In March, President Obama outlined a bold direction for education that included a call for states to reform their charter rules and lift caps on the number of charters.

Weeks later, the Rand Corp. released a report that studied charter schools eight states, including Pennsylvania. The study delivered what most considered a mixed report card on charter performance, concluding that elementary students in charter perform no better than students in traditional public schools.

Last month, a new report on charters in 16 states by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) sounded a more serious note: While 17 percent of charter schools delivered better academic gains than traditional public schools, 37 percent of charters showed gains worse than traditional schools; 46 percent showed no significant difference.

Charters have become the cornerstone of education reform throughout the country; Philadelphia alone has 34,000 students in 63 charter schools. And while many parents and educators are enthusiastic about having an alternative to failing or faltering public schools, the reports on charters' performance are sobering.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the CREDO report a "wake-up call" for charters. But it's really a wake- up call for everyone - school districts, parents and educators - to face two facts. First, there is no magic bullet to fixing the long systemic problems of public education. Second, the innovations that charters provide aren't enough on their own; charters must be held to standards of accountability by districts, parents, and governments. That means pulling the plug when a school isn't working. With political and economic attention now focused on charters, 2009 should become the year they began turning around - not the year the charter movement began its decline. *