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20-Years-of-Innovation-towards-Eliminating-the-Achievement-Gap

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

As we approach the end of the school year and reflect on public education in the United States, this week, we celebrate National Charter Schools Week, and the upcoming 20th anniversary of the first public charter school (founded in Minnesota in 1992). The development of public charter schools in the early 1990s was rooted in a quest to, provide parents with a variety of public school options, free schools from bureaucracies and bring accountability to a long-ailing system of education.

In my 14 years at Jumoke Academy, a public K-8 charter school in Hartford, CT, I have seen what can happen when committed teachers and school administrators confront the high needs of a low-income and minority population head on. Jumoke was founded in 1997 by my mother, Thelma Ellis Dickerson, a lifelong advocate for education reform and former president of the Hartford Board of Education, to eliminate the achievement gap for the city of Hartford. It was her fervent belief that, “if we provided a safe, supportive but rigorous learning environment for children, staffed with high-quality teachers who challenged students to learn at the highest levels, we could change the face of public education in the city of Hartford for the absolute better.” My mother passed away this February, however Jumoke continues to represent all that she thought public school education can be for urban children. Our students consistently score on the list of top ten performing urban schools in Connecticut, according to an independent report by ConnCan. Our academic results clearly demonstrate that an urban school with a 100 percent minority population can not only close the achievement gap, it can also equal and often outperform more affluent communities.

Jumoke is just one of the more than 5,000 public charter schools seeking to change the outcomes of the over two million students they serve across the country. In low-income, urban communities, public charter schools are targeting those most in need and working to raise the bar on public education through innovation, choice and parental empowerment. In Detroit, the high school graduation rate for charter schools was 80 percent, compared to 60 percent from traditional public schools. In Los Angeles, charter schools outperformed the Los Angeles Unified School District traditional public schools, on average, across all grade levels on the Academic Performance Index in the 2010-11 school year. In Washington, D.C., charter schools have a 21 percent higher graduation rate than Washington DC Public Schools. Studies out of charter-rich states like Arizona and California show that public charter schools are producing innovations that are being adopted by traditional schools districts. And in some districts, increased student achievement in neighboring traditional public schools suggests charter competition is raising the bar for all schools.

Despite the success that the charter movement has seen, there is still considerable inequity between charter and traditional public schools when it comes to per student state and federal appropriations. Charters are, on average, receiving less money per-pupil than the corresponding public schools in their areas. Additionally, there are still nine states that lack charter school laws, leaving families in those states without adequate public education alternatives for their children.

Let us seize National Charter School Week as an opportunity to celebrate the efforts of lifelong civil rights and education reform advocates like my mother, reflect on the successes and lessons learned from the charter school movement, expose the still present, still painful, inequalities in our public education system, and continue to strive for something better for America’s children.

Author: Michael Sharpe is the Chief Executive Officer of Jumoke Academy in Hartford, CT. He is the president of the Connecticut Charter School Association, board member of the National Charter School Leadership Council, and founding member of the Legacy Project and Family Urban Schools of Excellence, (F.U.S.E).

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5,000002B-Charter-School-Parents-Rally-in-Los-Angeles

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

On Feb. 4, charter school parents, students and teachers from more than 100 schools across Los Angeles rallied for “Schools We Can Believe In,” making this the biggest parent rally in LA history and possibly the biggest charter school rally ever anywhere in the country.

We showed the strength of the charter school movement, but more importantly, we showed the depth of our commitment to ensuring that all students have high-quality public schools in their communities. I was moved by the stories parents told of their own struggles to find a high-quality school in their neighborhoods and their incredible pride in their charter schools. As one our parent speakers said, “I want every family in LA to have what my family has – a great public school.”

We also heard from leaders like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Board President and Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Parents spoke out to demand fairness in funding and facilities for all public school students, including charter public schools and to have a voice in their child’s education.

But perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the “Schools we Can Believe In” Rally was to help our own movement recognize its potential. We were able to see what is within our potential to unleash and to recognize our own unique position to play a catalytic role that could greatly improve educational opportunity for all of California’s students.

We did a statewide poll earlier this year and it showed us that the biggest predictor of whether someone will support charter schools is that person’s direct or indirect experience with charter schools. We have to invite elected officials to visit our schools and to meet the amazing parents and students and teachers like those that rallied this past Saturday and hear their incredible stories.

On Feb. 29, we will rally again, this time in our state capitol in conjunction with our 19th annual Charter Schools Conference to push for funding equity for charter schools and the students they serve.

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A-Portrait-of-2012-Hall-of-Fame-Inductee-Jim-Griffin

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The staff at the Colorado League of Charter Schools is extremely proud that Jim Griffin will be receiving the National Hall of Fame award in Minneapolis next week. There’s no question it’s a well deserved honor.

Those who know Jim Griffin know that he’s a wealth of charter school information. I don’t think there is a charter school fact, figure or statistic that the man doesn’t have on the top of his head. As his Communications Director, I vow to get most of that information out of his brain and onto paper one of these days if it kills me.

Those who know Jim also know that he’s someone you can call for advice or assistance on almost anything charter school related. He is a true mentor to other charter support organizations around the country. And it’s no coincidence that 95 percent of Colorado charter schools choose to be members of the Colorado League of Charter Schools (yes that was a typical communications director plug – I can’t help myself). Jim never stops thinking and innovating new ways to help charter schools be successful, whether it’s through a policy change, a new service or an entirely new strategic plan.

But what baffles me though is how Jim Griffin never runs out of energy. Not only does he have four young children at home….he’s been at this charter school “game” for nearly 20 years -- since he was a kid in law school. And he is still energized by it.

A long, long time ago (19 years ago or so), Jim Griffin was a 20-something in law school reading the Rocky Mountain News (back when Denver was a two newspaper town). And he came across an article about a new charter school law in Colorado. He was intrigued and wanted to know more. So he contacted the Colorado League of Charter Schools, which was then a small group of people meeting to try to figure out how to move said law forward. Jim offered to trade law services to this group if they would let him sit in on their meetings and learn more about the charter school law. His intent was to write a paper for law school.

Little did he know from then on his phone would never stop ringing. Jim jokes about these phone calls coming into his then bachelor pad and irritating his roommates. But when you think about it, the story is nothing less than remarkable. As they say, the rest is history…..Jim became the first and only Executive Director (President) of the Colorado League of Charter Schools and he remains at that helm today. It’s hard to imagine Jim in any other role. I would venture to say he is where he was destined to be and the charter world is better because of it.

In the four years that I’ve worked for Jim I have gained the utmost respect for him. While most know he’s an extremely hard worker. Not everyone sees his commitment to his family. Jim and his wife Holly have four young children. And I’ve never seen someone in Jim’s role professionally so devoted to family. The Colorado League of Charter Schools is a true family environment. It’s nice to know if any of us need to be home with our families that Jim respects and supports that.

In 2013, Colorado will celebrate 20 years since its charter school law was passed. And while he will hate that I’m saying this – we also celebrate 20 years since the charter school community gained one of its most valuable leaders – Jim Griffin.

And with that, I’ll stop while I’m ahead as most people who know Jim Griffin also know he isn’t known for being warm and fuzzy. And he definitely isn’t one who likes to celebrate his own accomplishments. Yes, considering all he has to offer the charter school community, the man is also humble. The fact that we have convinced him to walk across the stage next week and accept his Hall of Fame award is an accomplishment in itself.

So, when you see Jim Griffin at the national conference next week, be sure to give him a big hug and congratulate him on his award. He will just LOVE that!

(And now…I’ll start updating my resume as I’m guessing I’ll be on the job market after Jim reads this blog, LOL!).

Stacy Rivera, Director of Communications, Colorado League of Charter Schools
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A-Teacher’s-Dream-Come-True

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Such successes as these do not come easy. Blackstone Valley Prep scholars attend school for over eight hours a day, 190 days a year. Teachers work tirelessly by planning and delivering the highest level of instruction. Our commitment to our scholars and their families means that teachers are on call every night and do home visits that allow us to make valuable family connections. Our systematic data collection is used informatively and strategically to drive our instruction and identify the individual needs of our scholars. Our school’s high expectations for all our scholars, and unwillingness to fail at getting them to meet those expectations, are commonalities shared by teachers, staff, and parents at BVP. Beginning with the first day of kindergarten, our scholars are introduced to our school’s core values of perseverance, respect, integrity, discipline and enthusiasm, PRIDE as we call it, which contributes to a positive school culture that is experienced by scholars, staff and families, alike.

Although my high expectations and desire to see all my scholars go to college certainly keeps me at BVP, I choose to teach there for selfish reasons, too. I participate and lead weekly professional development. I regularly visit successful schools to learn what others are doing. I am a part of a culture that includes teachers in decisions that are typically reserved only for administrators. I collaborate daily with a staff of educators in which 100 percent of them share the same values and high expectations that I do, and are aligned to a common mission. Does it sound like a teacher’s Dream-Come-True? Well, it absolutely is. Charter schools not only provide choice for parents wanting something different for their child than what their traditional public school system offers, it also gives choice to teachers, like me, who have unique and innovative ideas about education.

Author: Joy Souza, Kindergarten Teacher and Kindergarten Chair, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy (BVP) in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

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Achievement-and-Innovation-as-Mission-Critical:--Reflections-from-a-Charter-School-Founder

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Innovation has always been a key attribute of the charter school movement; however, now more than ever, we have the responsibility to progressively push education reform forward in ways that both advance the field but also, and more importantly, get results – significant results. Innovation devoid of achievement is for naught.

As a professional field, we know a great deal about what works in educating children. For instance, we know direct, systematic, explicit instruction is the most effective practice in teaching basic skills and advancing the learning of struggling readers, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners. We also know teachers who formatively measure performance are more effective in raising student achievement. We know investing students in their education is critical. At STEM Prep, we believe these and related practices are simply best practice. We’ve implemented every scientifically researched-based practice that aligns to our mission and model. However, we don’t believe these practices are innovative; we believe they’re responsible and simply what good schools do every day.

While “innovation” can be defined and operationalized in numerous ways, we believe innovation is the development of more effective practices and processes that not only result in advancing student achievement, but also instill the habits of mind required for our children to access the college and career pathways of the 21st Century. This is, in fact, our mission and the mindset undergirding the STEM Prep model.

To this end, the principle questions since STEM Prep’s inception have been: How do we educate children to keep pace with our rapidly changing environment? What are the requisite habits of mind that must transcend time, discipline, and reform effort in ways that ensure our children can compete? How do we move beyond mastery of very basic, rudimentary skills to more rigorous modes of thinking and problem solving?

These are the discussions in which my charter school colleagues are engaged across the country. As I prepare to meet with congressional leaders next week, I’m energized by the opportunity to dive deeply into these mission critical questions. Achievement and innovation, after all, are the drivers of this movement and our country.

Kristin McGraner, Ed.D., is the Founder & Executive Director of STEM Preparatory Academy in Nashville, TN. To learn more about STEM Prep Academy, please see their website and video.

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Another-Take-on-Michigan-Administration-Costs

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Point in time snapshots may not provide an accurate portrayal of the financial life of a public school. Equally important, averages sometimes can mask wide fluctuations in costs across a state. Both of these thoughts came to mind as I read The Huffington Post’s recent article on a new study that indicates charter schools in Michigan spend more on administrative costs than traditional public schools. The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University and released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education, reviewed financial data from the FY08 school year and examined expenditure patterns for districts and charters statewide. The funding landscape for public education has changed significantly since FY08 due to the economic downturn, and I wondered if the Center’s findings would hold true in our new economic reality.

Additionally, the Center’s research did not include a separate analysis on the charters in Detroit, in which a significant number of the state’s charter schools are located.[i] In my previous work examining charter school revenue patterns, I have found that the financial dynamics of major metropolitan areas often differ from the state as a whole. For example, in Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists, a project I worked on for Ball State University, we found that when all funding streams are analyzed, Detroit charters received 28.7 percent less funding than the district, while the state variance was 19.7 percent. (Across the country, the average per-pupil charter funding compared to the district school funding is 80.2% in statewide data and 72.2% in urban districts).

So, over the course of several days, I reviewed data for Detroit Public Schools and the charter schools located within its boundaries to see if the Center’s research from FY08 applied to Detroit in FY11, the most recent year available.[ii] Interestingly, a different pattern emerges from the one depicted in the Center’s study in revenue provided to the district and the charters. The Center’s analysis from FY08 showed the district and charters statewide at near parity in funding with a difference of only $293, or 3.3 percent. That is not the case for Detroit in FY11, where Detroit Public Schools averaged $9,937 per pupil in revenue, while the charters received $8,591 per pupil, a variance of 14 percent.

A second departure from the results of the Center’s study appeared in the comparisons for spending on Instruction, where the Center indicated that districts statewide spent $5,629 on basic instruction in FY08, while charters spent only $4,942. For Detroit, both the district and the charters spent considerably less per pupil on Instruction than the averages presented by the Center, but the Detroit charters spent more than Detroit Public Schools.[iii] In FY11, Detroit Public Schools dedicated $3,081 per pupil for basic instruction, while the charters spent $3,217 per pupil. Also of note is that the charters spent a higher percentage of their available dollars on basic instruction – 40.1 percent compared to 31.3 percent for the district. And this is consistent with research in other cities – charters dedicate a higher percentage of their available funding to instruction than school districts.

The Center’s study also indicated that Michigan charter schools spent more than traditional public schools for administration. In FY11, it is true that the charters spent more than traditional public schools for school administration - $722 versus $641 per pupil. My work in other major metropolitan areas has led to similar results – charter schools must pay a competitive wage to attract talented school leaders, but if a school has fewer pupils over which to spread that cost, the per pupil analysis will show a higher cost. The percent dedicated to school administration will be even higher for new charter schools that have not reached full enrollment. For the two other administrative categories, however, general administration and business administration, Detroit charter schools logged a lower per pupil cost when compared to the district. In FY11, Detroit Public Schools recorded $121 per pupil for general administration, while the charters recorded $73 per pupil. Business administration costs also were lower for the charter schools - $379 per pupil versus $602 per pupil for the district.

When all the administration categories are combined, Detroit charters recorded lower administrative costs across all categories - $1,174 per pupil versus $1,364 for the district.

It is interesting to note that charter schools have taken measures to maintain their administrative costs – 86 percent of Detroit charters have no salaried business manager as of FY11, relying instead on consultants and contractors to fill the business needs of their schools.

The Center’s research provides another indicator of the financial conditions of Michigan’s schools. But, it is a point in time indicator alone. As the data from FY11 indicate, rapidly changing financial conditions can result in charter schools adjusting the way they spend their money. Equally important, research efforts such as the one undertaken by the Center need to consider that funding and expenditure patterns will vary within a state’s largest cities where many charters provide services.

Larry Maloney is President of Aspire Consulting, LLC and worked as part of the research team on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s study, “Charter School Funding, Inequity’s Next Frontier,” and Ball State University’s 2010 follow-up, “Charter School Funding, Inequity Persists.”

