This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 5th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

At Ben Chavis's Charter School in Oakland, students are not entitled to a chair.

They're not entitled to much of anything except the opportunity to attend the fourth highest

performing public high school in California.

I spoke to Chavis last month.

What do you think the biggest hurdles are to scaling up successful schools?

When I think about what successful schools.

When I think about what successful schools are able to do,

it seems like almost a very delicate thing

to build institutions that really do function where children who are out of line can be

corrected, parts of the school that aren't working can be corrected where there's a

lot of flexibility to get things done.

What are the big challenges that you see

to scaling up successful schools?

I think anyone who's interested in scaling up successful schools

first must acknowledge a fact that public school does not want to be

successful. You get paid to be a failure. If we got a kid who's not performing in

Oakland, California, or LA or Washington, D.C.

We get more money.

Failing schools get more money than successful schools.

So that's the public schools vest in interest and not being successful. A financial vested

entries. The other thing about scaling up what I found most difficult in my own

...