Laura Waters:

Researchers at the University of Arkansas studied 15 states, including New Jersey, and found that traditional public schools receive more than $2,700 more per student than charters, even with non-public dollars included. The data analyzed is from the 2010-11 school year, the most recent available at the time the study began.

New Jersey was one of only three states in the study where charter schools received less in non-public revenue per pupil than traditional public schools. Traditional public schools received 1.3 percent of funding from private sources, while charters got 1 percent from non-public sources.

Alan Borsuk:

Amid the many education issues now in flux, the future of charter schools seems to attract a high degree of heat and, frequently, misunderstanding. So I thought it might be good to offer a Charter Schools 101 primer.

Q.Just what is a charter school?

A. Launched in Minnesota about 25 years ago, the idea was to offer kids independent, publicly funded schools with creative, different programs. The movement grew rapidly. More than 2.5 million students nationwide were in charter schools in 2013-’14.

Q.Why are they called “charter” schools?

A. Let’s say you and I have an idea for a school. We go to a government body (usually a school board, but, around here, a few other bodies, such as Milwaukee city government), and say, hey, give us permission to open this school, give us money and we’ll give you something different with good results. (At least, that’s the ideal.) Down the road — usually after five years — you can either give us a green light to continue or you can cut off our money, based on our record. If the government body says OK, then we formalize an agreement that is called our charter.

Generally, I’m describing what we’ll call an independent charter. There are quite a few charters created within school districts as alternatives to their traditional programs. Most of the charter schools in Wisconsin fit this description.

A significant difference between school district charters and independent charters is whether the teachers are employees of the district or whether they are hired (and potentially fired) by the individual school. Almost all of the controversy around charter schools involves independent schools.

Joshua Enpmerson Smith:

When Highland Park resident Liz Martinez talks about charter schools, she speaks with the same kind of pride she reserves for her children’s accomplishments. Her youngest daughter graduated from PUC Cals Charter Early College High School in 2010 and then Brown University. Her son graduated from another PUC charter school and was accepted to Notre Dame.

“They care about the kids,” Martinez says of the neighborhood charter schools where she opted to send them. “They know the kids by name. They know us by name, too. When you come to the high school, you feel welcome.”

The 46-year-old mother of three wasn’t as pleased with Franklin High School, a traditional LAUSD school her older daughter attended while the other children went to charter schools.

The public school is just five minutes down the street from Cals High School, but Martinez’s assessment of the two couldn’t be further apart.

“There’s a big difference,” she says. “At the charter schools, they told them they had to go to university. In Franklin High School, they don’t even care about the kids

Chris Rickert:

A reader with a much keener sense of irony than I emailed this week to point out that the site identified 3 1/2 years ago for the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy is slated to become home to a new police station by 2017.

That’s right. In a city with some of the highest rates of black incarceration in the country, a police station is taking the place of a school aimed at improving the prospects of poor, minority students.

The Madison Prep charter school was the brainchild of the Urban League of Greater Madison and its then-CEO, Kaleem Caire, and was to occupy the former Mount Olive Lutheran Church building at 4018 Mineral Point Road.

Madison Prep would have featured single-sex classrooms, longer school days, required parental involvement and other strategies not usually seen in a Madison public schools system that has struggled to educate black children.

In December 2011, it was voted down by a majority white, uniformly liberal school board over concerns about its cost, accountability to taxpayers, and use of nonunion employees. Madison’s overwhelmingly white teachers union opposed the school.

Now, Madison appears to be moving ahead with a plan to demolish the church and an adjoining house and replace them with a $9 million police station that will increase the number of stations from five to six and, police said, relieve pressure on officers serving the populous West Side.

Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school

Kate Taylor:

At most schools, if a child is flailing academically, it is treated as a private matter.

But at Success Academy Harlem 4, one boy’s struggles were there for all to see: On two colored charts in the hallway, where the students’ performance on weekly spelling and math quizzes was tracked, his name was at the bottom, in a red zone denoting that he was below grade level.

The boy, a fourth grader, had been in the red zone for months. His teacher, Kristin Jones, 23, had held meetings with his mother, where the teacher spread out all the weekly class newsletters from the year, in which the charts were reproduced. If he studied, he could pass the spelling quizzes, Ms. Jones said — he just was not trying. But the boy got increasingly frustrated, and some weeks Ms. Jones had to stop herself from looking over his shoulder during the quizzes so she would not get upset by his continued mistakes.

Locally, Madison lacks a diverse K-12 environment, as evidenced by the rejection of the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Laura Waters:

Last week, the Paterson Charter School of Science and Technology held its annual enrollment lottery. There were 1,437 applicants for 99 openings, and so each student had less than a 10 percent chance of selection. Edwin Rodriguez, whose seven-year-old daughter, Natalie, and five-year-old son, Juelz, attend School 6, one of the worst-performing schools in the state, was one of the unlucky parents. He told The Record, “our name is on the waiting list but there are hundreds of names on the waiting list.”

This week the New Jersey Department of Education announced that, after a careful review of its most recent pool of charter applicants, it would authorize the opening of just one new charter school. As such, the D.O.E., as well as the Christie Administration, demonstrates an overabundance of caution that ignores the plight of children like Natalie and Juelz Rodriguez.

But let’s not be too harsh. The politics of charter school authorization in New Jersey is a contact sport. Some suburban voters hate these independent public schools because they envision them siphoning cash from depleted district budgets like petty criminals huddled over the gas tank of an SUV. NJEA leaders and other anti-choice lobbyists describe the growth of charters in urban districts like Paterson (although in this case they were referring to Camden) as an “out-of-control corporate takeover.” N.J.’s 20 year-old charter school law is flawed and obsolete, but the D.O.E. may feel threatened by some proposed revisions skulking around the Statehouse that would further curtail charter expansion. Or maybe this was just a particularly weak pool of contenders.

Carl Campanile:

More parents than ever are trying to get their kids into Success Academy charter schools, according to figures released Monday.

With 10 days until the deadline, 19,000 applications have already been filed for 2,688 seats this fall — or about seven requests for every opening, the charter network reported. Last year, there were 14,400 students trying to snare 2,870 slots.

The number of applicants has soared 57 percent over two years ago as top-performing Success Academy expands its foothold.

“These numbers reveal the sad truth about the lack of educational options in New York City,” said Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz. “Parents are desperate for better schools. It’s heart-breaking that the wait lists just grow longer each year.”

Erin Richards:

Sen. Paul Farrow (R-Pewaukee), chairman of the Senate Committee on Education Reform and Government Operations and a supporter of charter schools, indicated some of the ideas might need to be corralled.

“I think we might be over-chartering ourselves and not developing a cohesive picture for what charter schools should look like,” he said in an interview.

Independent charter schools are public schools run by nonprofit companies instead of school districts.They have to report all the same data as traditional public schools, but get freedom from some other state rules — such as employing unionized teachers — in exchange for meeting performance goals in a contract with a state-approved authorizing agency. Failure to meet the targets means the agency can close the school.

Republicans often like independent charter schools because they’re run like small businesses, often with nonunion staff on one-year contracts. Many Democrats dislike charters because they can deplete enrollment at traditional public schools, often don’t employ unionized teachers and may not be able to serve children with the most significant special needs.

Classroom Struggle

CS: School communities – school workers, students and families – have been carrying out various actions at their schools and at board meetings due to the neoliberal policy called the “Call for Quality Schools.” This policy is targetting 5 “underperforming” schools and putting them through an RFP process. RFPs, or Request For Proposals, are a way in which the OUSD administrators and school board members can treat each school’s management positions as a commodities to be put on the market. Charter School Organizations, non profits funded by corporate money, and other entities are being put in competition with the school sites to determine who has the “best plan” for running the schools.

The new Superintendent of OUSD, Antwan Wilson, is from Denver and has brought a bunch of highly paid and well connected administrators from Denver to take positions in the OUSD. They are carrying out this process in a very blunt and aggressive manner – steamrolling their proposals without considering the school community’s own needs and processes, making hasty decisions and putting them out over email prior to being clear on what’s happening.

All of this has lead to the emergence of a polarization against the OUSD administration that we have not seen in several years in Oakland.

“Our schools will show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.” So declared teachers union chief Randi Weingarten in 2005 upon launching the United Federation of Teachers charter school in Brooklyn, New York.

The UFT quietly let slip last week that this showcase K-8 charter school is closing after a legacy of failure. Ms. Weingarten’s experiment in education of the union, by the union and for the union is a case study in the problems with the status quo of union dominance over American public education.

In 2005 the UFT Charter School opened with a $1 million gift from the Broad Foundation and plans to reduce class sizes, increase collaboration among teachers with monthly “townhall meetings” and daily “community gatherings,” and replace principals with less adversarial “school leaders.” Instructional coaches were supposed to support teachers but not evaluate their performance.

On queue, yhe New York Times dives into a failed Florida charter.