Updated citation on May 1, 2012

[i] “Charter Schools Spend More On Administration, Less On Instruction Than Traditional Public Schools: Study,” The Huffington Post, 10 April, 2012.
[ii] Michigan Department of Education 1011 report and Michigan Department of Education enrollment data. To align this research to the Center’s report as closely as possible, revenue and expenditures were included only from the General Fund and the Special Revenue fund. Revenues were included from Local, State sources, as well as Other Public Schools in Michigan, and Other Schools Outside of State. Federal revenue from the Special Revenue fund also was included; General Fund federal compensatory revenue was excluded to match as closely as possible the analysis from the Center.
[iii] Expenditure analysis conducted on General Fund and Special Revenue funds only. For comparability, expenditures for Added Needs Programs and for Adult Education Programs were excluded.
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Are-Charter-School-Students-Worth-Less003F

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In advance of the release of its 2012 Model Public Charter School Law rankings, NAPCS will chronicle some of the most critical—and contentious—aspects of the model law that played out in the past state legislative cycle. This guest blog by Eileen Sigmund, President and CEO of the Arizona Charter Schools Association, examines issues with funding equity (Model Law Component 18).

Are some students worth less or worthless? When it comes to Arizona's antiquated school funding system, students are treated differently. Charter students are funded, on average, $1,500 less per student than their district peers.

These funding disparities are unjust, and an Arizona lawsuit seeks a basic American principle: that all children in public schools receive an equally good education, backed by similar, adequate resources. A recent ruling by the Maricopa County Superior Court in the lawsuit Craven et al. v. State of Arizona et al. confirmed that Arizona's public charter school students are Arizona public school students entitled to the Arizona Constitution's educational privileges just like the state's public district school students.

This ruling came after the State and others argued that public district school students and public charter school students are not members of a similarly situated group of citizens. The State has maintained that Arizona's pubic charter school students occupy an inferior, secondary supplemental level in Arizona's public school hierarchy. The recent ruling rejects that argument.

In light of the ruling, the remainder of this litigation will focus on the determination of whether Arizona's K-12 student finance scheme is constitutional. To be upheld, the system must be rational, reasonable and not arbitrary, discriminatory or capricious. Trial is set for Fall 2012.

We cannot treat some students as if they are worth less than others. For more information, visit www.studentequitynow.org.

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California-Charter-Leadership-Program-Teaches-Tailored-Skills-for-Success

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This guest blog series describes approaches that seek to address one of the most critical issues facing the rapidly growing public charter school movement: its leadership pipeline. The examples from Georgia and California show how partnerships have been developed to create training programs that teach the specific skills public charter school administrators need to run a successful school. If you would like to share additional examples of leadership pipeline programs, post them to @charteralliance or #charterleadership on Twitter.

In 2012, the Charter and Autonomous Leadership Academy (CASLA) sent out a national survey to public charter school stakeholders to determine training needs for charters school leaders. These results presented a strong interest in charter leadership training. After several years of research and development, the CASLA program has created and implemented an innovative university-based charter leadership program in which participates earn a master’s degree in education (charter leadership) and a state credential authorization. Just as successful K-12 charter leaders must be entrepreneurial and creative, the CASLA university team successfully navigated the public university institutional system to create an accelerated, efficient, and personalized entrepreneurial program. The CASLA program is based on research, best practices, and creative solutions to meet the needs of charter school leaders in Los Angeles and eventually nationwide.

CASLA is housed at California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), a four-year urban public institution located in the urban city of Carson in Los Angeles County. CSUDH is one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the California State University system. The school is accredited by both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Since California has a very high percentage of start-up schools (as opposed to conversion schools), CASLA’s innovative program is focused on start-up schools. During our research, aspiring and current charter leaders requested relevant and current content, and alternatives to weekly evening classes in traditional university credential programs—due to the traffic congestion in Los Angeles and responsibilities of charter leaders. In addition, current charter leaders requested assistance with career options beyond their tenure as charter school leaders. The CASLA program is addressing the needs.

The CASLA leadership curriculum is designed based on the knowledge, skills, and disposition as articulated by current and former successful charter leaders, as well as small area public school district superintendents. The CASLA program incorporates sophisticated video conferencing using technology-based instruction to personalize and individualize the delivery and content. Participants attend two weeklong seminars in the summer, and content courses are web-based. One charter conference attendance is required. Content courses are six weeks in length; field research, extensive reading, and personal reflection are critical components. Charter case study is a major strand throughout the 15-month credential/certificate program. The critical internship component incorporates shadowing, field-research, and residency. Current and retired successful charter school leaders teach the content courses. Participants are grouped in a cohort. Current charter leaders benefit from web-based certificate programs, on topics such as master schedule development, essential elements of instruction, conflict resolution, improve rigor through effective use of data, etc.

The elements of the CASLA program form a comprehensive system that prepares and supports charter leaders who are committed to improving teacher practice and student achievement. CASLA school leaders are now leading over 10,343 charter students in the greater Los Angeles area, with 57 percent of our CASLA leaders representing the minority groups of our diverse student population. Over 4,000 charter students have been positively impacted by our field research to improve student achievement. CASLA plans to create national regional centers. We invite inquires. The CASLA program is the beneficiary of a supportive relationship with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, our California Charter School Association (CCSA), and a federal grant funded through the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the Department of Education.

Image via CASLA website

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California-Charter-School-Growth-Ushers-in-New-Public-Education-Era

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

This is a historic time for charter schools in California. Despite tough economic times, charter supporters continue to turn their commitment into opportunities for thousands of students and families seeking more options in public education.

This school year, 115 new charter schools opened, marking the most significant growth since California approved its charter school Law in 1992. This unparalleled growth pushed the state’s total number of charter schools to 912, the highest of any state in the nation. Every major region, as well as both urban and rural areas, saw charter schools open.

For charter school leaders, this growth is encouraging and exciting, and we believe it is proof that a new era of public education has taken hold. This new era is one in which parents, teachers and communities haven’t more flexibility and local control of schools making them better at serving individual student’s needs. It also means that we at the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) must do more than ever to advocate on behalf of charter schools, and continue our efforts to ensure equitable access of funding and facilities for public charter schools. Accountability is another top priority at CCSA, and this growth underlines the need for a system in which high performing charter schools in which high performing charter schools are replicated, while low-performing ones undergo a deep review to determine if they are serving their student’s needs.

With this year’s newly opened schools, an even larger number of families in California will now have more options for high-quality education options for their students.

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California's-Portrait-of-the-Movement---A-Closer-Look-At-Charter-School-Academic-Performance

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Education reform has taken center stage in many debates around the nation over the past couple of years, as parents, students and communities demand better educational outcomes for all students from public schools.

Generating those better outcomes while closing the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students is a daunting challenge but not an impossible one. Members of the California Charter Schools Association believe, like I do, that we must be relentless in our pursuit of ever-higher academic performance if charter schools are to contribute even more significantly to making high-performing schools a reality for every student in California.

For almost two decades, charter schools in California have offered parents, students and communities options for a better education. Our state now has the largest concentration of charters in the country. At 912 schools, we saw our most significant growth ever this school year, with 115 charters opening across the state. But growth alone isn’t enough.

While we know the state has some of the best charter schools in the country, we are also aware that there are weaknesses within the movement. That is why the California Charter Schools Association is taking unprecedented and proactive steps to ensure that all students attending charter schools are getting an education that will help them succeed as adults.

This week our first annual Portrait of the Movement report, which details the academic performance of charter schools, provides a framework to press for higher accountability for low-performing charters. The report reveals reasons for great optimism in the areas where charter schools are excelling and for greater resolve in the areas where charter schools need to improve.

The most significant finding in Portrait of the Movement is that California charter schools are accelerating the closure of the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students. This finding is supported with ample evidence that charter schools serving low-income populations are generating better academic results than traditional public schools serving students with similar demographics.

These results are cause for celebration, proving that charters are breaking the link between poverty and under-performance. For far too long, too many within our traditional public school system have believed that poverty and underperformance are inexorably linked and there is little schools can do to help students overcome the various social barriers they face. This paralyzing belief – undergirded by a self-perpetuating view that only some students, and not all students, are actually able to learn at high levels – has been used by many as justification for the various objections they raise to proposed reforms of our public education system. The performance of California’s charter schools – from classrooms in South Los Angeles to Oakland and San Diego to Sacramento – demonstrates that the possibility of transformational change is within our grasp if we have the courage to embrace reforms which serve the interests of students.

Another important finding with Portrait of the Movement is more charter schools are over-performing than under-performing, and that, in terms of numbers of students served, more than two times as many students attend over-performing than under-performing schools. We are also encouraged to see that the number and proportion of under-performing charters appears to be decreasing over time.

With that said, the Portrait of the Movement also clearly reveals that there are simply too many underperforming charter schools and we must as a movement act with commensurate courage to improve academic accountability systems.

While current state law calls on charter authorizers—school districts, county offices of education, and the State Board of Education—to close schools that have not met minimum academic requirements, the process has not been a consistent one, and under-performing charters have slipped through the cracks. CCSA is proactively working to close these loopholes and has established minimum performance criteria for charter renewal to ensure that charters are delivering on the promise of a high-quality education for all students in California,

In tandem with the release of Portrait of the Movement, CCSA is activating a series of Web-enabled tools to help families and the public understand the picture of performance for every single charter in California that opened before fall of 2010. An interactive map provides the public access to the performance record of all charter schools as well as all traditional public schools in their surrounding areas, giving families for the first time a highly detailed look of the options available to them based on a measure that renders a picture of added value.

For more information, visit www.calcharters.org/portraitofthemovement.

Submitted by Jed Wallace, President and CEO, California Charter Schools Association

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CCSA’s-"Portrait-of-the-Movement"-Report-Gets-National-Recognition

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

NAPCS supports the work by the California Charter Schools Association, and others in the field, to advance the accountability of the public charter school sector. We encourage others to follow CCSA’s lead by setting high performance expectations for the public charter schools in your state.

This week, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) presented the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) with the “Award for Excellence in Advancing Knowledge” for the Portrait of the Movement report, the cornerstone of CCSA’s accountability work.

Accountability has been a top priority for CCSA for many years, and when we released the first Portrait of the Movement report last February, we did so knowing that the data would help the charter movement identify schools that we all can learn from, and those that need a second look.

Through this candid and comprehensive snapshot of peformance, CCSA is looking to raise the performance bar and to support the expansion of those charter schools that are having a high impact on their students’ futures.

Perhaps the most significant findings in the first annual Portrait of the Movement report were that California charter schools are accelerating the closure of the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students, and that charters serving low-income populations are generating better academic results than traditional public schools. These results tell us that charters are successfully weakening the link between poverty and under-performance. Yet there is work to be done. Too many charters are also underperforming, and it is here where we are taking action.

Portrait of the Movement introduced a performance framework, which streamlines and improves upon the existing assessment system in order to strengthen academic accountability for underperforming charters. The Portrait of the Movement report plays an important role in advancing knowledge about the state’s charter schools, as the report features movement-wide analyses to aid efforts to assess, monitor and improve the academic performance of all charter schools, including tools schools can use directly to assess their strengths and weaknesses.

As a movement, we need to ensure that all students are getting the quality education they deserve, and need. We cannot make improvements if we exempt charter schools that are not delivering or producing solid results.

CCSA aims to remain the preeminent source for California charter school performance data in order to inform strategic school support and advocacy at the state and local levels and will continue to publish an annual Portrait of the Movement. Our next report is due in February 2012.

We are truly honored for this award, and we thank NACSA for their support.

NOTE: NACSA’s annual Award for Excellence in Advancing Knowledge recognizes the authors of a scholarly report that thoughtfully examines critical issues within the charter sector. Last year’s winner was the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools for How State Charter Laws Rank Against The New Model Public Charter School Law.

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Charter-Schools-and-the-Legacy-of-Brown-v.-Board-of-Education

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This excerpted blog by Michael Lomax was originally run by Education Week and published online on June 25, 2012.

In May, we celebrated the 58th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision declaring state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional. Calling education “perhaps the most important function of state and local governments,” the court unanimously declared that education was a “right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Brown, and rulings that followed, finally put an end to legally segregated schools. But after more than a half-century, education—a good education—is still not a right made equally available. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the national black-white achievement gap has narrowed in the past 20 years, but it’s not enough. Sadly, many of the children and grandchildren of the intended beneficiaries of Brown continue to get an education that prepares them neither for career nor college.

Over the past several years, initiated by cities such as New York, Chicago, the District of Columbia, and New Orleans, a wave of education reform has begun to spread across the country. Reformers like Joel I. Klein and Dennis Walcott, the former and current New York City schools chancellors, respectively; StudentsFirst founder and former District of Columbia schools chief Michelle Rhee; and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have become household names. In time, what they and many others have started will remake public education.

But it will not happen tomorrow, and it may not happen in the time it takes for children to go from prekindergarten through high school. The Supreme Court ordered segregation to be abolished “with all deliberate speed.” That took decades.

Today’s children should not have to wait. In a competitive global economy, we cannot afford to make them wait.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now,” gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

Charter schools also model and test innovative solutions that can be taken to scale in traditional public schools. For example, the Apollo 20 project in Houston is testing whether techniques honed in high-performing charter schools can help improve performance in struggling traditional public schools. And, in school districts with less collaboration, I believe that competition between charter and traditional public schools will accelerate educate reform.

Perhaps most important—especially to the organization I head, UNCF, formerly the United Negro College Fund, whose mission is to help minority students go to and through college—encouraging research has shown that attending a charter high school boosts a student’s chance of going on to college. In today’s economy, in which almost every good-paying, fast-growing career path requires a college degree, charter schools’ role as part of a college-focused education is absolutely critical.

A recent article in The New York Times vividly and thoughtfully notes that many charter schools do not have student bodies evenly balanced among races and ethnicities. Nationwide, charter schools do enroll a greater percentage of black and Latino students than traditional public schools (27 percent vs. 15 percent and 26 percent vs. 22 percent, respectively), according to a recent publication of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (on whose board of directors I serve). But it is precisely these populations that need better educational options and that are most highly motivated to take advantage of charter school opportunities.

Each anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is reason to celebrate that groundbreaking decision and to mark how far we have come. But it should also be an occasion to take stock of where we are and how far we have yet to go.

Charter schools will never replace traditional public schools. But they have a critical role to play in moving us from where we are today to the future that Brown v. Board of Education imagined, a country in which all children—not just some—get the good education that they need, and that we as a nation need them to have.

Michael Lomax is the president and chief executive officer of UNCF, formerly the United Negro College Fund, the nation’s largest minority education organization, based in Fairfax, Va. He is also on the board of the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
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Charter-Schools-are-an-Option-for-Parents-that-Enhance-a-Child’s-Educational-Experience

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Charters-provide-choices-parents-didn't-have-%28excerpt%29

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The op-ed excerpted below originally ran in the L.A. Times on August 30, 2012.

It is simply absurd to suggest, as anAug. 28 Times article summarizes a study as reporting, that California charter schools are "placing an ever-greater burden on taxpayers, who must fund an already strained public education system."

The fact is parents (whom economist Richard Buddin, the report's author, seems to forget are the very taxpayers he is so worried about) are choosing the best educational opportunity for their children. Twenty years ago, that choice was between a traditional public school and a private school. But thanks to the efforts of parents, teachers and community leaders across this state, parents today have another choice: public charter schools.

Further, to suggest that all students who come from private schools are "of means" is out of touch. Many families make financial sacrifices to ensure their kids are getting the best education possible, which for some has meant private school. Rather than assigning blame for this trend of students returning to public education, we should be celebrating that charter schools are helping to restore confidence in the public school system.

As is widely recognized, charter schools receive less funding per student than traditional public schools. And by and large, charter schools operate in facilities that have not been provided by the state. Were it not for the existence of the charter school movement, the taxpayers of California would have had to contribute far more funding to public schools over the last 20 years -- billions more than any amount cited in the study…

Please click here to read the full op-ed.

