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The Charter Blog
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Friday, June 29, 2012
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NAPCS Resource Roundup
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National Charter Schools Conference Coverage
You can relive the best moments of the National Charter Schools Conference through pictures on our Facebook page, our Hall of Fame video stories on YouTube, posts on The Charter Blog and by searching hash tag #NCSC on twitter.
New Publication
In 2005, the Task Force on Charter School Quality and Accountability issued Renewing the Compact, a position statement for the charter school sector that presented recommendations for achieving the goals of growth and quality. This report evaluates the sector’s progress on those goals and recommends bold actions to capitalize on its successes while confronting persistent challenges. By taking these bold actions now, critical stakeholders can build a breakthrough sector and create a results-driven culture, which will improve the impact of charter schools on student outcomes and the education system.
See What the Sector is Saying
Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO of Teach For America issued the following statement about our new President and CEO Nina Rees: “During her time as head of the Office for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education, Nina served as a tireless champion and advocate for public school students. She strongly believes that all children can succeed at the highest levels and will be unafraid to challenge the status quo by championing innovative solutions that give them the opportunity to fulfill their potential. She is a great choice to serve as the new head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.” See what other education reform leaders are saying here.
Public Charter School Data Updated on the Dashboard
For the fourth consecutive year, NAPCS has released the most comprehensive set of charter school data publicly available. The Public Charter School Dashboard contains statistics and indicators about the growth and quality of public charter schools at the national, state, district, and school levels. Notably, the Dashboard hosts detailed information on every charter school in operation across the country, including enrollment, student demographics, and school achievement data. The updated Dashboard now includes data for the 2011-2012 academic year.
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Posted by:
NAPCS Pressroom
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Monday, June 18, 2012
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Planning Your Time at the National Charter Schools Conference
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With over 112 breakout sessions, networking receptions, school visits, student performances and pre-conference workshops, figuring out how to prioritize your time at the National Charter Schools Conference can be a daunting task. So we’ve created a few tools to help make the planning a little easier. Our program search tool lets you find sessions by content strand, presenter and time; while our schedules at-a-glance give you the day’s overview. Also, check out these great sessions by NAPCS staff. We hope this helps you be able to take advantage of the many learning, sharing, and networking opportunities at the conference. See you in Minnesota!
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Posted by:
NAPCS Pressroom
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Wednesday, June 13, 2012
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Reclaiming the Origins of Chartered Schools
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This excerpted blog by Ember Reichgott Junge was originally run by Education Week and published online on June 11, 2012.
This month, nearly 4,000 educators and friends will come to Minnesota—the birthplace of chartered schools—to celebrate a few months early the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first chartered school in the nation, on Sept. 7, 1992.
As the state Senate author of Minnesota's 1991 legislation that authorized the first chartered schools (or charter schools, as most people call them), I am in awe of the number of young lives touched by chartering today: 2 million students in an estimated 5,600 schools across the country. In September 2011, the Kappan/Gallup Poll recorded—for the first time—a 70 percent public approval rating for chartered schools. We have come a long way.
And yet, I know that some charters are not delivering the quality education we envisioned 20 years ago. Accountability is a keystone of the original legislation, and we must, together, make that happen as part of our stand for quality chartered schools in the next decade. One thing we've learned is the importance of developing strong authorizers to hold chartered schools accountable.
As we look to the future of chartering, it is important to revisit the origins and set the historical record straight. Here are some key facts that may surprise you and dispel a few common myths.
Legislation for chartered schools came from the conservative right, in opposition to unions. False.
I've traveled the country and heard many assumptions: The legislation for chartering came from policymakers of the conservative right; or it came from policymakers of the liberal left. The truth is, it didn't come from policymakers at all. It came from a Minnesota group called the Citizens League formed by local civic leaders, one of whom was a visionary named Ted Kolderie. Without political motives, the group was interested in improving delivery of public education and creating more public school choices for students. Sometimes the most important thing policymakers can do is to remove the barriers and let citizens guide the way.