Perhaps the reporters might compare charters with traditional public school performance along with spending and staffing data.

National Alliance for Public Charters

Nearly 2.9 million students now attend charter schools, according to a report released today by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools that estimates growth in charter schools and their student enrollment. U.S. charter schools are serving almost 348,000 new students in 2014-15, up from 288,000 the previous school year.

“This has been our highest enrollment figure so far, and we are not surprised parents are choosing charter schools for their child’s education,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “The growth in charter school enrollment shows parents’ demand for high-quality educational options. We are optimistic that the number of public charter schools will continue to grow to serve even more students and families.”

Apart from providing student enrollment estimates, the report also shines a light on estimates of the number of charter schools that opened for the 2014-15 school year and those that have closed during the past year. This year, 500 new public charter schools opened, while more than 200 schools that were open last year are no longer operating. These schools closed for a variety of reasons, including low enrollment, inadequate financial resources, or low academic performance.

“We want to see more high-quality charter schools serve students throughout the country. At the same time we advocate for strong accountability measures to ensure that only the highest-quality charter schools are serving our nation’s students,” said Rees.

David Osborne:

The biggest obstacles to the spread of teacher-run schools are school districts’ central rules, most of which make it impossible to use unusual personnel configurations, alter budgets and make myriad other changes the teacher-run model demands. That’s why so many teacher-run schools are charters — they need autonomy to organize as they please.

“I have a lot of friends in more traditional models,” says Tim Quealy, who teaches math, technology and language arts at Avalon. “They are just told what to do — some big binder lands on their desk, and their days are scripted. They feel very isolated.”

Avalon has committees that handle specific duties: personnel, technology, special education. Every year teachers evaluate one another on each other on four questions: What are their contributions? What are their greatest strengths and skills? What is some constructive feedback? And how confident are you in their overall performance? Parents and students also evaluate teachers, using different questions. If problems surface, the personnel committee appoints a fellow teacher to mentor his or her struggling colleague. If that fails, the group lets the teacher go, which appears to happen more often when teachers are in charge than it does in traditional public schools.

Having more control keeps teachers and students more engaged. Avalon’s high schoolers can take math, biology, physics and Spanish classes, but they spend the majority of their time on projects of their own choosing, with guidance from teachers to ensure that they master state standards. Such a heavy reliance on independent projects is typical of teacher-run schools, according to Kim Farris-Berg and Edward Dirkswager, who studied 11 of them for their 2012 book, “Trusting Teachers With School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots .”

Laura Waters has more.

Meanwhile, one size fits all continues to reign in Madison.

The assembly line seems like an odd way to go.

Susan Frey:

During Daisy Montes Cabrera’s final week of her first quarter at UC Davis, her father, who was terminally ill, died. Cabrera, a first-generation college student, wanted to leave Davis to be closer to her family in San Jose. But her high school college adviser, principal and teachers all encouraged her to stay, she said.

Cabrera’s high school – KIPP San Jose Collegiate – is part of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter school organization, which focuses on preparing low-income and first-generation students for college. For the past few years, KIPP has expanded its K-12 program to include supporting “KIPPsters” through their college years.

As part of the KIPP Through College program, the charter group has partnered with more than 50 public and private universities nationwide, seeking their support to help KIPP alumni integrate both academically and socially into college life. In California, 11 universities, including UC Davis, work with KIPP. Steve Mancini, communications director for KIPP, says that he doesn’t know of any other K-12 programs in the country that have this type of partnership with a wide range of universities.

“I wanted to quit Davis,” Cabrera said, “but right away I got calls and messages from all my high school teachers to keep going. I got a Facebook message from my principal saying, ‘let us know what you need.’”

National Alliance for Charter Schools, via a kind email:

Join the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Fordham Institute for a discussion on the health of the public charter school movement, where the National Alliance will present their twenty-six state-by-state rankings that examine factors such as charter school quality, growth, and innovation.

Richard Kallenberg & Halley Potter:

ALTHOUGH the leaders of teachers unions and charter schools are often in warring camps today, the original vision for charter schools came from Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

In a 1988 address, Mr. Shanker outlined an idea for a new kind of public school where teachers could experiment with fresh and innovative ways of reaching students. Mr. Shanker estimated that only one-fifth of American students were well served by traditional classrooms. In charter schools, teachers would be given the opportunity to draw upon their expertise to create high-performing educational laboratories from which the traditional public schools could learn.

Mr. Shanker was particularly inspired by a 1987 visit to a public school in Cologne, Germany, which stood out for a couple of reasons. Teams of teachers had considerable say in how the school was run. They made critical decisions about what and how to teach and stayed with each class of students for six years. And unlike most German schools, which are rigidly tracked, the Cologne school had students with a mix of abilities, family incomes and ethnic origins. Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were educated alongside native German students in mixed-ability groups. Sixty percent of the school’s students scored high enough on exams to be admitted to four-year colleges, compared with 27 percent of students nationally.

Mr. Shanker argued that charter schools could help reinvigorate the twin promises of American public education: to promote social mobility for working-class children and social cohesion among America’s increasingly diverse populations. There is considerable research to back up this vision. Richard M. Ingersoll, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that where teachers have more say in how their school is run, the school climate improves and teachers stay longer — trends that have been independently associated with increased student learning. And data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Mathematics show that low-income fourth graders who attend economically integrated schools are as much as two years ahead of low-income students stuck in high-poverty schools.

Alan Borsuk:

The zen of how to start a school.” That was one of the things Larry Rosenstock wanted to talk about at an elegant luncheon in June 2013 at the private University Club in downtown Milwaukee.

“You want to keep it simple,” he told an audience of 150 or so, including business leaders and philanthropists. He said you don’t want a school to be too stuck in its ways, and you want it to be a place that has, as he put it, a lot of oxygen.

Rosenstock was a carpenter, a lawyer and a business executive before becoming a nationally recognized education innovator.

He was the founder of High Tech High in San Diego. It opened with 200 students in 2000 and now has about 5,000 students in 12 schools. Its unusual program is built in large part on students learning by doing projects, and its student body is intentionally highly diverse by income and race. Data on student success is impressive and educators have come to observe from across the United States.

Rosenstock was at the luncheon in Milwaukee to support an idea, then called the Forest Exploration Center, that would include an eye-catchingly different school and other programs, based in a historic building on what is known now as the Innovation Campus in Wauwatosa.

He said such projects are exactly what is needed to get many teens on the path to success in education and careers. “We are all in with these folks,” he said.

That was the next to last time I heard anything about the plan that suggested forward movement. The last time was a short time later when the Legislature changed law provisions related to charter schools to make the idea feasible.

Other than that, what I heard was all about problems: The concept and leadership changed. It was tough getting support. There was a lot of resistance from officials in Wauwatosa who thought this was going to take away students and money from their school system.

Joey Garrison:

It delivered one of the biggest blows in Nashville’s fight over charter schools — a spreadsheet compiled by Metro Nashville Public Schools that suggested a suspiciously high number of students exit charters midyear and return to traditional schools.

The implication: Charters were weeding out low-performing students before end-of-year testing, improving the schools’ results.

But more than one year after a debate on student attrition widened a gulf between charters and the district, a team of Vanderbilt researchers contends there is no evidence of a larger exodus of students from charters.

Instead, a 75-page Vanderbilt Capstone study conducted at the request of Metro Schools calls poverty the root of a widespread mobility problem in Davidson County — students routinely moving from one school to another.

It recommends that the Metro school system improve its data collection on why students transfer, conduct exit interviews when students leave and enhance communication with transfers within both charter operators and the district.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (PDF):

Across the country, charter schools occupy a growing position in the public education landscape. Heated debate has accompanied their existence since their start in Minnesota two decades ago. Similar debate has occurred in California, particularly in Los Angeles, with charter advocates extolling such benefits of the sector as expanding parental choice and introducing market-based competition to education. Little of that debate, however, is grounded in hard evidence about their impact on student outcomes. This report contributes to the discussion by providing evidence for charter students’ performance in Los Angeles for four years of schooling, beginning with the 2008-2009 school year and concluding in 2011-2012.

With the cooperation of the California Department of Education (CDE), CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of CDE staff was critical to CREDO’s understanding of the character and quality of the data we received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with CDE dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.

This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools physically located within the Los Angeles Unified School District boundary. It is the first separate analysis by CREDO of the performance of Los Angeles’ charter schools. However, charter schools in Los Angeles were included in the CREDO report on all California charter schools, which can be found on our website.1 This report has two main benefits. First, it provides a rigorous and independent view of the performance of the city’s charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO’s reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states and cities.

The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical charter school student in Los Angeles would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy operate, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.