Jed Wallace is president and chief executive of the California Charter Schools Association.
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Colorado-Students-Celebrate-20-Years-of-Public-Charter-Schools

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This month, nearly 800 students, teachers and administrators gathered at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver to celebrate public charter schools.

The rally, hosted annually by the Colorado League of Charter Schools, had a special theme this year, as 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Colorado Charter Schools Act. In 1993, the state’s first two charter schools opened their doors (The Connect School in Pueblo, and Academy Charter School in Castle Rock) – both schools are still very successful and boast high student achievement.

Over the course of a week, the rotunda of the Colorado State Capitol was brought to life with displays of charter school student artwork from T.R. Paul Academy of Arts and Knowledge (Fort Collins) and CIVA Charter High School (Colorado Springs). In addition, the Capitol was lined with visual statistics highlighting facts and figures about the state’s charter community. For example, “More K-12 students are enrolled in Colorado charter schools than any school district in the state,” and “The average Colorado charter school student receives 15 percent less public funding than the average peer student in a traditional public school.”

The event offered a variety of activities for public charter school students of all ages. Preceding the rally were two student debates (held in the Old Supreme Court Chambers) by middle school students in the Charter School Debate League, as well as various tours of the State Capitol.

The rally itself began with the National Anthem performed by the Belle Creek Charter School band (Henderson, CO) and the Rocky Mountain Deaf School (Golden, CO). During the rally, attendees heard from students, teachers, principals, elected officials and more. The event was high-energy and a fun learning experience for all. Many of the speakers took the stage and revved up the crowd while celebrating public charter schools. “I love charter schools,” “I love charter school teachers,” and other upbeat slogans were chanted in unison by the crowd.

The students proudly waved signs that read, “Thank You for My Charter School,” and “Celebrating 20 Years of Colorado Charter Schools.”

Winners of the 5th annual Colorado Charter School Essay Contest were honored during the rally. Over 1,200 essays were submitted this year, from students across the state. There were four age categories. Click here to learn more about the contest and read about the topics.

Runners Up

Brighid Griffin, Grade 2, Legacy Academy (Elizabeth)
Gabe Klar, Grade 4, Colorado Calvert Academy (Online School)
Jacob Kaze, Grade 8, Platte River Academy (Highlands Ranch)
Robert Trujillo, Grade 9, Swallows Charter Academy (Pueblo)

Winners

Shruthi Rajesh, Grade 2, SkyView Academy (Highlands Ranch; Winner of a $250 College Scholarship from S&S Worldwide
Hadley Fisher, Grade 3, Excel Academy (Arvada; Winner of a $250 College Scholarship from S&S Worldwide
Lauren Kloser, Grade 7, Rocky Mountain Deaf School (Golden); Winner of a $250 College Scholarship from S&S Worldwide
Ricardo Galdamez-Escobar, Grade 12, Colorado High School Charter (Denver); Winner of a $500 College Scholarship from S&S Worldwide

A special thank you to Cenpatico for sponsoring the rally and to S&S Worldwide for sponsoring the essay contest.

The next celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Colorado Charter Schools will be at a special luncheon and silent auction event scheduled for Monday, June 3 in Denver. This date is significant as it falls exactly 20 years to the day that Governor Roy Romer signed the Colorado Charter Schools Act. The event will include an awards presentation, a documentary film and featured speaker Chester E. Finn, Jr. Please visit www.coloradoleague.org/luncheon to learn more and to register.

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Dawn-of-the-Charter-School-Movement-in-Maine-%28Part-I%29

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been exhilarating and exhausting for the past several months. Once the enabling law was passed, we thought the going would get easier. And, indeed, the formation of the new state charter authorizing commission and the critical work of the staff at the Maine Department of Education has meant that implementation of the bill is really happening.

But, the continued intervention of opponents through political channels and the media has made it a rollercoaster ride. The state charter commission did create an application form and process, and 6 of 9 groups that filed “letters of intent” produced actual applications. The results so far: two approved for opening on October 2012; one approved conditionally for fall of 2013; another scheduled for a public hearing on September 11 for an opening in 2013. And the two applications for virtual charter schools were postponed until the commission could get training for reviewing these complicated proposals.

There has been a wonderful outpouring of creative ideas and passion by potential charter school founders, as well as diverse locations and themes. Of the first four major applicants, two are in rural areas, one suburban, and one urban. There is a school for at-risk kids with a natural sciences and agriculture theme; a STEM high school; a K-6 village school with individualized education plans and project-based learning; and an early childhood K-2 program based on 10 years work by an existing non-profit arts and science program.

The state charter commission has just issued its RFP for new applicants that wish to open in the fall of 2013, with full applications due in October. We are excited to work with these new groups.

Given the newness of this movement, all those involved have had a steep learning curve. Our organization is delighted that the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices is supporting Maine’s efforts by sponsoring two days of workshops and training for authorizers and founders in late September. This support is really needed, especially since the federal Charter School Planning Grants for SEAs has no money this year. What bad timing for a small state like Maine! It has also been difficult to persuade conservative members of foundation boards to understand and support the public charter school efforts. Hopefully, we’ll have better news on this front by next year.

Image via www.mainecharterschools.org

Authors Judith Jones and Roger Brainerd work for the Maine Association for Charter Schools.

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Dawn-of-the-Charter-School-Movement-in-Maine-%28Part-II%29

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Part I of this series examined the implementation work that has happened in Maine since the passage of its public charter school law through the authorization of its first group of public charter schools. Today's blog looks at the preparation to open these first charter schools.

Last week we witnessed the first lottery for admission to one of the two public charter schools opening on October 1st. Cornville Regional Charter School had 90 applicants for 60 seats. If a family had two or more children applying, when the first one was admitted through the lottery, if the parents signed the letter of commitment right away, the other siblings were also admitted. The event was observed by several members of the state charter commission and MACS. The news article can be viewed here. The other charter school opening this fall school, MEANS, had 49 applicants for 50 seats by the deadline, so no lottery was needed.

Charter schools in Maine have had a delayed start due to the highly compressed application and contracting process this year, but the new opportunities have been welcomed by the many families who have indicated their intent to apply. Our next steps will include helping these new schools to meet their promises – it’s really rewarding work!

A parent reacts to her child winning a seat in the Cornville Regional Charter School lottery. Photo credit:
Michael G. Seamans, "Winners drawn in Cornville charter school lottery," Morning Sentinel, Sept. 5, 2012.

Authors Judith Jones and Roger Brainerd work for the Maine Association for Charter Schools.

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Defeat-of-Public-Charter-Schools-Amendment-in-Georgia-Legislature-Leaves-no-Winners

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The score yesterday was 110-62, but nobody won! No, not a ball game, but the single most important piece of legislation (HR1162) in Georgia to continue the growth of high quality charter schools here.

The measure would allow the voters of Georgia to decide about a Constitutional Amendment that would restore the ability of the State to authorize charter schools. This is in response to our Supreme Court that struck down our law that established an effective alternative authorizer—the Georgia Charter Schools Commission.

Now the readers of this blog do not need to be persuaded about the value of an alternative authorizer for charter schools. So, I am “preaching to the choir.” I am going to share some observations and rants about the “sinners” that are doing their darn best to stop this charter movement here–and in your state as well.

Big nuisance to me: hearing all the opposing legislators yesterday start their speeches with: “Now I support charter schools.” Charter grammar lesson number 1—this phrase will always be followed with the conjunction “but.”

We heard that over and over yesterday. One representative who used that line yesterday, then referred to every study ever known to mankind doubting the value of charter schools. He even referred to some studies that have never been done! Where is the logic in this? This rep “supports charter schools” even though he thinks they are the worst development in public education and certainly should be burned to the ground (good thing we don’t have facilities?). Suggested response to him and others like him: “Now I support you,” but “your voting record is atrocious, you have bad grammar, bad logic, are ignorant of our dire K-12 education problems, clueless what we really need, and that a five-year old could represent the children of your district better.”

Another big nuisance to those of us on the front lines: “friendly” fire. You know—getting shot in the back from those who should be with you—and that some legislators actually think do support children in schools.

It’s the worst opposition of all. Consider the Georgia PTA. I thought their mission was to facilitate greater communication between parents and teachers for the children’s sake. Are they no longer about chili suppers, school festival days, cookies for parties, and apples for teachers? When did they become one of the loudest voices AGAINST charter schools? Did they poll all parents and teachers to get this position? Are they now Professional Teachers Association?

Other “friendly” fire here has come from Georgia School Boards Association, Georgia Superintendents Association, and PAGE (Professional Association of Georgia Educators).

Most gratifying has been the development of a broad-based and growing coalition to fight for the children. With eleven current members, we are pushing for the growth of quality charter schools. Check out www.brightergeorgia.org. We are expecting an opposition website www.wesupportcharterschools.but.

The good news is the game is not over; there has been a delay in the game. The issue will return to the House after 10-15 more representatives realize this issue is about children—not job security.

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Education-Entrepreneurs-Fellowship-Gives-School-Leaders-Resources-to-Innovate

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Charter school leaders have always functioned more like entrepreneurs than traditional principals. As the primary drivers of their schools’ missions, they manage the academic program, finance and operational systems, strategic planning and development, external relations and any other domains that impact their “bottom line”: the academic success of every one of their students. Over the past two decades, this entrepreneurial spirit has created numerous high-performing schools from the ground up – schools that have defied expectations and impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.

Today, the demands on school leadership are changing as the charter school movement seeks to respond to new challenges: the turnaround of failing district schools, the demand to scale up effective school models and the need to introduce new ones. When faced with such challenges, there is often discussion within the movement about the need to recruit new talent; but we also must create avenues for existing leaders to continue to develop the skills needed to tackle these new frontiers in education reform. Our charter school leaders have been doing this work for years across the country in schools they have built from scratch. It’s time for some of these school leaders to return to their entrepreneurial roots to develop innovative solutions to these new challenges.

Last week, we created an avenue at the Tennessee Charter School Incubator through our new Education Entrepreneurs Fellowship. This national program will give up to eight fellows the chance to expand on the best possible models across the country, design their own schools and/or management organizations, and launch them with financial and operational support, not as fresh-start charters, but as replacements for some of the lowest-performing public schools in Tennessee and, by extension, the country.

The opportunity and resources available to leaders who endeavor to do this work in Tennessee have never been greater. But this work requires time, targeted training, and personal and professional resources that go beyond those typically offered in some of our movement’s best training programs. Leaders need to master executive, political and turnaround competencies at levels few have had the opportunity to develop until now. The Education Entrepreneurs Fellowship is committed to providing these necessary tools and resources to exceptional leaders ready to transform education for our neediest students in Memphis and Nashville. It provides recipients more than three years of continuous and personalized support, from training to incubation to early launch services, as well as a competitive salary and benefits package.

We believe the talent to overcome our most pressing challenges already exists in our movement. It just needs programs like the Education Entrepreneurs Fellowship to provide the time, resources and space needed to develop.

Greg Thompson is the chief executive officer for the Tennessee Charter School Incubator. See information about the Education Entrepreneurs Fellowship at http://www.charterexcellence.org.

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From-Kindergarten-to-College:-What-it-Takes

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

At DREAM Charter School, my expectation as school principal, and the expectation of everyone who works in this building is that each and every one of our students is going to college. High academic achievement will get our kids ready, but that's not the only critical piece of setting our scholars up for success. We add to high academic expectations three things: health and wellness, family engagement, and full inclusion. It takes all of these elements working together to truly develop young learners and get them ready for life in the 21st century. At DREAM, we make no argument that academics reign supreme. But we also want to create a healthy environment of support so that our scholars can successfully brave the rigors of academic excellence.

At DREAM, health and wellness includes character development. We tell students to never give up; mistakes are how we learn; when something is hard, that just means we're learning. We let our scholars know from the very beginning – as early as kindergarten – that this work is really hard, but we are going to push them, and they can take the challenge. We let them know that if the work is easy, they’re probably not learning; and if it’s hard, they can’t opt out.

Physical well-being includes active recess even in the cold of winter, a full curriculum of physical education, and healthy meals that are modeled by every adult working here. Emotional and mental well-being is supported by a robust social work department that brings social workers into the classroom, lunchroom and school yard – our social workers don’t just show up when a student is in trouble. And they’re not only committed to the student, they’re committed to their families.

Which brings us to our families. Our Director of Family Engagement makes sure our students’ families feel welcome at DREAM. We recognize that parents are our students’ first teachers, and by doing so, we need to hear their voice when it comes to educating their child. Because what happens at home is just as important as what happens at school, we provide monthly family events that support our parents, such as legal clinics, reading and math workshops and nutrition classes. Beyond these formal gatherings, our families know they’re welcome at DREAM any day of the week.

Finally, DREAM values diversity – we are a full inclusion school where special education and ELL students learn side by side with general education students. We believe that all students have something to learn from students who are different from them. By having diverse students learning together, we are cultivating a generation of compassionate, rounded adults. This is supported by two teachers in each classroom – one general education teacher and one ELL or special education teacher – who partner to individualize each scholar's education in a shared learning environment.

This all sounds great, right? Well, we’re proud to say that it works. This year the New York City Department of Education gave us an A on our Progress Report. And our recent state test scores ranks DREAM out of 90 NYC Charter Schools second highest in improvement in ELA and sixth highest in improvement in Math. At DREAM, academic excellence does not come at the cost of recess, physical education, family programs and diversity – it comes through them.

As far as I’m concerned, college is on the horizon for all students at DREAM Charter School. Making that a reality is my job.

Eve Colavito, Principal, DREAM Charter School
www.dreamschoolnyc.org

Find DREAM Charter School on the Public Charter School Dashboard

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Georgia’s-CharterLeader-Program-Addresses-Charter-Leadership-Needs

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This guest blog series describes approaches that seek to address one of the most critical issues facing the rapidly growing public charter school movement: its leadership pipeline. The examples from Georgia and California show how partnerships have been developed to create training programs that teach the specific skills public charter school administrators need to run a successful school. If you would like to share additional examples of leadership pipeline programs, post them to @charteralliance or #charterleadership on Twitter.

For a number of years, the Georgia Charter Schools Association (GCSA) has anecdotally recognized a high turn over rate in its charters due to a number of factors—including governance issues and the heavy workload associated with running a multi-million dollar non-profit and a public school. In 2008, research from the University of Washington’s National Center for Charter School Research Project published data to validate GCSA’s concerns in their study, Working without a Safety Net by Christine Campbell and Bethany Gross. With the growth of the charter sector nationally and in Georgia, increasing the pipeline and retaining quality talent became a practical matter. The National Governor’s Association and others in the education research field, such as Robert Marzano, all agree that leadership is the second most influential factor in student achievement, next to the classroom teacher. This further emphasizes the importance of addressing leadership succession and capacity, and that is exactly what GCSA set out to do in late 2008.

When we decided to address leadership preparation and retention, it was a huge undertaking. Where do you start? We recognized that the issue with leadership turnover and quality in charters was rooted in inadequate skills and competencies to do the job. But to write curriculum for a training program, you really have to define first what a high quality charter school is and does. So the first step was to bring stakeholders together from our district authorizers and the State Department of Education’s Charter Schools Division to develop Quality School Standards. Out of these standards we were able to then identify the key competencies of a high quality leader and the training required to get them there.

Through a grant provided by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, we started with a 10-day intensive training program with 2 modules – business and leadership – and a strong mentor model from education and business backgrounds to support the leaders. The program pilot was a success. We realized, though, that while we could adequately train the leaders we had, we would never really move the bar in the sector toward a pipeline to meet demand and cross the bridge with the traditional public schools until we actually impacted training programs in the university system for a broader reach. So we set out to find a university partner who would be visionary enough to rethink educational leadership preparation.

