoring, preparing lessons, grading homework - than their peers in regular public schools.

Charter schools also have more flexible pay scales. Traditional schools must adhere strictly to pay schedules that honour length of service. But a charter school is free to simply offer more to the teachers it most wants to keep.

Why is this important to Bermuda?

Such comparison as our system allows shows that some of our children lag behind their American counterparts … perhaps not by a huge amount, but the lag is there, nonetheless. But what pitting our schoolchildren only against American children conceals is how badly we therefore must be doing by comparison with the children of the rest of the world.

Americans barely reach the international literacy average set by advanced democracies, according to a report issued by the Educational Testing Service after a recent International Adult Literacy Survey. Despite the high expenditures on education in the United States - and the large numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities - the United States ranked only 12th on the test.

At science and maths, American students trail those in other advanced democracies, and the longer students are in school, the worse things seem to get. Among fourth graders, US students rank high on the International Test of Mathematics and Science Study. Despite this head start, by the eighth grade, American adolescents have slipped to the midpoint on the test, and, by the age of 17, their scores trail all but those in a few developing countries.

All signs point to a deterioration in the quality of American schools. Europeans and Asians alike have rapidly expanded their educational systems over the last 50 years, but in the United States, stagnation, if not decline, has been the order of the day since the 1970s. Even high school graduation rates are lower today than they were just a decade ago. We're using the wrong yardstick. We should be comparing our schoolchildren with their counterparts globally, not just with those in the United States.

And we should be looking for innovative new ways of delivering a decent education to them, like shifting more responsibility away from Point Finger Road and into the hands of school principals, as charter schools do.

gshorto@ibl.bm