Compared to the educational gains that charter students might have had in a traditional public school (TPS), the analysis shows that in a year’s time, on average, students in Los Angeles charter schools make larger learning gains in reading and mathematics. Results for Hispanic charter students, especially Hispanic students in poverty, are particularly notable. At the school level, we compare the average performance over two growth periods to the average results for the school’s control group. The results in Los Angeles are among the strongest observed in any of the previous CREDO studies. Larger shares of schools outperform their local market in reading and math than was reported in the national study that was released in 2013.2

Meanwhile, a majority of Madison School Board members rejected the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school a few years ago. The traditional – Frederick Taylor -, non diverse governance model remains well entrenched here.

Karl Zinsmeister:

Many have been puzzled by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skepticism toward charter schools, his calls for ending space-sharing and charging them rent, and his $210 million cut of a construction fund important to the schools. Education reformers are also anxious about the failure of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to defend charter schools in the face of these prominent reversals of New York City policy. Is this just about teacher-union politics, or are there perhaps legitimate performance reasons for tapping the brakes on charter schools in public education today?

The first thing to remember about charter schools is how recent an invention they are. Born in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2006 that total enrollment reached a million children—out of 55 million pupils in the country. More than half of the charters in New York City are less than five years old.

With huge waiting lists for every available seat, though, charters are now beginning to mushroom. Well before Mr. de Blasio faces re-election in 2017, charters will educate 10% of New York City’s public-school students, and they already enroll a quarter of all pupils in some of the city’s poorest districts. Nationwide, charter schools will enroll five million by the end of this decade.

Seth Jovaag:

Melissa Droessler tries not to flinch when she tells people her dream of opening a charter school in Madison.

“Even the word ‘charter’ in Madison can be emotionally charged,” she says.

But Droessler, director of Isthmus Montessori Academy, is steadfast in her belief that a century-old pedagogy created in the slums of Rome could help tackle Madison schools’ thorniest problems.

Last month, the academy submitted a proposal to open Madison’s first public Montessori school in September 2015. As Madison’s fourth charter school, it would be tuition-free and open to anyone. It would also employ unionized Madison teachers, potentially avoiding a hurdle that tripped up proponents of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school in 2011.

Perhaps most significant, Droessler and others believe the Montessori approach could raise low-income and minority student achievement.

“The achievement gap will probably be the biggest part of our pitch,” she says “We feel it’s time for this in Madison. There’s no other motive.”

Organizers want to submit a grant application to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction by April 15 that could net $150,000 for planning costs next year. The Madison school board is expected to vote whether to green-light the application at its March 31 meeting, though any binding decision to establish the school is at least 10 months away, according to district policy governing the creation of charter schools.

Board member James Howard has toured the academy at 255 N. Sherman Ave. on the city’s near-northeast side. He says he’s interested in the proposal but needs to know more before forming an opinion. Ditto for board president Ed Hughes.

Related: Previous stillborn Madison charter initiatives include: The Studio School and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB school.

Meredith Simons, via a kind Caroline Zellmer message:

Collegiate Academies is seen by many as the crown jewel of the New Orleans charter school system, which is itself believed to be a national model for urban education. The charter operator’s flagship school, Sci Academy, boasts the best test scores of any open-enrollment high school in the city’s Recovery School District. In 2010, Oprah cut the school a $1 million check.
But this past November, a chain of events started that calls into question whether Collegiate Academies–and other New Orleans charters with similar models–will be able to maintain their success long-term.
First, students at Joseph S. Clark Preparatory High School, another New Orleans school, staged a sit-in after a beloved teacher was abruptly fired. The protest shut down junior classes for a day and got the following school day canceled while administrators decided how to respond. Leaders at Clark’s charter operator, Firstline Schools, met with angry students and parents, agreed to give students a voice in hiring decisions, and reassigned the school’s principal to the network office.

The Wisconsin State Journal:

Wisconsin has 243 charter schools.
Every one of them is a public school.
So don’t buy the “privatization” scare tactics surrounding legislation to expand chartering options across the state. Charter schools aren’t privatizing public education. They’re invigorating public education by trying new approaches to learning.
Charter schools cost the public less per student than traditional public schools. They often serve higher concentrations of minority and low-income students. And they are accountable for better results.
Local school boards have authorized the vast majority of charter schools in Wisconsin. Only UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside in Racine, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the city of Milwaukee are able to establish charter schools without local school board support.

Erin Richards:

A contentious proposal to expand independent charter schools in Wisconsin worries public-school advocates because it would further reduce aid to traditional districts and open the door for more private companies to run public schools.
But advocates of the bill, in a vigorous debate in Madison on Thursday, argued that’s largely the point — that it would offer more public-school options to families, as well as bring Wisconsin’s charter-school law in line with other states.
There are hints that such a change is too controversial to pass the Senate, primarily because of the financial effect it could have on school districts statewide. But that didn’t stop a robust, seven-hour debate about Assembly Bill 549 in the Assembly’s Committee on Urban Education — much of which revolved around differing ideologies about how to provide quality options for all in public education.

Erin Richards and Jason Stein:

Wisconsin could see a dramatic rise in the number of charter schools operating outside of districts and without teachers unions, under a new Assembly bill brought by Republicans that would take independent charters statewide.
The proposed legislation would eliminate district-staffed charters and empower a new slate of authorizers to approve independent charters: all four-year and two-year University of Wisconsin System institutions, as well as all the state’s regional educational service agencies and technical college district boards.
The measure comes as Republican lawmakers intensify their efforts to pass a charter-school bill in the remaining months of the session.
Independent charters are controversial because they are public schools run like private businesses; they don’t employ unionized staff and don’t have to answer to school boards. They exist through a contract, or charter, with an approved nondistrict entity.
Advocates see the schools as important to reform efforts because they’re not bogged down by school system bureaucracy and have more flexibility in curriculum and staffing.
Opponents criticize the schools for not having to follow the same rules as traditional districts, and for being the darlings of business interests. The schools also, in effect, reduce funding for traditional public schools the charter pupil otherwise might have attended.

Laura Waters:

Philadelphia’s Mastery Charter Schools is hoping to run a school in Camden. This week, Camden Public Schools announced that is now accepting applications from charter operators. But despite Mastery’s track-record, not everyone is excited by this idea.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this week that New Jersey’s Education Law Center (ELC), the primary advocate for New Jersey’s 31 poor Abbott districts, believes that the Camden Board of Education should not approve any more charter schools and instead focus on facilities repairs.
It’s not so hard to divine the politics of ELC’s anti-charter school stance. After all, the non-profit has made its bones lobbying for equitable school funding in the traditional public school sector and is closely allied with anti-choice groups that look askance at progressive instructional models. ELC was also one of the very few opponents to the Urban Hope Act, a 2011 bipartisan piece of legislation that allows non-profits to build up to four new schools in Camden, Trenton, and Newark, subject to approval by the local school board.

Terrence Stutz:

State Board of Education members vetoed a proposed charter school in the Dallas area Friday after complaints were raised that its operator has a history of catering to white students from more affluent families.
Board members voted, 9-6, to deny a state charter to Great Hearts Academies. The group had hoped to establish at least four campuses in the Dallas area, beginning with Irving.
The board approved a Great Hearts charter school in San Antonio last year, but that campus won’t open until next fall.
Great Hearts was one of four independent charter schools that Education Commissioner Michael Williams authorized in September, subject to the board’s approval.
The three other schools, in Austin, El Paso and San Antonio, won board approval Friday.
Board member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, noted that the 15 Great Hearts charter schools in Phoenix — where the charter operator is based — have a much higher percentage of white students than the regular public schools in the Phoenix area. While 42 percent of the public school students are Hispanic, only 13 percent of the enrollment at the Great Hearts schools is Hispanic.

Peggy McGlone:

A reference to nuclear warheads may seem out of place at a meeting of Newark educators, but not when you consider what’s at stake.
The Newark Public School district and the city’s charter schools are considering a plan that would blow up the status quo in what they say is an effort to provide equity to the city’s schoolchildren.
School officials are creating what some say is a first-in-the-nation voluntary effort to offer universal enrollment for students citywide to all of Newark’s 71 public schools and 21 public charter schools.
Under the plan, there would be one application, one timeline and one central clearing space for information about all city schools. Essentially, it would eliminate the need for parents to go from school to school filling out applications and participating in separate lotteries in the hopes of getting a spot in a particular school.