In 2012, GCSA partnered with Kennesaw State University’s (KSU) Bagwell College of Education and Lake Oconee Academy (LOA), the partnership’s model school site, to offer an Education Specialist Master’s degree program. It leverages GCSA’s expertise in disseminating information to a statewide network of charter schools, teachers, and leaders and its knowledge and experience with quality schools and leadership; KSU’s strength as one of the largest educator preparation programs in Georgia; and LOA’s outstanding record of leadership and student achievement. This Ed.S. degree program focuses on charter-specific skills and competencies required for leading a high quality public charter school and replicates many of the award-winning charter school leadership practices of LOA, a Georgia Platinum School for Highest Academic Achievement in which approximately 75 percent of the students qualify for federal free or reduced-cost meals. Candidates selected for the Ed.S. program receive grant-funded scholarships for their four-semester graduate program.

Building on educational research in effective leadership, most of the program’s content, developed in collaboration between KSU and GCSA from its original CharterLeader pilot, is delivered in a residency model at each candidate’s “home” school site. There, they are required to demonstrate expertise through “real life” performance projects. Candidates from both charter and traditional backgrounds come together throughout the program at retreats to share best practices, and to collaborate and to meet with experts in the field. Throughout the program, candidates receive ongoing coaching from educators with expertise in leading and founding charter schools, as well as veteran leaders in the traditional and independent school sectors.

We are about half-way through our first cohort and ready to recruit for the second cohort. We are very excited about the progress we have made and the promise the CharterLeader program holds for the future growth and efficacy of the charter movement. There has been much learning along the way in establishing the program and the partnership. We look forward to sharing these learnings with our peers in the charter sector and to broaden the reach of our work.

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Guest-Blog:-A-Researcher’s-Take-on-Claims-of-Charter-Schools-and-Segregation

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, NAPCS published a report on public charter schools meeting the diverse demands of their communities. This question of diversity (particularly, racial and socioeconomic diversity) is important to all public schools, including public charter schools. Groups such as UCLA’s Civil Rights Project pay close attention to racial segregation in all public schools and continue to find, for example, that “the children in United States schools are much poorer than they were decades ago and more separated in highly unequal schools.”

Unfortunately, many charter school opponents have seized this very real issue and misused it as an opportunity to bash charter schools. Just do a simple Google search on “segregation and charter schools” and you will find numerous hits in which news outlets or websites uncritically repeat the allegations of fervent charter bashers.

These claims reappear every so often and the problems are many. Let me name a few.

1. Shotgun reports. “Analyses” that take this shotgun approach present tables upon tables of data aiming to show (somehow) that charter schools are simultaneously schools of white flight that “cream” only the best students and miserable places in which poor children are trapped each day. Each of these conflicting claims is then backed up with an isolated example or two of a heavily white or heavily minority charter school. Of course, such reports make no mention of the numerous heavily white or heavily minority traditional schools surrounding the charter schools in question.

2. Data-free studies. Some reports make almost no attempt to gather data. These reports often include phrases like, “charter schools are among the most segregated in the district.” For example, the NEA Today website points to a March newspaper article and claims that “Some of the nation’s most segregated schools are charter schools, where students are often isolated by race, income, language and special education status”. While this blanket claim may be true (depending upon how segregation is defined), it is also true that the other segregated schools, indeed most of the segregated schools, are traditional schools. This is often the case in districts that are heavily segregated by neighborhoods where the traditional schools are also segregated.

3. Compared to perfection. Charter opponents sometimes conduct studies asking whether the racial and economic composition of charter schools is perfectly reflective of the sending traditional school district (see Miron et. al., February 2010). The unsurprising result is, no, most charters do not look exactly like the nearby school districts and the authors then draw conclusions suggesting problematic racial segregation in charters. The obvious flaw here, however, is the comparison between a charter school and a traditional district; if we want to criticize charters for not being perfectly reflective of a broader area, we should also ask the same question of traditional schools. That is, how well do the traditional school campuses reflect the broader district’s racial composition? When we ask this question, we generally find that neither charters nor traditional schools are reflective of the broader district or community. Check out the graph below showing data for a large southern district; the Y-axis represents the number of schools within the bands represented on the X-axis. For example, two of the schools in the district had minority student percentages between 20.0 percent and 24.9 percent while 13 schools had minority student percentages between 95 percent and 100 percent and so on. The take-away point here is that most of the traditional public schools do not reflect the overall district. In a district with 78 percent minority students, half of the schools are heavily minority schools (90 percent or more minority students) and one-quarter of the schools are disproportionately white.

Consequently, the relevant question is not whether charter schools reflect the broader district; the question is whether charter schools are more or less reflective of the district than the traditional public schools in the broader community.

4. Studies at the state or national level. A perfect example of this type of analysis is a February 2010 study by the aforementioned Civil Rights Project (CRP) titled “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.” The key flaw in this oft-referenced study is that the CRP authors focus on the fraction of students in highly segregated minority schools, and compare the figure for all charter schools to that of all traditional public schools. This is clearly an inappropriate analytic strategy because the geographic placement of public charter schools practically ensures that they will enroll higher percentages of minorities than will the average traditional school. As we show in our 2010 Education Next article (with the data attached so that anyone can choose to review or re-analyze it), our more appropriate analytic strategy clearly demonstrates how the CRP authors overstated their findings.

These are simply examples of the numerous ways to unfairly attack charter schools based on the demographic characteristics of the students that they serve. There are many others; indeed, some reports use no data at all but simply make reference to other flawed studies and yet the conclusions drawn by these reports are treated as new by those eager to bash charter schools. See, for example, the recent report called Chartering Equity that was used by charter critics to “show” that segregation is fostered by public charter schools.

* * * *

We have worked on this a great deal and have tried to figure out the best way to assess the relative racial integration and segregation at charter schools. It is complicated and requires that the researchers make several decisions (which can be debated) about how to define integration or segregation. Nevertheless, in recent years, some studies have done a good job of attacking this question. See, for example, the thorough analysis by the RAND Corporation in 2009. Good studies such as this generally compare the relative integration or the racial compositions of charter schools to that of nearby traditional public schools.

Thoughtful analyses find that students who move into charter schools mostly choose schools with racial compositions similar to those of the traditional public schools they exited. These results are not uniform; they vary state by state (for example, we find in Florida that charter schools and traditional public schools are similar in their “reflectiveness” of the broader community; in Delaware, however, charters are not as reflective of the community as are traditional public schools.) Results also vary by metropolitan area (in Philadelphia, 65 percent of the students in both charters and traditional schools attend highly segregated schools; in Atlanta, only 25 percent of charter students attend highly segregated schools while 70 percent of traditional public schools students attend such segregated schools).

Of course, schools (charters or traditional) that are the most "segregated" sit in geographic areas with high concentrations of poor and minority students. These families have the fewest choices; when they are dissatisfied with the schooling options they have, charters often open to serve these disadvantaged students. These are issues related to poverty and residential segregation — these are not charter problems!

In short, the claims that charter schools enhance segregation across the board are most certainly false and more than likely a thinly-veiled attempt of charter opponents to slow the charter movement and limit choice options. And, to cast these attacks as a defense of racial integration is simply disingenuous. For example, the majority of students in center cities, in both the public charter sector and in the traditional public sector, attend intensely segregated minority schools. We know this, any casual observer of urban schools knows this, and the critics of charter schools know this.

Thus, anyone truly interested in racial integration for students (and not simply interested in attacking charter schools) is looking in the wrong direction by focusing on the failings of charter schools. Charters serve fewer than three percent of US public school children; the remaining 97 percent are compelled to attend traditional public schools. Anyone genuinely concerned with enhancing racial integration should be channeling their energy toward reducing segregation in the traditional sector.

Finally, when critics use the term segregation to malign charter schools, it might be viewed as disrespectful to those who have suffered from formalized segregation in the past or to those who currently suffer from residential segregation. It does not seem to be the right term to use when referring to the results of active choices made by families of minority students. Segregation connotes a lack of freedom; this situation feels like the opposite. The fact that some poor students are free to flee segregated traditional public schools for similarly segregated charters cannot be viewed as an indictment of charters. Indeed, leaders of charter organizations are quick to state that they are honored to serve minority families who choose the charter schools after a search for attractive schooling options. It is simply wrong to compare these active parental choices to the forced segregation of our nation’s past.

Gary W. Ritter, Professor of Education and Public Policy, University of Arkansas

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Guest-Blog:-Study-Shows-Indianapolis-Charter-Success-at-Key-Moment-in-Movement’s-History

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Indianapolis charter school performance will be carefully scrutinized in the upcoming battle for scarce dollars for education funding when Indiana begins to draft its two-year budget in January. The National Center on School Choice’s report by Anna Nicotera, "Charter School Effects in an Urban School District: An Analysis of Student Achievement Gains in Indianapolis", comes at a perfect time to provide an accurate picture of performance in Indianapolis charter schools and provides sound guidance for sustaining the progress achieved.

Since the first student took a seat in an Indianapolis charter school in 2002, more than 23 schools have opened and enrolled approximately 6,000 students in this city. Growing in the shadow of a large, urban district that has experienced declining enrollment for decades, the Indianapolis charter school movement has become a target of the education establishment, accused of taking money from traditional districts but failing on its promise to educate.

The first slings directed toward charter schools were based on untruths and myths. When facts stepped in to repudiate these fallacies, opponents next directed their criticisms to charter school performance using examples of new charter schools that performed poorly on state standardized assessments. Absent in the criticism was attention to mitigating factors such as students’ prior level of academic achievement (often well below grade level), the newness of the school, the limited time the school has had to educate the student before the test and certainly not the amount of growth a student attains regardless of passage or failure on a state assessment. This is why a broader view is needed to more accurately evaluate these schools.

The report found that students who switched to Indianapolis charter schools experienced significant gains in mathematics achievement. Further, the report found gains in reading among these students, but at levels lower than the gains in math. The report also found that parents chose Indianapolis charter schools for academic reasons and that the charter schools differed in their approach to instruction than their traditional public school counterparts.

This is important. Local charter critics claim that charter schools perform no better than district schools and are not innovative. The National Center on School Choice report refutes both claims.

Next, the report indicates that time spent in charter schools is a significant factor in academic growth. This provides support for the argument that it is unfair to judge a charter school’s performance in its first few weeks of operation, regardless of how often charter critics use this tactic.
Finally, it was heartening that the report looked at external factors contributing to charter success in Indianapolis. Mayor Greg Ballard, the only mayor in the nation with authorizing powers, has a strong Office of Charter Schools. Its focus on quality is exceptional, and the results found in this study speak for themselves. Other organizations such as the Indiana Public Charter Schools Association, local business groups, and supportive state officials like Gov. Mitch Daniels, Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, and many legislators have made Indianapolis and the state of Indiana a place with great promise and opportunity for public charter schools.

I am pleased the National Center on School Choice’s well-timed report has provided support for the hard work of these groups and individuals. "Charter School Effects in an Urban School District" provides ammunition to refute the entrenched education establishment’s efforts to criticize charter performance, even if the facts get in the way of their claims.

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Hope-Academy-Charter-School's-Drop-out-Recovery-and-Prevention-Program-Surpasses-State-Graduation-Rate

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

During National Charter Schools Week, we celebrate achievements in the school house and the state house. These achievements could not have been possible without the commitment of teachers, leaders, parents and advocates from all parts of the country. We asked some of these individuals to tell us why they are a part of the charter schools movement.

My name is Zachary Bassin, and I am the Director of Operations and Development for Hope Academy Charter School located in Kansas City, Missouri. Hope Academy is a drop out recovery and prevention school serving students ages 16-21 since 2009. Having come from a non-education background, being able to work with these exceptional young adults is one of the most fulfilling jobs one can imagine. The personal growth and knowledge I have received while working at an innovative and evolving charter school are skills I will be able to use for the rest of my life, much like the skills Hope Academy’s students gain.

The mission of Hope Academy is to provide students who have dropped out of a formal educational program, as well as those contemplating dropping out, an opportunity to obtain a quality education leading to a diploma. Highly qualified teachers serve as advisors in each classroom, where students learn in a blended learning environment using the most advanced technology and teaching strategies. The classroom design embraces individual, small group, and whole group instruction. Students, parents and their advisor at Hope Academy develop an individual learning plan that allows students to work at their own pace towards a high school diploma. Hope Academy students not only receive classroom instruction, but also real world experience through the service learning program. Students are required to fulfill two hours a day of service learning, which can consist of employment, shadowing experience, paid and unpaid internship, or community service.

Hope Academy provides students a full complement of wrap-around support services which include: a guidance counselor, social worker, health services provider, job placement coordinator, home-bound coordinator and college liaison. These individuals help remove obstacles facing our students, preparing them for the next step in life of college, technical school, the military or the workforce.

Since its inception in 2009, Hope Academy continues to be recognized for a multitude of achievements. The Mid-America Education Hall of Fame inducted the school, as well as two of our outstanding board members, for its achievements in education in November 2011. Hope Academy continues to excel by surpassing the State of Missouri’s average graduation rate of 86.7 percent with a 93.1 percent rate. The Kansas City Public School drop out rate is 16.6 percent. The students of Hope Academy continue to be recognized for additional achievement in the community such as building a rain garden, and two students receiving full scholarships to the University of Kansas summer program in Health Sciences. Lastly, the school received national attention and a visit from Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, political commentator, author, professor and MSNBC host, while being recognized as one of her “Foot Soldiers” on the MSNBC program March 24, 2012.

By attending National Charter Schools Week, Hope Academy not only plans to advocate for the needs of charter schools in the State of Missouri and nationwide, but also learn from other programs across the country. In working with other schools to advocate for the needs of our students, we plan on sharing our unique story of success in Kansas City and the stories of other charter schools in Missouri. Hope Academy will continue to fulfill its mission by adding another campus to serve an additional 300 at risk students in the 2012-2013 school year.

Click here for more information.

It’s-Time-for-Public-Charter-Schools-in-Washington-State

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The state that brought the world Starbucks, Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has not exactly been leading the charge on innovative educational practices. When it comes to education reform, Washington has basically been a status quo heaven state.

Fortunately, a broad and growing bi partisan coalition of education advocates in Washington State plans to change this picture on November 6th. They submitted over 357,000 signatures for Initiative 1240, a well-crafted charter school measure proposal that just qualified for the fall statewide ballot.

Washington is a large, smart state with a growing population (we got the congressional seat that Massachusetts lost) that has been too attached to the educational status quo. It has been too easy for us to import the labor force that our technology driven economy needs, and too hard for us to help our low income and minority students stay in school and succeed.

Buoyed by the model law developed by NAPCS and a pile of research studies showing that public charter schools serving low income minority youth consistently outperform traditional public schools, advocates in Washington State have drafted a very strong law. We think it will be one of the strongest charter school laws in the country.

But first, we have to get our messages out to voters, and make certain that a majority of them approve Initiative 1240 on November 6th. Because Washington voters have defeated other charter school measures (three times, actually), this ballot fight has high stakes, and it is one of national importance. If you want to help, please visit www.yeson1240.com.

Image: States with (blue) and without (gray) a public charter school law. Via National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Dashboard, http://dashboard.publiccharters.org/dashboard/schools/year/2012

Author Lisa Macfarlane is the Washington State Director of Democrats for Education Reform.

