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Board of Education members Mike Schaden and Leslie Mansfield deserve great praise for their fair and even-handed treatment of the EACH! all-girls charter school application.

We were especially impressed that Mr. Schaden joined longtime charter school supporter Mrs. Mansfield in an effort to work collaboratively with the applicant to give parents more choices in their children's education.

It was clear that Mr. Schaden and Mrs. Mansfield understood that Maryland passed a charter school law to empower parents and teachers to work together to establish schools that implemented their vision for education.

When Superintendent Linda Burgee said the county didn't "need" an all-girls school, these two recognized that the need for a charter school should be determined by whether enough parents want to send their children there, not the school administrators' personal preferences or speculation about whether the school would raise test scores.

With the adoption of TERC math and the more recent adoption of a social studies textbook series that the school system admitted is a year behind grade level, our schools are increasingly out of touch with what many parents want.

School choice turns the tables on the public school near-monopoly by making the school system respond to parents' needs instead of the current situation in which a centralized bureaucracy decides what is best for our children and offers little choice to parents who want something different.

School choice is considered the norm in other counties, states, and in much of Europe and Scandinavia.

Frederick, home to the state's first charter school, ought to live up to its proud history. Parents living elsewhere enjoy the freedom to choose their children's school.

Why should Frederick be any different?

Tom Neumark, Point of Rocks