Via Laura Waters
Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

Sarah R. Cohodes, Elizabeth M. Setren, Christopher R. Walters, Joshua D. Angrist & Parag A. Pathak:

Boston charter schools have had many reasons to tout their performance in 2013. Research reports and MCAS scores have shown exceptional progress by charter students. But while we were buoyed by these findings, the Boston Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund sought to better understand in more detail not only how well charters are working, but for whom.
The answer–or at least the beginnings of it–is described in this report by a team of researchers from MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII). This is the third in a series of studies examining charter and Boston Public Schools (BPS) student performance. The first, released in 2009, was groundbreaking in its use of individual student data, its research design–which incorporated an observational study–and a lottery analysis. The second report, released in May 2013, examined Boston’s charter high schools and found gains in their students’ MCAS, Advanced Placement and SAT scores compared to their peers in the Boston Public Schools.
This report updates the 2009 study and uses a similar methodology. It examines the performance of all students enrolled in Boston’s charter schools as well as that of important subgroups of high-needs students, including those whose first language isn’t English or who have special needs. Importantly, this report also examines demand and enrollment patterns and finds a changing student population that includes more of these subgroups.
Like earlier studies, this report finds that attending a charter school in Boston dramatically improves students’ MCAS performance and proficiency rates. The largest gains appear to be for students of color and particularly large gains were found for English Language Learners.
At the same time, it is important to note that the analysis showed that charter school students are less likely to have special needs or to be designated as English Language Learners. While that gap has narrowed since the passage of education reform in 2010, the charters’ success with high-needs students should provide an even greater impetus to connect those student populations with charter schools.
In addition, the research team found that charter schools continue to be a popular option for Boston families. As the number of available seats grows, so too does the number of applicants. Nonetheless, the report finds that the odds of receiving a charter offer are roughly comparable to a student receiving his or her first choice through the BPS school-assignment process.
Readers of this report will draw many different conclusions, but the takeaway for us is clear: charters work for their students. It’s not only evident that we need more of these schools, but we must also redouble our efforts to ensure that students who have the most to gain are afforded greater access to them.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

Mary Burke’s past activities are coming under increased scrutiny now that she is an active candidate for governor. Mary has generously supported different educational initiatives for many years. Her primary focus has been the AVID/TOPS partnership between the Madison School District and the Boys and Girls Club. But her pledge of support for the Madison Prep charter school proposal has drawn the most attention. Since I was more involved in the Madison Prep saga than most, I thought it might be helpful if I provided a summary of what I know about Mary’s involvement.
In December, 2010, the Urban League of Greater Madison presented an initial proposal to the Madison School Board to establish a charter school called Madison Prep. The Urban League described the school as “a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color.” The school was intended to inculcate a culture of hard-work and achievement among its students through a host of practices, including single-sex classrooms, an International Baccalaureate curriculum, longer school days and school years, intensive mentoring, and obligatory parental involvement.
Madison Prep was controversial from the start and the initial proposal was adjusted in response to various concerns. By the fall of 2011, Madison Prep was planned to be an instrumentality charter school, like our existing charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Badger Rock. As an instrumentality, all teachers and staff would have been union members.

Burke’s candidacy will bring additional statewide attention (and rhetoric) to the Madison schools, particularly its challenges. It will be interesting to see what, if anything Mary Burke says about her time on the local school board.

Erin Richards:

Darling’s proposed amendment to Senate Bill 76 would allow the University of Wisconsin System two- and four-year campuses, as well as technical colleges and regional state entities known as Cooperative Educational Services Agencies, to approve charter schools to operate independent of school districts. It would also allow independent charter schools performing 10% higher in achievement than their local districts for two years in a row to automatically add new campuses. And it would allow charter schools that do not employ district staff to opt out of the state’s new educator evaluation system.
The legislation has the support of the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), as well as business groups and charter school advocates, who believe independent charter schools should have more opportunities to expand and replicate.
The state Department of Public Instruction, the associations that represent school boards and superintendents in Wisconsin, and the state’s largest teachers union are all against the proposal.
“This bill takes money out of the budgets of schools in western Wisconsin,” Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) said.

Marcus Winters, via a kind Deb Britt email:

This study uses NYC data to analyze the factors driving the gap in special education enrollment between charter and traditional public schools. Among the findings:
Students with disabilities are less likely to apply to charter schools in kindergarten than are regular enrollment students. This is the primary driver of the gap in special education enrollments.
The gap grows as students progress through elementary grades, largely because charter schools are less likely than district schools to place students in special education–and less likely to keep them there.
The gap also grows as students transfer between charter and district schools. Between kindergarten and third grade, greater proportions of regular education students enter charter schools, compared to students with special needs.
There is great mobility among special education students, whether they attend a charter or traditional public school. Close to a third of students in special education leave their school by the fourth year of attendance, whether they are enrolled in charters or traditional public schools.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

In the last few years, those at the helm of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) have become increasingly hostile to the city’s fast-growing charter school sector. Last year, the school board refused (despite a directive from the state to approve) a charter application from Great Hearts Academy, a respected Arizona charter management organization. This is despite the fact that only about 40% of the district’s students in grades 3-8 are meeting proficiency standards. In the past few weeks, the relationship between the MNPS directors and charter schools has deteriorated to the point that some describe as nuclear war. Schools Director Jesse Register has engaged lawyers to argue that the decade-old charter school law is unconstitutional.
Last week, a Nashville paper called for MNPS to adopt a portfolio strategy, meaning that the district should stop trying to be a monopoly operator of schools. Becoming a portfolio district would not mean that Nashville would put all its schools out to bid to charter schools. It would mean that the district would stop treating the students in Nashville charter schools as somebody else’s responsibility and start seeing its job as ensuring that all children in the city are well served by the public schools, no matter who runs them. If a particular neighborhood was not being well served and a renowned district principal wanted to open a new school there, great. If a high-performing charter school was in a position to open a new school there, great. Portfolio districts don’t have a preference for charters or district-run schools; they prefer whatever arrangement gets good results for kids.

Patrick Denice , Robin Lake, Betheny Gross:

How well do charter schools serve the students with special needs who choose to attend them? Finding the means to answer this question is complicated.
In March 2013, CRPE convened a group of nine experts, from leading economists to special education authorities, to determine the best ways for researchers to assess the learning and socio-emotional outcomes of charter school students with special needs.
Drawing on the panel’s conversations, this brief outlines the challenges associated with producing methodologically sound and practically useful research on how students with special needs fare in charter schools as compared to in district-run schools. These challenges include inconsistent approaches to identifying and tracking students with diverse learning needs, data and methodological limitations, and inconsistencies in state policy.
The authors include a set of recommendations for designing the kind of rigorous research needed to inform policy and practice and help policymakers and the public become wiser consumers of special education charter schools studies.

Shari Ackerman:

In the past three years, 18 states have lifted caps on the number of charters schools allowed, another sign that lawmakers are embracing charters as valuable options in public education.
“I think there’s a growing recognition from state policymakers that charter schools are one of the pieces of the puzzle of education reform,” said Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “They’re not the silver bullet. They’re not a panacea.”
But when charter schools are allowed to push the traditional system, they can become the labs of innovation they were designed to be, he said.
The information on caps comes in a new report from the alliance, which also looked at other changes states have made to charter school laws. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia now have charter schools, and the alliance concluded 35 of them strengthened their laws. In the alliance’s view, that could mean anything from increasing transparency of the approval process to ensuring local charter school authorizers are adequately funded.
Most of the progress was on lifting the caps, said Ziebarth, who co-authored the report and is the alliance’s senior vice president for state advocacy and support. Between 2010 and the beginning of 2013, 16 states lifted caps. Since January, Mississippi and Texas have joined the list.

Sherri Ackerman:

Charter schools are among those supporting a tense Board of Education decision this week that prevents state grades for public schools from dropping more than one letter.
But some of them worry the move might add to the confusion parents and others already have about Florida’s A through F grading system – and erode public confidence in it.
“I think it becomes confusing to parents when the state says it wants to move forward with higher standards and wants them to be more rigorous, and then makes a safety net” when those standards aren’t met, said Cynthia Adversa, principal of Indian River Charter High School in Vero Beach, which is a member of the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools.
Teachers and students worked hard to meet those expectations, said Daviem Dina Miller, who heads Somerset Academy in Davie. So when some schools that didn’t hit the mark still benefit from a higher grade, “I think a lot of parents would question that.”

Stephanie Banchero:

Students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools posted slightly higher learning gains overall in reading than their peers in traditional public schools and about the same gains in math, but the results varied drastically by state, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of U.S. charter schools.
The study [PDF], published Tuesday by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, found that charter students in Rhode Island, for example, gained the equivalent of an additional 86 days of reading comprehension and 108 days of math comprehension annually compared with peers in traditional public schools. In Nevada, however, charter students had 115 fewer days of learning in reading and 137 fewer in math annually, the study found.
Overall, the new study found that charter students gained an additional eight days of reading, while the math gains were identical. Low-income Hispanic and African-American students did much better in charters than their peers in the traditional school option, while white children did worse in charters.
The researchers and some charter proponents said the results suggest some states need to be more particular about which groups they award charters, and more aggressive about shutting low-performers.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes Press Release:

According to the 26-state study:

• Students in poverty, black students, and those who are English language learners (ELL) gain significantly more days of learning each year in both reading and math compared to their traditional public school peers. Performance differences between charter school students and their traditional public school peers were especially strong among black and Hispanic students in poverty and Hispanic students who are ELL in both reading and math.
• Charter school enrollment has grown among students who are in poverty, black students, and Hispanic students.
• The 11 new states added marginally to the mathematics gains seen since the 2009 study, but more so to gains in reading.