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Learning-From-the-Best-Cooperative-Practices-Between-Charter-and-Traditional-Public-Schools

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Collaboration is a force multiplier when it comes to innovation. Despite popular perception, traditional public schools and charter schools are collaborating on innovation and education reform. The upcoming 2012 national conference on Charter and Traditional Public Schools Collaborative Practices is the second national conference committed to exhibiting successful examples of these district-charter collaborations. The 2012 conference will be held November 5, 2012 in Broomfield, Colorado, just west of Denver near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The goal of the upcoming conference, exhibiting examples of district-charter collaborations, is to provide sparks that will ignite additional public education partnerships. To further that end, examples of collected practices are now available online at www.charterdistrictcoop.org, where folks can also register for the November conference.

In welcoming participants to the 2010 national conference on district-charter collaborations, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said:

“We need more examples of charter leaders working with the leaders in traditional schools. We need you to be working together to build great schools and to provide students with the world class education they so desperately need and deserve. We can’t let historical tensions or rivalries stop us or get in the way of where we need to go. No third grader in the country really cares or knows, frankly, whether they go to a charter school, traditional school, gifted school, or magnet school. All the child knows is whether they have a great teacher in the classroom, whether the principal knows who they are and whether they have a chance to fulfill their tremendous academic and social potential.”

Thanks and appreciation goes to the following co-hosts of this important conference: the Arizona Charter School Association; The Cleveland Metropolitan School District; The Denver Public Schools; The Colorado League of Charter Schools; CSI Colorado; The Douglas County School District; The Falcon School District; The Georgia Charter School Association; The Illinois Network of Charter Schools; The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools; the New York Charter School Center; New York City Collaborates and the Ohio Alliance for public Charter Schools.

Looking forward to seeing all of you there! Register here!

-Bill Sims
President and CEO
Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools

Click here for more information.

MAPSA’s-Documentary-About-Jalen-Rose’s-Charter-School-Promotes-an-Important-Conversation

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

What should a parent do when they feel their current school is not working for their child? And how do we create the quality schools they deserve?

That was the focus as the Michigan Association of Public School Academies had an exciting event this week to kick off National Charter Schools Week – the premiere of an original documentary we produced on the first year of the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit. The full-length documentary was called “Creating Hope: A Year in the Life of a New Charter School,” and it was written and directed by MAPSA’s Emmy-nominated Vice President of Communications, Buddy Moorehouse.

For those who might not be basketball fans, Jalen Rose was a member of the University of Michigan’s fabled Fab Five team from the early 1990s. He later went on to a long career in the NBA, and currently works as a basketball analyst for ESPN and NBC. He’s obviously gone on to great success and fame in his life, and people like that often forget where they came from.

Not Jalen Rose. The state of public education in his hometown, Detroit, has always troubled him, so a few years back, he decided to do something about it. He founded a charter high school on the city’s northwest side called the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy. The school would teach leadership and responsibility along with the academic subjects, and it would feature an extended school day and school year – 211 days in all.

The school opened in 2011, and MAPSA’s documentary project began at that time. We decided to tell the story of the school through the eyes of one student and her family. Unique Bailey’s family enrolled her at the school in 2011 because they felt the local school district wasn’t meeting the needs of their daughter. Unique was a very bright girl, but she was getting lost in her old school district. Her parents wanted more for her. They wanted hope. They found it at the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy.

The documentary project consumed nearly a full year, as we followed Unique and her classmates all the way to the last day of classes on Aug. 3, 2012. Editing on the film began soon after that, and the premiere took place at the start of National Charter Schools Week on Monday evening, May 6, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. We had a dream audience in attendance – a who’s who of Michigan’s business, philanthropic, educational, media and community leaders.

The main intent of the documentary was to start a conversation that needs to take place now in our state, and our country. Specifically, what does a parent do when they feel trapped in a school that isn’t meeting the needs of their child? And how do we create the schools they deserve? We saw that question come to life through the eyes of Unique Bailey and her family.

This was a film about a charter school, but in the same way, it was not a film about a charter school. Because the challenges faced by the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy are the same challenges that every public school in our state faces – creating a school that meets the needs of the student. As we pointed out on Monday night, we don’t need good schools in our state – we need GREAT schools in our state.

An important step in that process is defining the challenges and starting a conversation. That was the intent of our documentary, and we’re heartened that we were able to start this conversation during National Charter Schools Week. We had a panel discussion following the film that featured myself along with educators, legislators, media members, parents – and a former basketball star who was willing to roll up his sleeves to get his hands dirty, to help make a difference in his hometown.

Jalen Rose isn’t used to sitting on the sidelines when the game isn’t going well. We need more people like him if we’re going to create more excellent schools.

We’re going to be showing the documentary to more people in more places around Michigan, because we feel it’s an effective way to illustrate the challenges and get the discussion moving.

The film ends with Unique Bailey’s mother, Tanisha Bailey, saying, “I can’t fail Unique. I cannot. I cannot fail her.”

Mrs. Bailey, you’re right. You can’t fail Unique. And neither can we. The success of our state, and our country, depends on the success of our students.

We can’t fail them.

Dan Quisenberry is the President of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, the state’s united voice for charter schools.

Photo: From left, charter school founder Jalen Rose, MAPSA President Dan Quisenberry, Michigan Senate Education Committee Chairman Phil Pavlov and JRLA Superintendent Joe Tenbusch participate in a panel discussion following the premiere of “Creating Hope.”

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Massachusetts-Community-and-Business-Leaders-Seek-to-Lift-Charter-Caps

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This week, The Charter Blog will feature guest posts from state charter support organizations capturing their reaction to their state's ranking on the 20 essential components from the NAPCS model law.

Massachusetts has enjoyed a period of unprecedented expansion of charter public schools as a result of a 2010 education reform law that allowed charters to double the number of seats they can offer children in the state's lowest performing districts. So you would think its ranking against other states would have risen in the latest NAPCS survey of how state laws support charters. But several states leap-frogged past Massachusetts making more aggressive changes to their laws promoting charter expansion and providing financial support.

Massachusetts' ranking fell from 5th to 11th. The 2010 law approved a "limited" cap lift and the new seats were quickly taken up. Right now, more than half of the 29 districts that rank in the bottom 10 percent academically are either at the cap or have room for only one more charter school. These include large cities and towns like Boston, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Chelsea, and Randolph, and several smaller communities in Central and Western Massachusetts. Meanwhile charter wait lists have grown to 45,000 students.

The study points out potential room for improvement in state law, including removing the state’s caps on charter school growth and ensuring equitable operational funding and equitable access to capital funding and facilities. These two issues are the focus of a legislative campaign launched by charter public school advocates, local business leaders and legislators. The legislation would eliminate all charter caps in underperforming districts and create more room to open new charters all across the state. The bill would also address underfunding of charter facilities by requiring cities and towns to offer charter school operators the opportunity to purchase or lease unused municipal buildings. The coalition is also seeking increased state support for charters facilities in the state budget. This legislation is part of a comprehensive effort to build on the state’s two-decade-old education reform effort raising academic standards, strengthening accountability and increasing parental choice.

Charter public schools are among the highest performing schools in Massachusetts, and have been successful at narrowing race and income-based achievement gaps. The vast majority of charters post higher standardized MCAS test scores compared to their district counterparts, and many urban charters, which educate mostly minority and/or low-income students, outscore even affluent suburban schools. In fact, twenty-four charters ranked #1 in the state on various MCAS and academic improvement rankings.

For the past twenty years, charter schools have proven that they are a high-quality, valuable option for families across the state. If the legislature fails to act on this bill, families from many of the state's neediest communities will be frozen out. It’s time to lift the cap and give these children the academic opportunities they need to successfully prepare for their futures.

Click here for more information.

Michigan-Cyber-Schools-give-Parents-a-Choice-Outside-the-District-Box

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Michigan has two cyber public charter schools, and the demand by parents for these schools is incredible. Under current law, each of the schools will never be able to accept more than 1,000 students. Both schools have already reached that limit. Combined, the Michigan Virtual Charter Academy and Michigan Connections Academy currently have a waiting list of approximately 10,000 students. These students are now waiting on the lottery, hoping their number gets called.

Currently, a legislative effort is taking place in Michigan to lift the cap on cyber charters, and the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA) strongly supports this effort. We support the expansion of parent choice, believing that every child matters and every parent should have a variety of high-quality options. Public charter schools, and public cyber charter schools are quality options. As it stands now, only a small percentage of parents in Michigan have that option. And that’s not right.

The traditional school community in Michigan has been fighting this legislation tooth and nail, simply because they don’t want to lose market share. They’ve tried to advance the false argument that a cyber education lacks quality safeguards and results. This is a curious argument for them to be making, considering that 90 percent of more than 500 traditional school districts offer these very same online learning programs, using the very same online education providers they’ve been criticizing.

As a cyber charter school, these schools are held to a higher standard of accountability. Each school has a separate school board of public officials, an authorizer with a contract that audits and monitors academic performance, fiscal stewardship, and sound and appropriate governance. Charter schools in Michigan must also comply with most rules and regulations that apply to all public schools, certified teachers, reporting, testing, etc. Most importantly though, charter schools are held accountable by parents, through their choice to attend or leave.

The cyber charter school legislation, SB 619, has passed the State Senate, come out of the State House Education Committee and is expected to be taken up in the full House next week. If passed there, some modifications would need to be approved by the Senate before moving to Governor Rick Snyder who is expected to sign the bill when it reaches him.

Ultimately, MAPSA supports lifting the cap on cyber charter schools for Michigan’s future, the students. Students like Steve Slisko. He’s a boy I met who lives in a suburb of Detroit, and has cognitive impairments that prevent him from speaking or holding a pencil. He’s extremely bright, but has struggled in a traditional school setting. Thankfully, his family found the Michigan Virtual Charter Academy, and he was able to win a coveted spot in the school. Now he is thriving. He can type his assignments; communicate with his teachers via e-mail, which has resulted in his grades skyrocketing. His grandfather says the school is a “miracle.”

Steve is just one example from the many students in Michigan who have found success by attending a cyber charter school. There are thousands of other students, each with their own story, and their own reason why a cyber education is the best option for them. Our job is to provide sound policy and a quality opportunity for them, then let them decide. Our job is to ensure a quality education for each child in Michigan.

Click here for more information.

Michigan-Results-Show-That-African-American-Students-Perform-Better-in-Charter-Schools

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Every year, all public school children in Michigan take a standardized test called the MEAP – Michigan Educational Assessment Program. The purpose of the test is to assess the performance of students and schools using content standards prescribed by state educators.

When the MEAP results are release each spring, researchers and educators in Michigan have a data-filled field day digging through all the numbers. And this year’s MEAP test revealed something quite significant, but not at all surprising:

In both math and reading at every grade level, African-American students in charter schools performed better than African-American students in traditional public schools in their host districts. Students are tested in grades 3-8, so when you combine math and reading, that’s 12 categories altogether. In all 12 of those categories, African-American students in charter schools scored higher in every single grade level for both math and reading.

Wow.

The results were almost as impressive among Hispanic students. Those results showed that Hispanic students in charter schools scored higher on the MEAP than Hispanic students in traditional public schools in 10 of the 12 categories.

The MEAP results also revealed that charter schools in Michigan’s biggest cities continue to outperform the traditional public schools. In the state’s largest city, Detroit – where a whopping 37 percent of children are enrolled in a charter school – charter school students scored 5 percentage points higher in math and 7 percentage points higher in reading.

Taken together, these results are very significant for several reasons. First, they show that charter schools are succeeding when it comes to one of their primary missions – giving parents a quality educational option in places where the local public schools are failing. In Detroit, where the local public schools are most certainly failing, the data tells us that students in charter schools are doing better.

These numbers also show that we’re finally starting to make some progress when it comes to closing the achievement gap that has plagued our public education system for so long. We have a lot of work left to do, but we can finally see that we’re making progress – significant progress.

In Michigan, we’re never going to be truly great again as a state until we have an educational system that offers every child the chance to receive a quality education. As these results show, for African-American and Hispanic students, charter schools are doing a superior job of helping to prepare them for college and success in the 21st century.

There’s a saying in sports that holds true here: “The scoreboard don’t lie.” That’s certainly the case with this year’s MEAP results.

Dan Quisenberry is the President of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies

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More-than-700-Texas-Charter-School-Parents,-Students,-Teachers-and-Charter-Leaders-call-for-passage-of-strong-charter-legislation-at-TCSA-Rally-at-the-South-Steps-of-the-Texas-State-Capitol

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

During National Charter Schools Week and in the final 20 days of the 83rd Legislature, the Texas Charter Schools Association welcomed to Austin more than 700 parents, students, teachers and charter leaders from across Texas to rally on the south steps of the Texas State Capitol to show their strong support for public charter schools and charter legislation this session. On that same day, the TCSA’s first charter bill, SB 1538, which helps to accurately measure drop out recovery charters and traditional public schools, passed and is headed to the Governor’s desk.

TCSA executive director David Dunn praised all the charter school parents, like our two parents from Dallas and Austin who spoke at the rally, students, teachers and leaders across the state, who are working this session with the Texas House and Senate to pass legislation that will strengthen and support effective charter schools in Texas, lift the arbitrary cap on charter schools, and more accurately measure drop out recovery schools and the work they do with students returning to high school to recover credits and graduate.

He also thanked our Legislators for leaving the House and Senate chambers and addressing charter parents and supporters at the rally. During the rally, we cheered and thanked them for their support and for all the hard work they are doing this session to pass good and needed charter legislation.

Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst addressed the rally participants as well as Senate Education Chairman Dan Patrick, House Public Education Committee member and Representative Marsha Farney and Representative Diane Patrick. During National Charter Schools Week, public charter school parents, leaders and supporters traveled from Houston, San Antonio, San Marcos, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Angelo and locally from Austin, Tex., to rally for legislation that helps their children and strengthens overall charter school policy to benefit all charter schools statewide.

We began the day with lunch on the Capitol grounds, and then TCSA led a supporter march from 11th and Congress up to the Capitol south steps, chanting our support for public charter schools and options for parents and students. We rallied at the south steps and then entered the Senate gallery to watch the Senators in action. Senator Dan Patrick, chairman of the Senate Education committee, recognized our charter parents, students, teachers and leaders in the gallery and we stood to applaud and wave. Rally participants ended their day at the Texas Capitol by visiting their district House rep and asking for support on TCSA’s list of charter bills.

All of the rally participants represent more than 154,000 students on 500-plus open-enrollment charter school campuses across the state, and equally as important, the larger-than-expected crowd represents the more than 101,000 students on waiting lists for a spot at a charter school. The Texas Charter Schools Association is the statewide association representing open-enrollment charter schools in every part of our great state of Texas, and we continue to advocate for quality charter schools and state policy that will create an environment for more charter growth, more innovation and more options for parents and students in Texas.

Public charter schools are making a difference for students in Texas.

In 2011 (the last year of rankings in Texas), in public charter schools rated under Texas' Standard Accountability System, higher percentages of African-American and Hispanic students passed the TAKS test in every core subject area than in traditional public schools.
According to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts in her annual Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST), Texas charter schools account for nearly 30% of the state's most fiscally efficient public schools, even though they represent only 3% of the student population.
Texas public charter schools, as a percentage, serve more African-American students, more Hispanic students, more economically disadvantaged students and more at risk students than traditional public schools. Public charter schools serve only slightly fewer limited English proficient and special education students, as a percentage, than traditional public schools.
U.S. News & World Report Best High Schools Rankings: 8 out of the top 20 in Texas are public charter schools.