These policy entrepreneurs brought their proposal to a legislature with large majorities in both houses of Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislators, and to a newly elected Republican governor who had just appointed the lobbyist for the Minnesota Education Association as his commissioner of education. That was the political setting in which the first chartering legislation passed with bipartisan support, coming from the middle of the political spectrum. I wonder whether chartering, if it were just now being offered as a new idea, would pass in Minnesota or any other state today. There just isn't a "middle" anymore.
The proposal for a "charter school" was suggested by a prominent leader of a national teachers' union. True.
It was Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who challenged attendees at an education reform conference in Minnesota in 1988 to imagine how teachers might partner with the public education "system" to encourage risk-taking and change. "The best answer so far," said Shanker, "is charter schools," crediting Ray Budde with the idea. Think of this. Three years before passage of chartering legislation, in response to the call for education reform in the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, Shanker took a bold stand for chartering as a path to professionalize teaching.
I, a DFL legislator and conference attendee, was inspired by Shanker's call to empower teachers to do what they do best. Yes, our points of view diverged along the way; Shanker envisioned chartered schools under district control, while the resulting legislation created them as new schools outside the district. But to this day, I believe that chartering empowers teachers. We currently see teacher cooperatives providing services to chartered schools, and in Minnesota, the first union-initiated charter school authorizer in the country was approved last November.
Chartered schools emerged on the national scene within weeks of passage of the Minnesota legislation. True.
This didn't happen by accident. In September of 1989, a Kappan/Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward education found the U.S. public was ready for "tradition shattering" changes in policies that governed schooling. By a 2-to-1 ratio, the public favored the idea of public school choice, which was already law in Minnesota and Arkansas. By 1990, the nations' governors declared "a major crisis in education."
This was the backdrop against which the Minnesota legislature passed the first chartered school law in 1991. U.S. Sen. David Durenberger, R-Minn., and his policy aide Jon Schroeder, immediately recognized chartering as a viable middle position between President George H.W. Bush's focus on vouchers and U.S. House Democrats who supported the education status quo. Durenberger and Schroeder positioned chartered schools as a pragmatic, centrist national policy alternative at a time when the American public was calling for aggressive reform in education.
Following the Minnesota governor's signing of the chartered school bill on June 4, 1991, the chair of the Washington-based Democratic Leadership Council issued a press release praising the law. The chair of the DLC was a rising star in education reform, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and his connection to the charter movement was not an accident. During the late 1980s, Clinton had pushed to enact open enrollment in his state, the first to follow Minnesota's lead on that form of public school choice. By the fall of 1990, nine months before Minnesota passed the chartering law, the future president was traveling the country promoting chartered schools as part of the DLC agenda, with a 1990 report in hand, written by Kolderie. Chartering was a part of the national conversation even as we struggled to pass the first legislation in Minnesota...
To continue reading, please click here to access the original Education Week article.
Ember Reichgott Junge, a former Democratic-Farmer-Labor senator in Minnesota, was the state Senate author of the first chartered school law in the nation. She is the author of Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story (Beaver's Pond Press, 2012). Currently, she is the board vice chair for Charter Schools Development Corp., based in Hanover, Md., which helps finance chartered school facilities. She is a member of the National Charter Schools Hall of Fame and a former board member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
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Posted by:
NAPCS Pressroom
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Tuesday, June 12, 2012
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Demand Continues to Grow for Public Charter Schools
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Two years ago, NAPCS estimated a national waiting list of 420,000 students who wanted to enroll in public charter schools in the 2009-2010 academic year. That seemed like such a large number! Today NAPCS released an even larger national waiting list estimate. Based on a national survey of charter schools, NAPCS estimates that there were 610,000 students on waiting lists to attend charters in the fall of 2011.
Let’s put that number in perspective. The average charter school enrolls 350 students. That means that the waiting list could fill an additional 1,700 charter schools. Adding 610,000 charter school seats to meet the demand would grow the sector by 30 percent. The number of seats equals the number of students currently attending charter schools in two states with the highest charter school enrollment: California and Texas. And on a non-charter school note: 610,000 students would fill seven and a half Olympic Stadiums during this summer’s Olympics in London.