More from Stephanie Simon.
Related:One year in, Oconomowoc High School staff, students adjusting to change and May, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
A majority of Madison school board members rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in 2012.
Madison’s long term, disastrous reading scores.

The Boston Foundation & New Schools Venture Fund (PDF):

Boston charter schools are making a substantive difference in the lives of their students. For the Boston Foundation, recognition of this began in 2009, when we partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to publish an Understanding Boston report that compared the results of students in Boston’s charter schools, pilot schools and traditional schools.
The report, Informing the Debate, by a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard, which used data from the state, followed individual students over time. While it showed few advantages for students attending pilot schools, which the Boston Foundation had heavily invested in at the time, it did show that charter schools–at both the middle and high school levels had a decidedly positive impact on student achievement. The results in math achievement for middle-school students were nothing short of remarkable.
Informing the Debate helped to fuel the movement to partially lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts, spurred by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top federal funding strategy for education, which emphasizes innovation and encourages the establishment of more charter schools. Inspired by the potential for federal funds for education, in the spring of 2009 Governor Deval Patrick announced support for in-district charter schools. On a local level, Mayor Thomas M. Menino filed legislation that would allow local school districts to open new, district-run charter schools.
In January of 2010, a major education reform act was passed in Massachusetts. Through our convening of the Race to the Top Coalition, the Boston Foundation was proud to play a key role in the passage of An Act Relevant to the Achievement Gap, which, among other advances, doubled the number of charter school seats in the state.

Stop the latest ploy by the WIGOP to destroy our public schools!The time to act is now: bit.ly/18zyVJW

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) May 30, 2013

Long term disastrous reading scores are the existential threat to our local public school “status quo” structure.



Related: Where Have all the Students Gone? Madison Area School District Enrollment Changes: 1995-2013.

Matthew DeFour

Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to create a statewide charter school board has hit a roadblock as lawmakers are considering removing it from the next two-year budget.
Republicans are also backing away from using new school report cards to expand the state’s voucher program, though a broader agreement on the voucher expansion remained elusive Wednesday.
Republicans said they might introduce separate legislation to establish a statewide board to authorize nonprofits to open charter schools in certain school districts, including Madison.
“We think that’s highly popular around the state and we need to talk about it a little more,” said Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, co-chairwoman of the Joint Finance Committee, which is rewriting Walker’s 2013-15 spending plan.

A charter school operator named in a report from The Education Trust-Midwest as running underperforming schools has fired back, accusing the advocacy group of misrepresenting test scores.
The Leona Group, which operates 25 charter schools in Michigan, has been approved to add an additional K-5 campus to its Cesar Chavez Academy in Detroit this fall, operating under authorization from Saginaw Valley State University. The report from The Education Trust-Midwest criticized the addition, citing poor performance on the 2012 MEAP compared to Detroit Public Schools students, especially among Hispanic pupils.
Madalyn Kaltz, a spokesperson with The Leona Group, issued a statement Friday calling the report from The Education Trust-Midwest “grossly irresponsible and slanted” and questioning the report’s use of statistics from the MEAP.

Ray Fisman:

On June 4, 1991, Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson signed into law a bill that set in motion one of the most significant–and controversial–education reform movements in modern history. Minnesota’s charter school law allowed educators and other concerned individuals to apply to the state for permission to operate a government-funded school outside of the public education system. In order to obtain and keep their licenses, these new schools needed to show they were serving their students effectively, based on goals laid out in the school’s “charter.” City Academy, America’s first charter school, opened in St. Paul the following year. Its mission was to get high-school dropouts on track to vocational careers, and it is still operating today. One early enrollee, Demetrice Norris, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 1992 that he had spent years, “being lazy – not doing nothing” before he “got a life back here in school” and “got a chance to be something.”
Whether charter schools have actually lived up to their initial promise is a hotly contestedtopic in the education reform debate. An entire field of education research aims to assess whether students are better off at charter schools than in the public system. The latest findings, based on six well-regarded charter schools in Boston, released Wednesday by theBoston Foundation and MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, adds to the accumulating evidence that at least a subset of high-performing charters are measuring up to the movement’s early aspirations of giving disadvantaged kids a shot at a better life. The study shows that the Boston schools’ students did better on SAT and Advanced Placement tests and are vastly more likely to enroll at four year colleges–and to do so on scholarship–than otherwise identical students in the Boston public school system.
What makes a charter school different from other public schools? While they’re funded with public money, they generally operate outside of collective bargaining agreements (only about one-tenth of charter schools are unionized) and other constraints that often prevent principals in public schools from innovating for the good of their students (so the argument goes). In exchange for this freedom, they generally get less funding than public schools (though they’re free to look for private donations, and many do) and have to prove that they are making good on the promises set out in their charters, which often means showing that they improve their students’ performance on statewide standardized tests.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

One of the main goals of the charter school movement at its founding was to provide new school options for families that wanted and needed them. Another was to foster innovation, for charter schools themselves and traditional public schools around them. Are charters living up to those promises?
Edited by Robin Lake, the 7th edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality focuses on growth and innovation and presses charter leaders to consider whether they are fully using their flexibility and autonomy on behalf of students. Experts assess the national landscape and provide possible guidance for the charter sector in light of the demand for better schools, impending Common Core standards, and tight budgets:

Laura Waters:

One of the few things educators and administrators agree on: charter schools need multiple authorizers
Here’s a rarity within New Jersey’s education reform community: consensus. The NJ Education Association, Gov. Chris Christie, Commissioner Chris Cerf, Education Law Center, and NJ Charter Association concur that the state’s charter school law is broken. In response, several members of the state Legislature are working on overhauls, and last week a draft of the bill Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex) is putting together was leaked to NJ Spotlight.
Critics of our 14-year-old charter school law are buttressed by various national research organizations that evaluate state charter school legislation and find ours lacking. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), for example, ranks New Jersey 31st out of 42 states with charter school laws.
We lose points on funding inequities between traditional (district) and independent (charter) public schools and a certain lack of transparency. Most critically, New Jersey relies on a single entity to authorize new charters (the education commissioner), despite mounds of data that proves that effective laws invest “multiple authorizers” with approval authority.

Andrew Rotherham:

Something you hear a lot from charter school opponents is that they’d be OK with charters if the schools more consistently produced gains for students. Yet in places that have done a good job with charter quality the opposition from special interests remains. Some new polling data that will become public next week in Massachusetts casts a light on this issue.
The poll of 625 registered voters in Boston found that just 23 percent of respondents supported keeping current limits on charter schools while 64 percent are in favor of expanding charters. 66 percent think the city should lease vacant buildings to charters and 67 percent think charters should get state funding for construction and renovation. Perhaps most interesting, 73 of voters said they support allowing charter schools with a proven record of success to expand – essentially a “smart cap” idea (pdf).

Emma Brown:

Sidwell Friends, the elite private school known for educating the children of presidents and members of Congress, has lent its support to a group of former students and faculty who are seeking to open a public charter school in the District.
The aspiring charter founders say they want One World Public Charter School to give middle-school students from across the city an opportunity to experience — for free — the caliber of education that costs $34,268 a year at the independent Quaker school.
Tom Farquhar, Sidwell’s head of school, spoke in favor of One World last week at a D.C. Public Charter School Board hearing. “These are extraordinary people,” Farquhar said, “and they have demonstrated in their lives prior to this an extraordinary commitment to the children of our community.”
Charters have drawn leaders from high-flying college-prep schools before: A graduate of National Cathedral School started the high-performing D.C. Prep charter network, while a Sidwell alumnus co-founded the SEED School, a charter boarding school.

Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel Steve Hartley, Chief of Staff (PDF):

It is the policy of the School Board to consider the establishment of charter schools that support the DISTRICT Mission and Belief Statements and as provided by law. The BOARD believes that the creation of charter schools can enhance the educational opportunities for Madison Metropolitan School District students by providing innovative and distinctive educational programs and by giving parents/students more educational options within the DISTRICT. Only charter schools that are an instrumentality of the DISTRICT will be considered by the BOARD.
The BOARD further believes that certain values and principles must be integrated into all work involving the conceptualization, development and implementation of a new charter school. These guiding principles are as follows:
1. All charter schools must meet high standards of student achievement while providing increased educational opportunities, including broadening existing opportunities for struggling populations of students;
2. All charter schools must have an underlying, research-based theory and history of successful practice that is likely to achieve academic success;
3. All charter schools will provide information to parents and students as to the quality of education provided by the charter school and the ongoing academic progress of the individual student;
4. All charter schools will ensure equitable access to all students regardless of gender, race and/or disability;
5. All charter schools must be financially accountable to the DISTRICT and rely on +’ sustainable funding models;
6. All charter schools must ensure the health and safety of all staff and students;
7. All externally-developed charter schools must be governed by a governance board that is registered as a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt charitable organization;
8. All charter schools must have a plan to hire, retain and recruit a highly-qualified, diverse staff;
9. All charter schools must have a clear code of student conduct that includes procedures for positive interventions and social emotional supports

Related:
Matthew DeFour’s article.
The rejected Studio charter school.
Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools.
“We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”.
Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13.
Madison’s disastrous long term reading results..
Interview: Henry Tyson, Superintendent of Milwaukee’s St. Marcus Elementary School.