Image via Austin American-Statesman: Texas Senate Education Committee Chairman Dan Patrick speaks at TCSA rally

Image via Austin American-Statesman

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Moving-to-a-Common-System-of-Choice-in-D.C.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The growth of public charter schools in Washington, D.C.—coupled with out-of-boundary options for the traditional public school system, and vouchers—have made D.C. one of the most robust school choice environments in the nation. But as executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB), I’ve seen and heard how in the charter sector, the proliferation of options has brought its own problems when it comes to picking and enrolling in a school.

D.C. has 57 charter organizations that operate 102 campuses, each with its own means of enrolling students. Parents said that with so many different application dates, the process was confusing and headache-inducing, leading some to throw up their hands and opt out. It can also act as a subtle barrier to the least advantaged families.

For oversubscribed public charter schools that held lotteries, each school’s lottery was separate, meaning that some families get into many schools, while others into none–with no account taken for a family’s first or second choices. And with uncoordinated enrollment systems, families enroll in several schools and decide at the last minute which to attend, triggering a cascade of students switching schools after classes start, a phenomenon known as the “waitlist shuffle.”

With more than 35,000 students enrolled, or 43 percent of the public school population, our charter schools haven’t been entirely happy with the application and enrollment process either. They have to contend with higher student turnover, phantom enrollment, and mobility in the first month of school that can exceed 10 percent of the student body.

Clearly collective action was needed to address these issues, and it made most sense for PCSB to facilitate. But to make progress, we knew our action had to be respectful of charter school autonomy and voluntary, with charter schools themselves designing and directing the path forward. Enrollment is a charter school’s lifeblood. Only if we moved gradually, without laws, regulations, and mandates, and in a way that was informed by the schools’ perspectives, would this succeed.

The first issue we would tackle was having a single, common enrollment deadline. Our schools had more than 30 separate deadlines for applying—along with different dates for lotteries, notification, and enrollment. Looking at every school’s process, the most common date was March 15. My team and I individually called each school leader to ask for their support. Many schools initially said “yes.” Others signed on when they saw how many of their peers were. In the end, just four or five schools opted out.

The schools joined a working group that became a key forum for addressing other related issues. They agreed, for example, to set a common enrollment deadline of April 12 as a way of minimizing duplicate enrollments. They agreed to share enrollment information as a way to flag dual enrollments that do occur. The facilitator of this workgroup, Abigail Smith, built tremendous trust among the schools. (Two weeks ago D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray appointed Smith to be his Deputy Mayor for Education.) And we had key philanthropic support from NewSchools, which helped launch a media campaign called Your Charter Your Choice, which that put signs at bus stops and ads on the radio and in newspapers, to make sure parents knew about the date.

The April 12 acceptance deadline has just passed, and we’re eager to hear the final numbers. But early data indicate tremendous success. One public charter school saw a 66 percent increase in applications. Another charter school said that this year they saw their highest interest level from parents yet, showing that awareness of the deadline was high. With schools sharing information about their acceptance lists, we expect far fewer duplicate enrollments.

Now the working group is turning its attention to the next issues, a common lottery and common application, for charters and the traditional school system. Many schools are enthusiastic about these next steps; others are understandably more cautious. I’m confident that through the same collaborative process that created the common deadline, we can develop a common system of choice that will work well for parents and for charter schools.

Scott Pearson
Executive Director
DC Public Charter School Board

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NYC-Schools-Open-Their-Doors-to-Sharing

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

For all the classes, workshops, and one-on-one conversations that influenced my professional development as a teacher, there was nothing quite like the opportunity to observe other educators in action. Whether I went next door to my mentor teacher’s room or across town to a different school, I inevitably returned to my own classroom with pages of furiously scribbled notes. Some things I implemented immediately, some things planted the seeds for longer-term changes, while still other things were frankly lessons in what I did not want my own class to look like.

Given the growing number of virtual platforms, it’s becoming easier and easier to share ideas digitally, but there remains something to be said about the physical act of observation. While in-school sharing is still the norm, there are far fewer opportunities for educators to actually go out into the field and observe in a different setting.

This past spring, NYC Collaborates, an initiative of New York City’s District-Charter Collaboration Compact that aims to facilitate opportunities for schools to share information and best practices, launched its first school study tour series. Through these tours, NYC educators were able to visit a variety of district and charter schools, with each visit focused on a particular theme. More than just identifying possible schools to visit–in and of itself not an easy task for an individual–we wanted to ensure that we created a deeper learning experience. Further, we wanted to ensure that it was actually a shared learning experience, where educators had the opportunity not just to learn from the school they were visiting, but also from one another.

Check out this video to see what the tours were really all about.

We’re grateful to the four schools that warmly welcomed what was essentially a group of strangers into their building. We’re thrilled that attendees prioritized the opportunity to visit another great public school, and that they candidly contributed to rich and authentic conversations.

And we’re excited to keep the momentum going. If you want to learn more or brainstorm with us, stop by or drop us a note.

NYC Collaborates is a co-sponsor of the upcoming national Best Cooperative Practices for Charter & Traditional Public Schools Conference. Click to learn more and register for the conference.

Click here for more information.

Ohio's-charter-law-remains-a-laggard

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio’s charter law remains mediocre despite numerous reform efforts over the last decade. According to the latest “Measuring Up to the Model: A Ranking of the State Charter School Laws” produced by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) the Buckeye State’s charter school law ranks 27 out of 43 states and the District of Columbia.

NAPCS ranks state laws based on two primary factors: 1) the freedoms and flexibilities state laws provide charter operators; and 2) the quality of accountability provisions for both charter school operators and authorizers. There are 20 Essential Components of the NAPCS rankings and these range from freedoms such as “No Caps on Charters,” “Automatic Collective Bargaining Exemptions,” and “Equitable Operational Funding” to accountability measures such as “Authorizer and Overall Program Accountability” and “Clear Processes for Renewal, Nonrenewal and Revocation Decisions.”

Ohio has made some progress – and this is reflected in the NAPCS state rating of Ohio inching up from #28 last year to #27 this year. But, other states are making progress faster. Big charter states, those that have at least 4.5% of their students enrolled in public charter schools, that have made steady progress and improvements to their laws in recent years include number one ranked Minnesota (with 4.7% of students in charters), number four Colorado (with 9.8% of students in charters), number five Florida (with 6.8% of students in charters), number six Louisiana (with 6.4% of students in charters) and number seven California (with 6.7% of students in charters).

These states are serving hundreds of thousands of students under state laws that are superior to Ohio’s in both allowing charter freedoms and ensuring charter performance. Louisiana, for example, jumped from #13 to #6 due to significant enhancements in its laws, such as strengthening the authorizing environment and increasing charter school autonomy. While South Carolina leapt from #25 to #12 because of improved laws related to better authorizing.

The NAPCS rankings make clear that Ohio’s lawmakers can do better by its 113,000 charter school students, while setting the conditions for better charter schools and opportunities for more kids in need of better schools in the future. Specifically, legislative leaders in Ohio can help promote charter school quality by crafting policies that ensure would-be school operators are carefully vetted in advance of opening; that all schools are thoroughly monitored by responsible authorities for their academic performance; and that poor performers exit the market in a timely fashion.

Failed schools should not be able to skirt academic accountability; whether they are traditional district schools, virtual charter schools or charter schools operated either by for-profit management companies or nonprofit ones. But, in return for performance, successful charters should receive equitable funding. Charters in Ohio, on average, receive about $2,200 less funding per pupil than traditional district schools. This disparity is due in large part to charter schools’ lack of access to local revenues and facilities funding. Successful charters should also be able to replicate their successes through innovations like multi-school charter contracts and multi-charter contract boards. If, for example, a high quality charter school board can successfully oversee ten or even 15 great charters in a city there should be no laws preventing this from happening, but there currently is in the Buckeye State.

The states with the best charter schools also have the strongest charter school laws. According to Nina Rees, President and CEO of NAPCS, the national charter school association release their annual rankings so they “can be used by charter school supporters to help them push for laws that support the creation of high-quality public charter schools, particularly those students most in need of a better school option.” Ohio can and should learn from other states when it comes to improving charter school policies and NAPCS makes this easy to do with their rankings and model law. It is smart policy to build on the lessons of higher-performing charter states.

This blog originally ran on the Ohio Gadfly Daily on January 30, 2013.

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Passage-of-SB-576-Expands-Charter-School-Options-for-Missouri-Students

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed SB 576, expanding access to charter schools in the state of Missouri while increasing the accountability of charter schools and their sponsors. This legislation will provide more families across the state access to quality charter schools held accountable to high standards of academic performance and operational management.

The new law will also expand access to charter schools for Missouri students in a manner recognizing that families are seeking alternative public education options in struggling districts and local school boards are seeking flexibility and additional potential for innovation. Prior to this legislation being signed, charter schools were only allowed inside of the St. Louis and Kansas City public school districts.

This legislation allows charter schools to open in any unaccredited district in the state as well as any provisionally accredited district, under certain conditions. Charter schools may also open in any fully accredited district but sponsored only by locally elected school board.

The new statute requires sponsors and schools to sign a performance contract that is the basis for measuring the school’s performance. The law also requires intervention by a charter school sponsor if the school is identified by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) as a persistently lowest achieving school, has a high school program that fails to maintain a 70 percent graduation rate, or is chronically underperforming the district's Annual Performance Report score. This score is an annual report given by the DESE to all public school districts in the state. This legislation also greatly increases transparency in a charter school's agreements with outside management companies and requires a formal evaluation of charter school sponsors every three years by the State Board of Education.

SB 576 passed the Missouri State Senate by a wide, bipartisan vote of 31-2 and the Missouri State House by a similar bi- partisan margin of 99-54. The law will go into effect on August 28, 2012. MCPSA was proud to work, along with allied legislators and stakeholders, on this important piece of legislation to give Missouri students access to additional high quality public education options.

Douglas P. Thaman, Executive Director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association (MCPSA)

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Preserving-Charter-School-Autonomy-and-Accountability-in-ESEA-Flexibility

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

On February 9th, President Obama announced that 10 states have been granted waivers under the U.S. Department of Education’s ESEA Flexibility program. These states are the first to receive waivers from elements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) if they adopt several reform practices. This includes focusing their accountability and intervention efforts on two groups of low performing schools that make up roughly the lowest-performing 15 percent of public schools in a state.

You may be wondering what impact the waiver program will have on charter schools. You’re not alone. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) wondered the same thing, and has discussed the potential impact on charter school autonomy and accountability with Department officials and Secretary Arne Duncan.

After reviewing the first 11 applications submitted for the waiver, we observed that none addressed how their proposed policies would affect low-performing charters. We’re concerned state education agencies (SEAs) will inadvertently harm charter school autonomy and accountability unless they give specific attention to the unique aspects of charter schools.

One of our concerns is that SEAs will seek to apply the same intervention policies to charter schools that they apply to district schools. For young charter schools that are struggling, SEAs would require state-mandated improvement plans – greatly reducing charter schools’ autonomy over their educational program.

For consistently low-performing charter schools that come up for renewal, states would require multi-year corrective action plans that keep low-performing charter schools open for years. As states implement these waivers, we want to ensure that struggling charter schools that would be closed by their authorizer do not stay open longer because they are involved in these improvement processes.

The good news is that the department is aware of our concerns, and is working to address them with the current waiver recipients and future waiver applicants. Furthermore, authorizers across the country have reached out to their SEAs to discuss their ESEA waivers. State charter associations and charter schools can join us in this discussion. Please consider contacting your SEA to work with them to develop ESEA Flexibility plans that consider the charter sector.

Working together, I’m confident we can preserve charter school autonomy and accountability through this process.

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Professional-Development-Center-Benefits-Charter-School-and-Greater-Community

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In 2010, Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, Colorado, launched its Center for Professional Development (CPD), an office dedicated to creating collaborative educational partnerships designed to maximize student achievement. As a nationally recognized charter school (the high school is consistently ranked among the top 100 high schools by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report), Peak to Peak regularly receives requests for advice, support, or resources from other schools and educational institutions. Because the school recognizes its responsibility as an educational leader, the CPD was designed to respond to those requests.

The CPD’s purpose is basically two-fold. First, it provides professional development to Peak to Peak faculty and operational staff by creating opportunities to serve as consultants, mentors, workshop leaders, and instructional coaches. Second, it facilitates partnerships to provide collaborative, research-based professional development services to other schools and institutions (schools, districts, universities, etc.). Partnerships are custom-tailored to the needs of each partner institution, and are designed to be relevant and transformative for educators in all stages of their careers.

CPD partnerships take on a variety of forms, from providing curriculum consultants to offering workshops in best practices to providing state-approved induction services. For example, the CPD’s free Wednesday Workshop series attracts a diverse audience made up of Peak to Peak teachers, district teachers, pre-service teaching candidates, graduate students from university education programs, university professors, and faculty and staff from neighboring schools (charter and traditional public). CPD consultants collaborate with partners across the state of Colorado, whether partnering with the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) to provide pre-AP training to BVSD middle school teachers, leading workshops on student engagement at an alternative high school in the Denver Public School District, exploring pedagogical best practices with the Health Professions faculty at Metro State University, or providing induction programs for initially-licensed teachers in rural charter schools.

When the CPD brings education professionals together to improve organizations through authentic needs assessments and systematic implementation of best practices, schools get better and students get smarter. What’s more, it’s not just the partner school that sees improvement. As a result of the leadership and consulting opportunities provided by CPD external partnerships, Peak to Peak teachers and administrators become inspired by new insights and valuable experiences, which they then use as a lens through which to reflect upon and improve Peak to Peak’s own internal programs and practices.

For more information about the Center for Professional Development at Peak to Peak Charter School, please visit www.cpdcolorado.org.

The Center for Professional Development will be a featured collaborative practice at the upcoming national Best Cooperative Practices for Charter & Traditional Public Schools Conference. Click to learn more and register for the conference.

Author Megan Freeman is the Director of Professional Development at Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, Colorado.

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Public-Charter-School-Community-Heard-During-INCS'-"Have-Your-Say-Day"

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools (INCS) is delighted to spread the word about our successful INCS 8th Annual Lobby Day in Springfield this past Thursday, just ahead of National School Choice Week. We had over 500 parents, teachers, and students travel to Springfield to join forces and advocate for equal funding for charter public school students. Together, we made great progress:

We put the final nail in the coffin of House Bill 2660, a proposal designed to starve funding for state-approved charter schools.
We built momentum in support of SJR 33, a joint resolution to establish a 6-month charter school funding task force to recommend equity legislation for the 2014 legislative session.
We explained to elected officials the critical role charter schools play in creating educational opportunities statewide and why charter school parents deserve to be heard.

This year our theme was Have Your Say Day, and that’s exactly what parents and students did. We started with an early morning rally at Perspectives/IIT Math & Science Academy on the South Side, followed with a Springfield kick-off rally in the rotunda of the Illinois Capitol, and culminated with dozens of visits with elected officials representing districts where charter schools and parents reside.

The value of the INCS Lobby Day goes beyond the critical personal connections and myth-busting that occur in every legislative meeting. The day is also about inspiring participants who are on the front lines of the charter movement every day. As Lobby Day participant and charter school alumna Dennise Medina put it, “I just wanted my voice to be heard. Meeting Representative Silvana Tabares was a great honor, as was sharing my story as an UNO Rufino Tamayo charter school graduate. Thanks to charter schools, I am what I am today: a successful college student.”

