A serious threat to New Jersey charter schools that would set the state back decades on education reform is looming in Trenton.

The proposed legislation is a voter referendum bill—which would allow community members to vote on whether a charter school gets approval. At first blush, that seems like a very democratic idea. Unfortunately, it would have some very undemocratic consequences-- stifling the intention of the New Jersey law that was meant to spark innovation and proliferate high-quality charter schools across the state.

The charter approval process would become nothing more than a political campaign, with vested special interests having the power to sway the outcome—just about the worst way to come to good decisions about schools. The losers: students and parents, who would be denied the option of a school that would best meet their needs.

The current Department of Education administration has shown that they are committed to allowing only well-prepared founding groups to open up schools. Right now, charter schools are approved after a rigorous application process run by objective judges in the state education department—far away from the politics of the local school districts. Local school boards and superintendents, however, do have a chance to weigh in on charter applications.

But historically, the quality of authorization in New Jersey has been overly dependent on the political priorities of whoever inhabits the Governor’s mansion. What New Jersey really needs is comprehensive reform of its charter school law, that increases accountability and autonomy, raises the number of objective authorizers of charters and funds charter schools equitably.

Right now, New Jersey has one of the worst charter laws in the country, in part because we have only one authorizer. According to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, our law ranks 26 out of the 40 states with charter laws. A voter referendum bill that would all but halt charter school growth would put us at an even greater disadvantage.

There’s a reason not a single state in the country uses a voter referendum to decide on the merits of a charter school. Such a bill would also run counter to the Obama administration’s guidelines on healthy charter laws and would jeopardize the opportunity for the state to win what could be potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in federal competitive education grants in the future.

In short, the voter referendum bill doesn’t make sense, and only protects the status quo. As one charter-school advocate put it recently in the New York Times: “It’s like you’re Burger King and you have to go to McDonald’s to get a license—in most cases you won’t get a friendly reception.” We would never stand for that in the private sector. Why would we then allow special interests to hijack parental options and eliminate the opportunities for new and innovative school designs with high levels of accountability?

If we look across the country, we see that the highest quality charter schools exist where there are multiple strong, independent authorizers. We believe New Jersey would benefit from additional high-quality, no-nonsense authorizers that will only approve the very best charter candidates and leave politics out of the decision making.

High quality authorizers not only approve charters, but can also take them away. A charter school that is not producing outstanding results for kids should be shut down, period.

In the end, parents vote with their feet. A charter school that fills up with students is one that was wanted by the community. If parents didn’t want more options, then a charter school wouldn’t survive. Shouldn’t every parent have that say? And aren’t taxpayers better off with more high-quality and innovative schools than fewer?