USA Today Editorial:

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers’ unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they’re siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There’s little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.
That doesn’t mean all charters are automatically good. They’re not. But it’s indisputable that the good ones — most prominently, KIPP — are onto something. The non-profit company, which now has 125 schools, operates on a model that demands much more of students, parents and teachers than the typical school does. School days are longer, sometimes including Saturday classes. Homework burdens are higher, typically two hours a night. Grading is tougher. Expectations are high, as is the quality of teachers and principals, and so are the results.
KIPP’s eighth-grade graduates go to college at twice the national rate for low-income students, according to its own tracking. After three years, scores on math tests rise as if students had four years of schooling, according to an independent study.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”
.
A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.
Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools
.

Nina Rees:

President Obama will soon release his federal budget for 2014, and a top priority is likely to be early-childhood education, particularly for the poor. But will the proposal seek much funding for the growth of charter schools–at least more than the paltry 0.4% of federal education spending that currently supports these exciting and demonstrably successful schools?
Last month, the respected private firm Mathematica Policy Research published a multiyear study (PDF) of students enrolled in KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program), a network of 125 charter schools serving 41,000 students in 20 states and the District of Columbia. The study found that after three years students in the KIPP program were 11 months ahead of their traditional-public-school peers in math and eight months ahead in reading. Also after three years (or four for some children in the study), KIPP students were 14 months ahead in science and 11 months ahead in social studies.
These gains are substantial. For every three (or four) years they spend in the program, KIPP students are benefiting from almost a full year of greater learning growth than they would if they remained in traditional public schools.

Marquette University Law School Poll:

A statewide Marquette Law School Poll conducted March 11-14 finds that voters view charter schools as enabling more choice in education options but are doubtful that students learn more in charter schools than in public schools. Seventy-one percent said charter schools offer more choice, while 18 percent disagreed. Thirty-four percent think students learn more in charter schools, but 51 percent disagree. The poll finds that voters have a mix of views about charter schools, reflecting varied evaluations of them as education alternatives.
Charter schools are publicly funded, independently operated schools that are allowed more flexibility over instruction and subject matter than traditional public schools. The poll also touched upon views of vouchers, which support students attending private and religious schools.
A large majority, 72 percent, think charter schools provide flexibility to meet student needs that may not be met in traditional public schools, while 16 percent disagree. Voters doubt that charter schools skim the best students: 31 percent think they do, but 58 percent disagree. Opinion is more evenly divided on whether charters take needed money away from traditional public schools: 40 percent think they do, while 48 percent think they do not drain money from traditional schools. Forty-six percent think competition with charter schools makes public schools better, but 42 percent disagree.
Voters are concerned that the public pays for charter schools but has little control over school quality, with 47 percent agreeing and 38 percent disagreeing.
Charter schools are viewed favorably by 42 percent of voters statewide, while 16 percent have an unfavorable view of them. However, 42 percent say they don’t know enough about charter schools to offer an opinion. That is a higher favorability than toward voucher schools, which are seen favorably by 27 percent and unfavorably by 24 percent. An even larger segment, 49 percent, said they didn’t know enough to express an opinion about voucher schools. Public schools, in contrast, were viewed favorably by 72 percent of the public with 18 percent having unfavorable views and 10 percent unable to say. Likewise, 24 percent said they were very satisfied with the public schools in their community and 57 percent said they were satisfied. Eleven percent were dissatisfied and 2 percent very dissatisfied

Poll topline views (PDF).

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates.
This week, we ask the candidates about charter schools, whether they’d like to see their expansion in the district, and if so, how they should operate within the district. Another question focuses on teacher evaluation, and how the candidates think it should be conducted with regards to student test scores.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board, here.

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s 0 between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 3, former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos is running against retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong. The winner will replace retiring school board member Beth Moss.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we’d pose our own questions to candidates.
This week, we ask the candidates about charter schools, whether they’d like to see their expansion in the district, and if so, how they should operate within the district. Another question focuses on teacher evaluation, and how the candidates think it should be conducted with regards to student test scores.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.

Isthmus:

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.
The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker’s revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers’ evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.

Jennifer Levitz:

Massachusetts lawmakers are considering eliminating a cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the lowest-performing school districts, including here in the capital city.
While other states also have weighed lifting caps, charter advocates point to left-leaning Massachusetts as a somewhat unlikely model for the movement. “This demonstrates that charter schools are a viable reform,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the movement. “If it can happen in Massachusetts, it can happen anywhere.”
Charter schools receive public funding but, unlike public schools, employ mostly nonunion teachers and have autonomy in school districts, which allows them to set their own conditions, such as longer school days. They have long been embraced by Republicans for introducing choice in education, but have been assailed by some teacher unions and others as hurting traditional public schools.

Madison appears to be going in the opposite direction.
Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”

Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel; Steve Hartley, Chief of Staff:

During last month’s Committee meeting, we presented a new, rewritten Policy 10000. At that time, we explained that the changes contained therein were intended to reflect the time the Board has spent reviewing and discussing Dr. Julie Mead’s work regarding principle-based policymaking. Over the course of the last meeting, several members suggested changes for and improvements to Draft 1 of the rewritten Policy 10000. Tonight we present Draft 2, which we believe incorporates the Board’s suggestions and input. Attached hereto is a redline draft highlighting the differences between Draft 1 of the rewritten policy and Draft 2.
The changes include:

• Express language stating only instrumentality schools will be considered (p. 10-1)
• Refinement of the guiding principles (pp. 10-1and10-2)
• Revisions to the timeline to include more Board involvement and specificity (p.10-3)
• Board review and approval of Initial Applications (p. 10-5)
• Clarification of the timing of the Superintendent’s Administrative Analysis (p. 10-6)
• Removal of the term “qualified” in Section IV (p. 10-7)
• Additional detail regarding location requirements (p. 10-8)

The changes in Draft 2 do not reflect any of the proposed statutory amendments contained in Governor Walker’s biennial budget. At this time, the changes are only proposals and may or may not be passed as law. Obviously, if any of the proposed changes, which primarily relate to independent and instrumentality charter schools, do become law, we will need to review Policy 10000 again to insure compliance.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools” Soglin Asked Sarah Manski to Run for the School Board; “Referred” her to MTI Executive Director John Matthews.

“Vouchers, private charter schools, special education vouchers will fragment our community and weaken MMSD,” says GRUMPS. Thank You!

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) March 6, 2013

Much more on GRUMPS, here.

Laura Waters:

From yesterday’s NJ Spotlight article on NJ’s progress towards updating our charter school laws:

“This is exciting,” said Carlos Perez, executive director of the New Jersey Charter Schools Association. “We’ve talked about the need for a charter reform bill for some time now. The administration is absolutely correct that a strong charter law is the pathway to high quality charter schools.”
Others with a different vision for revising the charter-school law continued to oppose Christie’s approach and policies.
“What the overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents want added to the charter law is local approval of new charter schools and of charter expansions, more transparency and accountability, and an end to the terrible segregation between charters and traditional public schools,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a founder of Save Our Schools-New Jersey.
“Instead, the Governor is proposing failed for-profit charter schools and an increase in charter schools being forced on unwilling communities,” she said. [Assemblyman Patrick] Diegnan, who has sided more with the positions of SOS and other critics of the Christie administration’s policies, said he would continue to press for tighter controls.
For instance, Diegnan said his bill would include a controversial provision requiring a vote by local residents before any new charter school is approved to open.
“I remain a big advocate for that,” he said.

This excerpt is a useful window into some of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of local control and school choice. First, a reality check. There’s no evidence that the “overwhelming majority” of NJ residents prefer local referenda on charter school expansion. Certainly there’s terrible segregation among NJ’s public schools, but that has nothing to do with charter schools. SOS’s contention that school choice proponents are jockeying for “failed for-profit charter schools” is just silly.

Matthew Defour

Manski declined to name the other people who recruited her and has not returned calls since last Friday.
Soglin said when he spoke to Manski he did not know who the other candidates were or which seat she was going to run for.
“I thought she would be a good candidate committed to public education,” Soglin said. “The only discussion I had with Sarah Manski was her candidacy for the School Board. There was nothing else to discuss.”
Soglin said he was “disappointed for our community and disappointed for her” at the news of her withdrawal.
Matthews said in an email that Soglin referred Manski to him for a discussion about her candidacy, but that the grad school application never came up. He said he learned Manski would be moving to California when she called him at 6 p.m. on Feb. 20, the night before she announced her withdrawal from the race.