Our work doesn’t end here. Over the next few months we will continue our efforts to engage parents and empower them in leadership roles. Most critically, we are back in Springfield already with a group of parents from Catalyst Charter School continuing the smaller group visits that we’re conducting throughout the legislative session with targeted officials. Lobby Day is a critical event, but nothing is more important than a continuing, consistent presence with elected officials. We will continue to fight until the law treats all Illinois public school students equally.

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Public-Charter-Schools-Represent-Opportunity

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

After earning my teaching degree, I spent a year as a substitute teacher. To say that that was an unrewarding experience would be an understatement. By the end of that year, after multiple applications to school districts around Rhode Island, I found myself without a single interview. I expanded my search to include community-based organizations and was soon hired to teach computers to unemployed and underemployed adults. Eventually, I would be designing employment training programs for adults and teens whose families were struggling to make ends meet. This position allowed me to hone many of the skills that would later serve me well as a public school teacher.

After four years in this position, I found myself longing to continue my education. I moved to Southern California to pursue a masters in screenwriting. This is what I often called a personal enrichment degree. In addition to teaching, my other passion was independent filmmaking. While pursuing this degree, I took a job as an administrator in a proprietary school in the Los Angeles area. While this work seems a long way from teaching in a public school, many of the students enrolling in proprietary schools are those who achieved less success while they were in high school. Reaching them and ensuring their success motivated me every day.

Family matters brought me back to Rhode Island and a community-based organization. Within a couple of years, Beacon Charter School opened down the street and I got myself an interview. I include this employment history as a way to shed light on one of the great things about charters. While charters serve as a second chance for students to be successful, I feel that the faculty and staff of the schools are no different. I was certainly never a failure as a public school teacher; I was never given the chance to be one. That is, of course, until I was hired at Beacon as a social studies teacher.

In eight years at Beacon, I went from teaching all levels of history and civics courses to creating the school's performance-based graduation system (including digital portfolios and an innovative senior film requirement for all students), serving an internship as principal-in-residence and, finally, this past year, being appointed principal and earning my doctorate.

For me, charter schools will always represent opportunity; an opportunity for adults to make a difference in the lives of students and for students to explore skills and talents they didn't know they had. Many of our students could be classified as small fish in the big ponds of traditional public schools. At a charter school, they are in a smaller pond with a better chance for engaging with key aspects of the high school experience. Many of my teachers have never been given the opportunity to use their talents in traditional public schools. Their reward for getting hired at a charter school: greater freedoms to implement standards-based instruction. The cost: greater accountability for the teaching and learning at the school. This is true for charter schools in general: greater freedoms and increased accountability. None of us would have it any other way. For more information on Beacon Charter High School for the Arts, please visit www.beaconart.org.

Michael Skeldon, Ed.D. is the Principal of Beacon Charter High School for the Arts in Woonsocket, RI.

Beacon Charter High School for the Arts students in the theater arts program.

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Public-Charter-Schools-Serve-as-Models-Beyond-the-U.S.

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) is pleased to launch a guest blog series which will feature contributions by leading international education experts. The goal of this series is to expose our readers to the challenges and successes of establishing charter schools in different parts of the world. Our contributors have experience in charters schools either as providers or in the case of Cecilia Maria Velez, former Minister of Education for Colombia, spearheading programs which improved educational quality by allowing private agents to operate public schools serving low-income students.

This series take our readers on a tour well beyond our borders by looking at adaptations of the public charter school model in the United Kingdom and Kurdistan. We begin our series with a contribution by Tony McAleavy, Education Director, CfBT Education Trust, U.K. followed by Carl Bistany, board member of SABIS® Holdings and President, SABIS® Educational Services s.a.l. and SABIS® Educational Systems, Inc.

As Manager of the new EdAdvance education resource (formerly EdInvest), it gives me great pleasure to highlight the global impact made by the public charter school model. To receive newsletters and bulletins about developments in the international education market, please write to: edadvancecontact@gmail.com. Our website will be operational shortly.

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Pushing-the-boundaries-of-virtual-teaching-and-learning-at-Myron-B.-Thompson-Academy

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

NAPCS is using the Charter Blog to feature public charter schools that prepare students for college using a range of instructional strategies. NAPCS asked school leaders to tell us in their own words how they use different instructional methods to create a “college-prep” focus. By combining data on instructional strategies from a national survey with on the ground stories of the work of charter schools, NAPCS wants to show the scope of possibilities in how charter schools can provide great learning environments for students.

Myron B. Thompson Academy (MBTA) recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. The school, which began as an idea in a white paper on virtual learning back in the early 1990s, has blossomed into the oldest online school in Hawaii. Test scores are stellar, the curriculum is rigorous, teachers and students are thriving, and dynamic change is always in the air.

At Thompson Academy, grade 7-12 CORE courses are taught online, while many electives are face-to-face. Five years ago, the school realized that “canned” courses, with computer-graded quizzes were not adequately preparing students. The redesign of curriculum began with grade 7. Select teachers and the curriculum director spent a year researching and developing meaningful content, interactive teaching strategies, and quality assessments. The first group to complete the redesigned curriculum is currently in the tenth grade. These students have provided input on the degree of challenge in their classes, requested the development of specific course offerings, and provided the impetus for continued curricular redesign. Most courses are now developed and field-tested by teachers with assistance from the curriculum office. Professional development is ongoing, primarily in small groups, and courses are continuously updated, using data from assessments and student comments.

A week in the life of MBTA students begins on Monday morning, with a log-in to courses and a check of the weekly plan for each class. Students work in depth and at an accelerated pace. There will be content to read, Google Docs “discussions”, WebEx sessions, homework, projects and tests. All teachers offer one-on-one live or virtual tutoring. Students may contact their teachers via e-mail, instant message, telephone, or in person. Many teachers keep the lines of communication open in the evening. The Academy has students on the four major Hawaiian Islands, so working across distances on collaborative projects is the norm.

MBTA is currently at work on the design of two Institutes for 11th and 12th graders: one in STEM, with initial courses focused on the operations of a smart grid for electrical systems, and one in humanities, offering AP courses and interdisciplinary competitions in International Extemporaneous Speaking, Debate, and History Day projects. Institutes will be both virtual and face to face. In the near future, students at Myron B. Thompson Academy will complete all required courses by the end of junior year, allowing for specialization in the senior year.

Students feed into the online secondary program from Thompson’s elementary division, which is a combination of at-home and at-school instruction. Parents and teachers work together to deliver approved curriculum to K-6 students. While the elementary is primarily “high touch” instead of “high tech”, teachers also offer virtual lessons. Students are issued iPads and use these to document their learning.

MBTA strives to be an incubator of ideas, to push the boundaries of virtual education, and to truly teach our students. We have had many successes and look forward to many more.

Sharon Abrigo, Director of Curriculum

Find Myron B. Thompson Academy on the Public Charter School Dashboard

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Raising-the-Bar:-Reviewing-STEM-Education-in-America

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Serving as the CEO of Denver School of Science and Technology Public Schools (DSST), I can readily say that STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is an important priority for me. But more importantly, it must be a priority for our nation.

On behalf of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, I recently testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on how the public charter sector is leading the way in providing students – of all backgrounds–with high-quality STEM education. As we continue to see the trend of public charter school students outperforming their traditional public school peers, policy makers should consider the lessons we have learned–particularly in the field of STEM education.

DSST Public Schools serves more than 2,000 students at six open-enrollment STEM public charter schools on four campuses; our schools are focused on preparing every student to succeed in four-year college with the opportunity to pursue a STEM field of study in college. DSST schools are not magnet schools or in any way selective and as a result, our student body is very diverse. Yet DSST Public Schools operates some of the most successful public schools in Colorado. We are most proud of measures that show growth–meaning, how much did a student learn from the first day of school to the last day of school.

Most importantly, DSST proves, without a doubt, that all students, regardless of race or income, can earn a rigorous STEM high school diploma and attend four-year colleges and universities. Preparing every student to succeed in a four-year college with the opportunity to study STEM is at the center of DSST’s academic program. Every single senior in the history of DSST Public Schools has earned acceptance to four-year college–an unprecedented track record of success in Colorado. Preparing our nation’s students for our highest-need, hardest-to-fill jobs is one of the most important tasks of our public education system. Today, we are not providing our students from low-income families with access to the highest-quality STEM education and the preparation needed to enter critical fields like engineering, computer science and bioscience. We have long reserved STEM education for the gifted and talented, denying our students and our nation’s employers with the opportunity to fill a critical national need.

DSST Public Schools represents an important and growing movement to open up high-quality STEM education to all students regardless of their ethnic, economic or academic background.

If we are to tackle the issue of providing effective STEM education for all students, educators and policy makers should consider some key building blocks of any successful STEM program. First, our schools are uniquely built on the premise that all students deserve access to a high-quality STEM education. A majority of DSST students enter well below grade level in the 6th and 9th grades and could never be accepted into a magnet science program on the basis of a test. Many students are conditioned to believe that science and advanced math “is an extra” and only for “smart kids.” In our schools, these subjects are not extras, but a core subject for all students. All students are required to take a STEM college preparatory curriculum–there is no remedial track in our school.

Our second key belief is that schools must provide a rigorous STEM preparatory curriculum. We believe that the most important factor in a student choosing and ultimately completing a STEM degree is his or her preparedness to succeed at the college and graduate level. Thus we design our curriculum to provide students with the best possible preparation to succeed in STEM fields in four year colleges.

Lastly, we believe the success of any school must be rooted in a strong school culture that focuses on building character and creating an environment that expects all students to be college ready. Students are challenged, but supported in our schools. A peer-driven culture is reflected in each of our schools where going to college is “cool” and expected.

Of course, DSST and our students would not be successful without the dedication and expertise of our outstanding teachers. Teachers at DSST are driven by their unwavering belief in our students, driven by data, and continually reflect on student performance. They receive extensive support, including observations and feedback, peer-driven professional development, and targeted development in new instructional techniques to ensure they are incorporating the best instructional strategies in their classrooms.

For our country to continue to lead the way in the 21st century economy, we must re-double our efforts to provide every child with access to a high-quality STEM education.

Image via DSST website

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Recent-Report-Shows-How-Charter-Schools-are-Helping-Defy-Poverty, Redefine-Public-Education

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Newsweek Magazine’s recent 2012 ranking of “The Best High Schools in America” seeks to identify the nation's top public high schools based on which schools best prepare students for college. Newsweek selects 1,000 schools from more than 22,000 contenders—roughly, the top 5%.

The list can be sorted by several categories, including the percentage of students eligible for school lunch subsidies. Schools where more than fifty-percent of students are eligible for subsidies can be defined as low-income. Using that classification, one can compare schools where poverty is the norm to those where poverty is the exception.

Of the 1,000 high schools listed in the Newsweek report, only 75 (7.5%) serve low-income student populations. Further, only 16 of 789 (2%) traditional open enrollment high schools listed in the report are low income. That is an abysmally low percentage. In Florida, for example, more than half of the state's 474 public high schools are low income, but only 9 of 69 Florida schools that made the list are low income.

The dearth of “low-income” schools on Newsweek's list underscores the reality that economic advantage often correlates with academic attainment across America. The success attained by the few low income schools that defy this harsh reality merits careful study because they offer hope that being economically disadvantaged needn’t be an insurmountable barrier to academic success.

Charter schools are the newest entrants among the four school types designated by Newsweek (open enrollment, lottery enrollment, magnet, and charter). Surprisingly, charters also represent the largest cohort of low-income schools on the list; they appear to be especially effective at delivering college readiness to the children of low-income families. Sixty-nine charter schools made the Newsweek list, 24 of them are low-income schools, 35% of the total. That's an amazingly rapid ascendancy given that not a single charter high school existed 20 years ago in our nation.

The discrepancy in the list is glaring: 1 in 20 of the non-charter schools versus 1 in 3 of the charter schools serve majority low income students. As newcomers to the education sphere, charters appear to offer the greatest bang for the buck in tackling the vexing challenge of providing college readiness to low-income students.

I’ve had the privilege of working with and visiting some of the high-achieving low-income charter schools across the nation, and they offer a culture of high achievement and expectation that is profoundly motivating. The students at these schools are active and purposeful agents in their own educations.

I believe that the schools that succeed do so by creating a “culture of learning” that intrinsically motivates students to dedicate great time and effort in becoming educated. This is an intangible property not easily captured by standardized tests alone but that becomes evident in comprehensive reviews like Newsweek’s. By “creating culture,” high performing charter schools are defying poverty and helping redefine what we should expect from public education across America.

Image via www.academica.org

Fernando Zulueta is president of Academica, one of the nation’s largest charter school service and support organizations. He also serves on the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Academica serves three of the 24 low-income charter schools that made the Newsweek 2012 list of “Best High Schools.”

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SABIS®-Schools:-Global-Lessons-in-Education-Partnerships

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

NAPCS is pleased to launch a guest blog series which will feature contributions by leading international education experts. The goal of this series is to expose our readers to the challenges and successes of establishing charter schools in different parts of the world.

The role and purpose of education – particularly in the public sector – has changed drastically with the coming of the Information Age. What started out as a means to prepare youth to take over in a trade is now a much different beast saddled with seemingly insurmountable challenges and a distinct element of the unknown, not to mention expectations that have set it up as the panacea for all manner of national woes – national security and economic stability, just to name a couple. Today education is tasked with preparing students with the knowledge and skills they will need to use in jobs that do not even exist. A large enough undertaking for schools operating in the private sector, the scope of this task is exponentially greater in public schools educating the masses. In this context, the scope of the task is not only greater; it is also ESSENTIAL as nations seek ways to secure their place in the global economy moving forward.

Looking to improve national education standards, the U.S. has been a global leader, drafting public charter school legislation in the mid-1990s and introducing the concepts such as parental choice, accountability, and competition in public education. In the years since, the U.S. charter school approach has been used as a reference for public-private partnership in education; some countries mirroring its approach, others setting out on their own to blaze their own path to raise standards.

As a global education organization with 126 years of experience, SABIS® has been involved in the providing education in the public sector since 1995, when it was awarded the management of its first public charter school in Springfield, Massachusetts. Today, SABIS® manages nine charter schools and licenses its proprietary educational system to five others. SABIS® experience in public-private partnerships (PPP), however, is not limited to the U.S. We have accumulated valuable experience and perspective as participants in PPP projects around the world.

The most promising PPP project that SABIS® is involved in – it may surprise you to learn – is in Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq, where SABIS® currently operates seven public schools in a project that originated in 2009. The Kurdish leadership at the time realized that spiraling public education costs were not yielding the desired results in the short or long term for the region. With surprisingly short school days, a degree of complacency among administrators, teachers, and staff, and no option for parental choice, there was room to improve the system. To address these issues, the Kurdish government sought out SABIS® and together developed a PPP model. SABIS® would take over existing K-2 or K-3 public schools, including staff, and provide training to staff in instructional methods as well as the English language. In contract periods of three to five years, SABIS® would manage the school, extending the grade levels offered each subsequent year, with the goal of instilling autonomy.

The strength of this PPP comes in the fact that it is not saddled with unnecessary – and many times unfair – barriers to entry and hurdles that have marred other countries’ attempts at private sector engagement as a means to raise education standards.