At the 20 year milestone, the charter school sector has matured. You would be hard pressed to find anyone advocating to open 1,700 new charter schools before the beginning of the next school year. Instead, authorizers, charter school support organizations, funders, and incubators are using 20 years of experiences to develop new high quality charter schools and expand charter schools that are proving success. This does have the consequence that many students will remain on waiting lists. Hopefully the large demand for high quality options will promote improvements throughout the entire public school system through policy changes and competitive effects (see a recent study on the impact of charters on public school system).
The Olympic Stadium in Olympic Park, London, England. Photo via Google Images.
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Posted by:
Anna Nicotera, Director of Research and Evaluation
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Thursday, June 07, 2012
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NAPCS Comments on Race to the Top-District Competition
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NAPCS submitted comments on the US Department of Educations proposed requirements for the newest round of Race to the Top: Race to the Top-District (RTT-D). NAPCS expressed support for the program’s emphasis on an individually focused approach to education and the inherent potential the program has to supplement the growth and expansion of high quality charter schools. However, there were a number of areas that we felt the Department should reevaluate, notably, the minimum size requirement for local education agency (LEA) eligibility. The minimum LEA size is currently set at 2500 students. Of the 2,525 charter LEAs in the 2010/2011 school year, only 27 LEAs would meet this requirement. That is only 1.07%!!! To learn more about our recommendation for eligibility criteria, and other areas of the application, read our full submission, and don’t forget to submit your own comments by June 8th.
Logo via Ed.gov
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Posted by:
Kristin Yochum, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs
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Friday, June 01, 2012
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Education Policy 101--Lesson 3: Charter Schools are not private, quasi-public, or out to inculcate your children in some weird philosophy
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This is the final post in Kristin's "Education Policy 101" series (see the intro, lesson 1 and lesson 2), which will run on The Charter Blog this week.
The best advertising campaigns are the simplest. “Just do it”, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner” “Got milk?” The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) understands this. The best way to dispel myths about charter schools? It’s a Fact. Public charter schools are:
- independent public schools that never charge tuition, don’t have special entry requirements and are designed to boost student achievement.
- They are public because they are funded through local, state, and federal tax dollars, like all public schools.
- They are held to the same state and federal academic standards that traditional public schools are held to.
- They are not sectarian and are not allowed to discriminate; they are subject to the same laws traditional public schools are subject to.
- They never charge admission, and must use a lottery process to accept students if more students apply for registration than there are slots available.
Public charter schools are different from traditional public schools, because without the oversight of a large central administration, they have the autonomy to innovate in ways that will improve student achievement (while still meeting all of the requirements above). Some charter schools innovate by offering longer schools days and additional educational opportunities outside of the traditional education day. Public charter schools have the freedom to create a unique school culture. For example, as long as the state and federal education standards and assessments are met, schools could elect to add a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) focus to the classroom, or a school based around arts education, public policy, or language immersion.
Public charter schools do not take money from traditional public schools. States utilize a uniform per pupil funding formula to determine how much it costs to educate a student. That funding is provided to the traditional public schools and public charter schools based on their enrollment levels. The funds are not taken from one to give to the other. They are just given to the entity providing the service.
The public charter school movement is comparatively young. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first public charter school this year, we are reminded that the movement still has a long way to go, and there are only a handful of studies that have used limited to data pools to evaluate the impact that charter schools have had on public education. When we talk to parents, and look at waiting lists, we can also see that although a young movement, charter schools are in demand; this school year saw over two million students attend a public charter school, with countless more on waiting lists. But to put that in perspective, this is only 3.7 percent of the total public school student enrollment across the country.
That is public charters 101. Now you are ready to jump into the debate! Where do charter schools fit in the discussion of school turn around? What about teachers unions? How can a charter school capitalize on innovation?
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Posted by:
Kristin Yochum, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs
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