Related: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools” by Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.
Madison’s long time disastrous reading results and the school board.
2013 Madison School Election Intrigue (Public!)
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
I’m glad DeFour continues to dig.

Matthew DeFour:

Wisconsin school boards would have less control over their own charter schools under Gov. Scott Walker’s state budget proposal.
The changes could have major implications for districts such as Madison, where the School Board has exerted tight control over charter school expansion, including rejecting a school proposed by Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire that sought exemptions from district policies.
On Monday night, Madison School Board members said they might have to halt plans to revamp the district’s charter school policy.
“We’ve saved money and we’ve implemented programs and then with the swipe of a pen we have been outnumbered and outmanipulated by a governor who apparently wants to run for president,” board member Maya Cole said.
“I hope he’s really happy.”
The majority of charter schools in the state have less autonomy than others around the country, said Carrie Bonk, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. Walker’s proposal would change that.

The New York Times:

From a national standpoint, the 20-year-old charter school movement has been a disappointment. More than a third of these independently run, publicly funded schools are actually worse than the traditional public schools they were meant to replace. Abysmal charter schools remain open for years, even though the original deal was that they would be shut down when they failed to perform. New York City’s experience, however, continues to be an exception.
For the second time in three years, a rigorous study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes shows that the typical New York City charter school student learns more in a year in reading and math than his or her peers in their neighborhood district schools. The difference, over a typical year, amounts to about a month’s more learning in reading — and a whopping five months’ more learning in math.

Alan Borsuk:

Just what is a charter school? That’s the question I get most often when I talk to people in the general public. It’s a good question. What’s going on with charter schools around here is both important and tough to grasp.
Gov. Scott Walker unveiled ideas last week for momentous steps related to education around the state as part of his budget proposal for the next two years.
One of them was not allowing public schools to spend more money for operations in the next two years than they’re spending now. I was betting Walker would back a modest increase, at least in line with increased state aid for schools. By not increasing what is called the revenue cap on schools, Walker effectively proposed using increased education aid for property tax relief, not education. That would mean putting public schools statewide in increasingly tight circumstances. Will Republicans in the Legislature accept that or moderate it? A big question for the coming months.
Another Walker proposal would allow launching private school vouchers in as many as nine more cities in the state (Milwaukee and Racine have them now). It’s very controversial and we’ll talk about it in coming weeks.
But Walker’s budget proposal also includes important charter school changes. Those have gotten less attention, so let’s focus on them here, mostly in the form of a primer on charters.

Stephanie Simon:

Getting in can be grueling.
Students may be asked to submit a 15-page typed research paper, an original short story, or a handwritten essay on the historical figure they would most like to meet. There are interviews. Exams. And pages of questions for parents to answer, including: How do you intend to help this school if we admit your son or daughter?
These aren’t college applications. They’re applications for seats at charter schools.
Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.
“I didn’t get the sense that was what charter schools were all about – we’ll pick the students who are the most motivated? Who are going to make our test scores look good?” said Michelle Newman, whose 8-year-old son lost his seat in an Ohio charter school last fall after he did poorly on an admissions test. “It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools typically operate under private management and often boast small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus. They’re booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.

Stephanie Simon:

Charter schools pride themselves on asking a lot of their students. Many ask a great deal of parents, too.
Nearly 40 percent of charters nationwide do not participate in the federal subsidized lunch program, often because they don’t have space for a kitchen or don’t want to deal with the paperwork, according to the pro-charter Center for Education Reform.
That can leave low-income parents scrambling to find a way to feed their children. Nearly half of American school kids are eligible for subsidized meals, and more than 90 percent of traditional public schools provide them.
Most states don’t require charter schools to offer transportation, so that’s often up to parents, too.
And then there’s the forced volunteerism. Traditional public schools can and sometimes do ask parents to help out, but they can’t force the issue. Scores of charter schools, however, require parents to work up to 40 hours a year – or forfeit their child’s seat. To meet the mandate, parents might chaperone field trips, keep order at lunch or direct traffic in the parking lot.

Emma Brown:

It’s the latest sign that the District is on track to become a city where a majority of children are educated not in traditional public schools but in public charters: A California nonprofit group has proposed opening eight D.C. charter schools that would enroll more than 5,000 students by 2019.
The proposal has stirred excitement among those who believe that Rocketship Education, which combines online learning and face-to-face instruction, can radically raise student achievement in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Rocketship’s charter application — which is the largest ever to come before District officials, and which might win approval this month — arrives on the heels of Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s decision to close 15 half-empty city schools, highlighting an intense debate about the future of public education in the nation’s capital.
A growing number of activists have raised concerns that the traditional school system, facing stiffer-than-ever competition from charters, is in danger of being relegated to a permanently shrunken role. And they worry that Washington has yet to confront what that could mean for taxpayers, families and neighborhoods.

Laura Waters:

There’s a new CREDO report (Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes) on how to identify high-performing charter schools and encourage their expansion. You can download either the Executive Summary or the full report here, ), but here’s a few highlights:

• Charter schools don’t tend to improve much over time. If a school is struggling in its first year or two, it’s unlikely to duplicate the success of high-performing charter schools. “Based on the evidence, there appears to be no structural ‘new school’ phenomenon of wobbly performance for several years.”

• This holds true for all schools, but especially for middle and high schools; i.e., if they’re not getting it right from the get-go, then odds of turnarounds are not high. “Substantial improvement over time is largely absent from middle schools, multi-level schools and high schools. Only elementary schools show an upward pattern of growth if they start out in the lower two quintiles.”
• Charter Management Organizations (CMO’s), or groups of three or more charters run under one management, have a higher degree of success with minority and poor kids. “They produce stronger academic gains for students of color and student in poverty than those students would have realized either in traditional public schools (TPS) or in many categories what would have learned in independent charter schools.”

One big take-away: a charter school’s first year is indicative of its long-term performance, and kids do better with historically-successful CMO’s. There’s little justification for not closing down a poorly-performing charter after the first couple of years.

Valerie Strauss:

The Rocketship network of charter schools has made a name for itself in the world of school choice — and attracted $2 million from the Obama administration to help it grow — with its “blended learning” model that incorporates traditional classroom settings with a computer “Learning Lab” for students.
The idea behind the lab was that students could learn basic lessons in math and reading while teachers could work with students on more complicated material. Part of the attraction, too, was that the computers would cost less than hiring more teachers. Well, it turns out that the vaunted “Learning Lab” isn’t working so well. In fact, it has turned out to be so much less than expected that Rocketship is revamping it.
Here’s what my colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote about the Learning Lab in this 2012 story about Rocketship and its co-founder and chief executive officer, John Danner:
In each Rocketship school, children file into a “Learning Lab” every day, where they sit at computer carrels that line the perimeter of the room.

Michael Goldstein, via a kind reader’s email:

Our friends at Barr Foundation produced this 12-minute video. It profiles 3 new Boston schools.
The first is Margarita Muñiz Academy. MMA is a two-way bilingual Spanish-English High School. Shout outs to Meg Campbell and Greg Gunn for helping get this off the ground. If you want to know what 2-way bilingual means, watch the video.
Then there’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School. I blogged about here in September. Christine, their principal, is married to our middle school principal, Megan. I’m pretty sure I noticed our 2-year-old checking out their almost 2-year-old on Thanksgiving.

Related: We are not interested in the development of more charter schools.

Laura Waters:

This week NJ Spotlight acquired, via a formal Open Records Act request, the application from KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy to the Camden City Board of Education. The applicants hope to create up to five charter schools under the auspices of N.J.’s Urban Hope Act, a bill passed last January that allows non-profits to operate new schools in Newark, Trenton, and Camden.
The application process has not been lacking in melodrama. (See here for previous Newsworks coverage.) While Mayor Dana Reed heartily supports other options in Camden besides its dismal traditional schools, the school board initially rejected all applications and later, only begrudgingly, agreed to consider the one from KIPP, a highly-regarded program that serves 41,000 kids in the country and operates five schools in Newark.

Larry Winkler kindly emailed the chart pictured above.

Where have all the Students gone?

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

We are not interested in the development of new charter schools. Recent presentations of charter school programs indicate that most of them do not perform to the level of Madison public schools. I have come to three conclusions about charter schools. First, the national evidence is clear overall, charter schools do not perform as well as traditional public schools. Second where charter schools have shown improvement, generally they have not reached the level of success of Madison schools. Third, if our objective is to improve overall educational performance, we should try proven methods that elevate the entire district not just the students in charter schools. The performance of non-charter students in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago is dismal.
In addition, it seems inappropriate to use resources to develop charter schools when we have not explored system-wide programming that focuses on improving attendance, the longer school day, greater parental involvement and combating hunger and trauma.
We must get a better understanding of the meaning of ‘achievement gap.’ A school in another system may have made gains in ‘closing’ the achievement gap, but that does not mean its students are performing better than Madison students. In addition, there is mounting evidence that a significant portion of the ‘achievement gap’ is the result of students transferring to Madison from poorly performing districts. If that is the case, we should be developing immersion programs designed for their needs rather than mimicking charter school programs that are more expensive, produce inadequate results, and fail to recognize the needs of all students.
It should be noted that not only do the charter schools have questionable results but they leave the rest of the district in shambles. Chicago and Milwaukee are two systems that invested heavily in charter schools and are systems where overall performance is unacceptable.

Related links:

• Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. [Kaleem Caire video interview]
• Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending
• When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005)
• “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!
• Paul Soglin notes and links.
• Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13 (2009 Open Enrollment Leaver Survey)
• Paul Vallas visits Madison; Enrollment Growth: Suburban Districts vs. Madison 1995-2012
• Where does MMSD get its numbers from?
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools

I am unaware of Madison School District achievement data comparing transfer student performance. I will email the Madison School Board and see what might be discovered.
Pat Schnieder:

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has some pretty strong ideas about how to improve academic achievement by Madison school children. Charter schools are not among them.
In fact, Madison’s ongoing debate over whether a charter school is the key to boosting academic achievement among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District is distracting the community from making progress, Soglin told me.
He attended part of a conference last week sponsored by the Urban League of Greater Madison that he says overstated the successes elsewhere of charter schools, like the Urban League’s controversial proposed Madison Preparatory Academy that was rejected by the Madison School Board a year ago.
“A number of people I talked with about it over the weekend said the same thing: This debate over charter schools is taking us away from any real improvement,” Soglin said.
Can a new committee that Soglin created — bringing together representatives from the school district, city and county — be one way to make real progress?

The City of Madison’s Education Committee, via a kind reader’s email. Members include: Arlene Silveira, Astra Iheukemere, Carousel Andrea S. Bayrd, Erik Kass, Jenni Dye, Matthew Phair, Maya Cole and Shiva Bidar-Sielaff.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison’s newest charter school opened in a state-of-the-art green building this fall, but parents and teachers are already worried there isn’t enough room for additional students next year.
It’s not that the classrooms at Badger Rock Middle School are cramped — they’re more spacious than most others in the district. But parents and teachers say there just aren’t enough rooms to serve the needs of the school.
The principal had to negotiate with the building owner to carve out an area for private meetings between teachers, parents and students. The nurse’s clinic doubles as a teacher break room. And when the number of students increases from 100 to 150 next year, a grade level will move into what is now the art and science room.
“When they planned out the building they said, ‘We have this great idea and it looks like this,'” said Tom Purnell, the parent of twin seventh-graders at Badger Rock. “Do I want to send my kids where the vision is or where the reality is?”

Linda Shaw:

The first charter schools in Washington probably won’t be run by the nation’s best-known charter groups with years of experience and strong reputations.
During the successful campaign for Initiative 1240, which will allow as many as 40 charters to open here over five years, supporters talked about wanting Washington students to have a chance to attend the kind of schools operated by the nation’s top charter operators.
But the highest profile chains are in such demand that most won’t be looking to expand here anytime soon — if at all.
Instead, assuming the new law survives a legal challenge, Washington likely will start out with kitchen-table charters, cooked up by a teacher or principal or two with a passion to try something new.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:

By now, it should be apparent that charter schools have been the spark to the education reform flame in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At first, applicants hoping to open publicly funded but independently operated charter schools had to fight for every new campus, opposed by school board members who were strong union allies. But as charters showed remarkable progress with disadvantaged and minority students who had been failing in regular public schools, appreciation for them increased. New laws limited the grounds on which the school board could reject charter applications, and the election of a more reform-oriented board brought the number of students attending charter schools to nearly 100,000, about twice as many as in the New York City school system.
Yet misguided attacks on charter schools still occur, most recently when L.A. Unified school board member Steve Zimmer introduced a resolution to temporarily halt the approval of new charters. The resolution was softened, but eventually, and rightly, it was rejected by the board.

Robin Lake, Betheny Gross, Patrick Denice, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Responding to concerns that charter schools do not provide equal access to students with special needs, advocates in districts, states, and courts across the country have sought to improve such access. Lawsuits and complaints allege that some charter schools systematically discriminate against high-needs students. Additionally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report showing that charter schools, on average, serve a smaller proportion of students with disabilities than do district-run public schools. In response, policymakers in some states are looking for ways to better ensure that financial, incentive, and support systems are in place to aid charter schools in providing greater access and services to students with special needs.
This report provides some context to these policy responses by describing the distribution of students with disabilities in New York State charter and district-run schools. The analysis shows that different levels of comparison–state level, school type, district level, and authorizer level–yield different results, and comparisons at high levels of aggregation (such as those made at the state level) mask important information and variation. Whether, and in what ways, charter schools appear to systemically underserve students with special needs depends on how you answer the question, “Compared to what?”

Erin Richards:

At many traditional public high schools, the last bell of the school day signals the imminent transition to extracurricular activities, from musical rehearsals to sports practices.
But at Carmen High School of Science & Technology in Milwaukee, the after-school scene is predominantly focused on academics. Any student at the charter high school making below a C in a core subject is required to stay after school until 5 p.m. to work with teachers.
Mandatory after-school tutoring is a feature Carmen can more easily implement because of its status as a charter school within Milwaukee Public Schools. The district has approved Carmen opening a second high school, making it part of a network of Milwaukee charter schools that are serving more students than ever, according to a new national report that places Milwaukee among the top districts for percentage of students in charter schools.
The growth in market share of students for Milwaukee charter schools underscores important changes in the local landscape for such publicly financed, independently operated schools. MPS, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the City of Milwaukee are approving more charter schools, and a growing number of those proposals are coming from national operators.

Related: A Growing Movement: America’s Largest Charter School Communities.

Donna Gordon Blankinship:

Now that voters have spoken about charter schools will the new, independent public schools be an option at the beginning of the next academic year?
It seems unlikely.
Voters narrowly approved Initiative 1240 earlier this month, but opening charter schools by 2013 would require many things to happen quickly — and there’s a strong possibility that the state’s top education officer will sue to block them.
First the state Board of Education has to figure out the next steps. The board has until March 6 to adopt rules to govern most aspects of charter schools in Washington. Board spokesman Aaron Wyatt said that schedule is tight, so people shouldn’t expect them to beat their deadline.
Next on the agenda: The new Washington Charter School Commission will be formed and begin its work. The independent state agency created by the initiative will be authorizing and supervising the new entities.

National alliance for public charter schools:

For the past 20 years, the public charter school movement has been a leader in innovation and education reform. By unleashing an environment of creativity in states and communities, charter schools have demonstrated that children of all backgrounds are capable of achieving high standards and that college and career readiness is a goal attainable for all. Charter schools have led efforts to narrow achievement gaps and are showing that success is possible in neighborhoods where schools have been failing for generations.
For these reasons, public charter schools have been the fastest-growing sector of America’s public education system. Beginning with a handful of charter schools in 1992, the number of charters has grown rapidly, especially in the past four years. Today, demand for public charter schools is at an all time high. In 41 states and the District of Columbia, more than 2 million students – almost 5 percent of total enrollment in public schools – now attend a charter school. The growth in public charter school enrollment presented in this report shows that parent demand for school options continues.
For seven years, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) has tracked the growth in student enrollment at public charter schools. The enclosed report, A Growing Movement: America’s Largest Charter School Communities identifies school districts that have the highest percentage and highest number of public school students enrolled in public charter schools. In communities where families have choice, families are increasingly selecting public charter schools over the traditional public schools. The 2012 Phi Delta Kappa (PDK)/Gallup poll indicates that two thirds of Americans favor charter schools. A recent poll of Detroit residents, for example, found that more than half of them believe charters are a better option than the schools in the traditional public system. In countless other communities, parents are clamoring for more high quality public options for their children. As a result, the public education landscape is shifting in many major cities.

Jody Lawrence-Turner:

Although votes are still being counted on Washington’s charter school initiative, Spokane Public Schools officials have already decided the district will apply to have one if it passes.
“If we are trying to do some innovative programs, we should have a good shot,” said Superintendent Shelley Redinger, who helped set up a charter school as a superintendent in Oregon. “Part of it is if we don’t have one to offer our community and someone else does, I’m afraid the students will go elsewhere.”
Initiative 1240, which in Thursday night vote totals was leading with 51 percent approval, allows for as many as 40 charter schools – eight per year, set up over the next five years. They would be established either by public school districts or by nonprofit organizations.

DC Public School Charter Board:

The DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) provides school performance reports as a way to share how PCSB evaluates each public charter school. Although each charter school is unique, PCSB’s Performance Management Framework (PMF) enables the board to look at school performance across common measures. See the frequently asked questions sheet for further information on how the PMF works. See a brief PowerPoint presentation on the School Performance Reports here.