So what does the Kurdistan PPP have that others have missed the mark on? First, and most importantly, in Kurdistan private sector engagement in public education is approached as a true partnership. In Kurdistan, the private operator is allowed to operate in an environment of free enterprise, encouraging the principles of efficiency, accountability, and return on investment and transferring these benefits to schools and students. Second, unlike the public charter school model in the U.S., the operator is not hampered by legislation that imposes accountability through boards that do not have a skin in the game. The private operator is held fully accountable, flourishing by its own hand or floundering its way out of a job as dissatisfied parents withdraw their children from the school. Third, unlike public-private partnerships attempted in other countries, in Kurdistan the private operator is not distracted from the job of raising standards by nationally hired “experts” who have a financial incentive to continually move the yard-stick they require operators to measure up to. Fourth, in Kurdistan, the funding formula is respected. Funding of the school operation is taken care of by the government based on a mutually-approved budget. The operator is paid for its services from within the budget, allowing the operator to concentrate solely on the performance of students rather than worry about unexpected funding reductions mid-year. And finally, in Kurdistan, the private operator does not face perhaps the largest barrier to entry – access to and availability of facilities. The government works in true partnership with the private provider by providing the necessary facilities necessary to deliver the sought-after results.

If we are to take a serious look at raising education standards of the masses, governments around the world need to learn from the Kurdistan model of private sector engagement in public education. Only in the spirit of true partnership will we be able to leverage the experiences, resources, and motivation of the private sector to raise education standards and tackle the most pressing issue of our time.

To learn more about SABIS®’s experience in Kurdistan as well as the organization’s long history and approach to education, read the latest book by renowned U.K. author and education policy expert, James Tooley. From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the World through Education is available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Image: Author Carl Bistany

Carl Bistany is a board member of SABIS® Holdings and the president of two education management companies, SABIS® Educational Services s.a.l. and SABIS® Educational Systems, Inc. These two companies manage schools within the SABIS® School Network, which currently serves Pre-K, K-12 schools, and a university located in fifteen countries on four continents.

Since joining SABIS® in 1992, Mr. Bistany has led the fourth generation family-owned business and transitioned it into a globally-recognized, professionally-managed enterprise at the forefront of education management. In addition to his active involvement as president of SABIS®, he has been instrumental in pursuing the expansion of the SABIS® School Network in the private sector in various countries as well as into the Public-Private-Partnership arena in the U.A.E, U.S., U.K., and Kurdistan.

Mr. Bistany holds two Masters’ degrees, one in Mathematics and the other in Computer Science from Syracuse University, NY. He is also a Harvard alumnus, having completed the Harvard Business School Executive Education Owner/President Manager program. He serves as a board member of several organizations including the Advisory Board of the Institute of Family and Entrepreneurial Business at the Lebanese American University and the Chief Executives Organization. He was the founding Chairman of the Lebanese Chapter of the Young President Organization (YPO) as well as the World Presidents’ Organization (WPO). He has also served as a senior member of the Executive Board of the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a member of the World Bank Advisory Group on Engaging the Private Sector and is a sought-after speaker at global education conferences and events.
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Sheridan-Japanese-School:-A-Focus-on-Culture-and-Community

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

NAPCS is using the Charter Blog to feature public charter schools that prepare students for college using a range of instructional strategies. NAPCS asked school leaders to tell us in their own words how they use different instructional methods to create a “college-prep” focus. By combining data on instructional strategies from a national survey with on the ground stories of the work of charter schools, NAPCS wants to show the scope of possibilities in how charter schools can provide great learning environments for students.

Sheridan Japanese School (SJS) is a public charter school in Sheridan, Oregon, a rural town with a population of 6,165, with 53.6 percent economically disadvantaged and 77 percent first-generation (parents without a four-year degree). SJS is a multi-aged school serving 88 students from grade 4-12. SJS is a unique blend of family atmosphere and academic success where students who appear unsuccessful elsewhere flourish; students on IEPs learn how to take small steps to advance their education, and students who excel are pushed to take responsibility for their advanced learning. SJS embraces shared leadership. All stakeholders: students, student council, parent council, board, staff, community members, and director believe that all students will be successful. Everyone is responsible for the success of SJS.

Among the 17 core values, respect and trust between teacher and student, and among students, is a high priority. The older students tutor and act as role models for the younger students. In tandem with caring for each other, one quality of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success is focused on each month, then reinforced throughout the year as other concepts are added. Students learn to take care of their environment by cleaning the school each day, and parents volunteer to clean on the weekends. A sense of family is attained through families and their students helping each other, such as parents mentoring parents new to the school, picnics, parent nights, and Undokai (game day), for example.

Another core value, high academic standards, is delivered through Advanced Placement (AP) and other advanced classes. Every student must take Japanese language and culture classes and participate in a yearly Japanese speech contest. The Japanese teacher runs a 2-week summer immersion camp, which any student in the USA may attend. A student from North Carolina attended this past summer. The grade of D is not given, but a student is given personal tutoring outside of school hours to help him/her succeed.

Opportunities for giving to the community, another core value, are facilitated through students’ volunteerism at meal sites, the local food bank, raising money for Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, the local library, and many more.

SJS opens it doors to the community with taiko drum concerts, Obon Festival, and exhibitions.

The teachers use Build Your Own Curriculum to customize instruction for relevance and high standards for the students. The Director personally creates each student’s schedule with his/her needs in mind. Teachers meet to discuss students, as well as publish their phone numbers in case questions arise outside of school hours. Teachers run tutoring sessions after school to insure student success. SJS requires conferences in the summer, fall, and winter with 100% participation.

Ninety-five percent of the seniors go on to a two-year or four-year college. Of the three seniors who graduated last year, one received $17,000; one received $48,695, and one received $7,050 in grants, scholarships, work-study opportunities, and other awards.

A quote from one of the students best exemplifies SJS’s success: “I truly believe that SJS has provided me with an excellent preparation for college through global education. I have had the privilege to attend a school that provides an unparalleled opportunity to interact with instructors and other students in an intimate environment."

Jan Smith, Sheridan Japanese School Foundation Board Member (Secretary); Kathryn Bervin-Mueller, Executive Director
www.sheridanjapaneseschool.com

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South-City-Preparatory-Academy-Grows-from-a-Humble-Beginning

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The idea for South City Preparatory Academy was born from seeing evidence of great urban charter schools throughout our country. Over the course of several years, I had the opportunity to visit amazing charter schools like Boston Collegiate, Academy of the Pacific Rim, Roxbury Prep and schools in the KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, and Noble Street networks. These schools changed my paradigm on what schools could accomplish. They were eliminating the achievement gap for countless students across our country.

South City Prep opened in August of 2011, when we welcomed our first crop of 5th and 6th grade scholars. Within the first week, we realized one of the hardships of charter schools throughout the country: financial issues. Because of a lower than expected student enrollment, we were forced to make some hard decisions. We had to lay off our PE teacher and one of our support teachers within the first month of school. Additionally, we decided that we would pinch our pennies even more by not hiring a school secretary. Every person on staff had a shift at the front desk answering phones, sorting mail and assisting our students.

Despite these roadblocks, by many accounts, our year was a success. Our scholars averaged 1.9 years worth of growth in Reading and 1.7 years worth of growth in Math as measured by a national norm referenced exam. Our families love our school and during our first year, we heard countless tales of gratitude from these same families. In looking back, I’m amazed that these families “took the leap” with our school. When they were touring our facility, all we could point out were dusty, empty classrooms with no walls.

August 2012 signals the start of our 2nd year. Sitting at coffee shops working on our charter now seems light years away. We have doubled our students and added 5 new staff members. Having 16 staff members feels like an embarrassment of riches compared to our first year as we even have someone to answer the phones! We’ve earned a positive reputation in our community and feel proud about our first year. However, we also know that thousands of students in our city do not have access to high quality schools and thousands are doomed to failure in failing schools. We know that we must do our job well as the reality for many of our students is that we are their only hope. Additionally, once we’ve laid the groundwork for this school and proved that it can work, we have to replicate the model. The beauty of the public charter model is that we can serve as an incubator for what works. When something is working, it can be replicated and expanded; when it is not working, it can be changed or closed. We look forward to building more great schools in the St. Louis region so that we can dramatically change the educational landscape of our city and our nation. Big dreams from a humble beginning.

Photo: Author Mike Malone, Head of School of South City Preparatory Academy (St. Louis, Missouri)

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Starting-a-Public-Charter-School:-The-Road-to-Reality

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

After eight years of involvement with charter schools, I think I have learned one truth above others—it is incredibly difficult to start a charter school. I have heard more than once over the past year from people who want to start charter schools. They are uniformly enthusiastic and are eager, no, desperate for any piece of advice I can offer as someone who has managed to start a grassroots charter school. The grassroots charter school is the school that is started by a group of community residents without the oversight or control of a Charter Management Organization (CMO) or an Education Management Organization (EMO). Our school is independently governed and operated. The only piece of advice I feel is useful to them is that the work is hard, and that if they are not prepared to commit completely to the task, then they should not even begin.

The reasons why it is so hard to start a charter school are myriad—it requires a comprehensive and professionally crafted petition, a dedicated and diverse founding board, community support, a total comfort with uncertainty, and a lot of luck. There are few endeavors in life where maximum effort applied with maximum competence can yield zero results, but starting a charter school is one such endeavor.

At Latin Academy, we were fortunate to navigate the perilous waters of authorization successfully, being the only grassroots start-up charter school authorized in the state in 2010-2011. That was an achievement in and of itself. Latin Academy is associated with Building Excellent Schools, a national urban charter school formation program which has helped to launch over 50 charter schools in 18 different states. Until Latin Academy's authorization by Atlanta Public Schools (APS), Building Excellent Schools had never successfully won authorization from a local school board to launch a Georgia charter. July 11th, 2011, the date of our authorization, is one that holds a prominent and joyous place in our school's history.

Though authorization is not an easy thing to come by, too much delay and resting on laurels can result in an authorized school that never opens for students. So, we spent every day after our authorization preparing to clear the hurdles that stand between getting the permission to have a school and actually having one. From nothing, we have had to recruit students, find a building, hire staff, and plan for the actual day-to-day of the school. Nothing along that journey was simple or came easy—for instance, our start-up year coincided with a tension-filled and controversial redistricting process within APS that placed charters (particularly new ones) under an increased level of public scrutiny. We also had challenges finding a suitable facility—we did not learn that we would have a place to open in until the 2nd week of July.

Regardless of those challenges, we have managed to overcome each one—we have all of our students, we have all of our wonderful staff, and we do have a building. Though that is a significant accomplishment, it is not enough, and it is not why we have undertaken this work. All the work over two years that we've done to create Latin Academy was only so that we could have an opportunity to address the real issue that brought us to this work—the significant academic challenges of our southwest Atlanta children.

We opened to 92 very bright and eager 6th grade students three weeks ago, and I can see the elements of our plan falling into place, and our school slowly but surely turning into the Academy our students need it to be. The pathway of starting a charter school is fraught with more opportunities to fail than Odysseus' road back to Penelope, but we are thrilled to have made it to this point and eager to make the most of a remarkable opportunity.

We cannot know yet whether Latin Academy will be a good school, but as of August 6th, it is a real school, and one that we are all hopeful will be a transformative influence on children's lives.

Author Chris Clemons is the Founder and Principal of Latin Academy Charter School in Atlanta, Georgia.

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The-Intergenerational-School:-Connecting-Generations,-Building-Relationships

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The mission of The Intergenerational School (TIS) is to connect, create and guide a multi-generational community of lifelong learners and spirited citizens. To teach and live out the concepts of lifelong learning and spirited citizenship, we surround our young students with opportunities to engage with the broader community and to learn with and from individuals of all ages who exemplify this ideal. TIS is located in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the poorest cities in the nation. Over the 12 years that TIS has been operating, we have developed the intergenerational learning model from a seed of an idea into a vibrant and successful school with not only 224 “young” learners (grades K-8) but approximately 300 adults and older adults who participate in a wide range of intergenerational programs each year.

A “walk through” at TIS demonstrates the ways in which we operationalize this mission. Walking into one primary classroom, it is reading workshop. Students are scattered throughout the room; some are engrossed in reading his or her own self-selected book, others are reading with a partner, a few are working with the teacher. Looking more closely, you will see that the class includes students of a variety of ages and some of the older students are reading with and helping some of the younger students. This is the first step toward instilling an inclination of “community service” in the children: if you know how to do something and someone younger does not, you have the opportunity to teach what you know. Hence at TIS a fundamental belief is that everyone is at once a teacher and a learner at all times.

Meanwhile in the hallway, ensconced in comfortable sofas and chairs are some of our oldest participants, senior citizens who have been trained to mentor our young readers. Together one elder and one child explore the wonderful world of books, which prompts discussion and the sharing of life stories between the two. Over the course of weeks, months, and even years, the elders notice the growth of their mentees as readers, and as poised and thoughtful partners in increasingly rich conversations. Further on, area college students are tutoring math students and developing relationships that will inspire TIS students to see college as a part of their own future.

Yet another class is preparing to leave to visit their nursing home partners. That day they will be deepening their own understanding of the civil rights movement by collecting the stories of those residents who were a part of it. These stories will be rewritten into picture book format to be shared with their primary cluster reading partners later on.

These are just a few examples of intergenerational learning activities that take place on a daily basis. Intergenerational experiences not only deepen and personalize learning, but have spillover effects on overall school culture and outcomes. From the academic perspective, TIS students consistently post some of the highest test scores in the state of Ohio. The school has had 6 years of Excellent ratings, and 2 years of achieving Excellent with Distinction status out of 9 years of being rated. But test scores do not tell the full story. TIS students develop a profound respect for their elders and benefit from the patience, caring, and consistency that characterize these relationships. The come to value people of all ages and from all walks of life. The presence of older adults contributes to a calm and respectful school climate. Meanwhile the older adults, including some with memory loss, know that they are making a profound contribution to the next generation and leaving a true living legacy.

We have coined the term “intergenerativity” to denote the powerful synergy that emerges when the generations learn together. To us, this represents community service at its most profound and personal level.

Cathy Whitehouse, Founder, Principal and Chief-Educator, The Intergenerational School www.tisonline.org

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UK-Free-Schools-and-Academies-Draw-on-U.S.-Public-Charter-School-Model

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Image: Author Tony McAleavy, Education Director of CfBT Education Trust

Tony is CfBT’s Education Director, with corporate oversight of the educational impact of all our activities. Tony also has responsibility for corporate business development and advises the Trustees on CfBT's public domain research programme. He has played a major part in the development of our international consultancy practice, and he has worked extensively on our growing portfolio of education reform projects in the Middle East. Prior to joining CfBT, Tony held senior school and local authority posts in England. He has published extensively on the subject of school history teaching and has an MA in Modern History from St John’s College, University of Oxford.

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Utah-Provides-Meaningful-Support-for-Charter-School-Facilities

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The Utah Legislative Session has ended. That’s right, for all of those that are still in the trenches, we are done and grateful for an efficient 45 day session.

The Utah Association of Public Charter Schools is even happier because this was the greatest session in Utah for charter schools since our original authorizing legislation. After not receiving any federal start up grants, we worked with the Legislature, Governor’s office and State Board of Education to replace them. We also partnered on a bill to strengthen the ability of our higher education institutions to authorize charter schools.

However, the most important legislation was SB 152 sponsored by Senator John Valentine and Representative Derek Brown that creates a moral obligation pledge for qualified charter schools buildings.

The recent LISC study made the following observation that all charter school people will fully understand:
“Because charter schools finance their facilities with per pupil operating revenue rather than a general obligation pledge tied to taxing authority, they pay significantly higher interest rates on facility debt than their school district counterparts. Yet, charter schools pay these higher rates with public dollars. Many charter school proponents, taxpayers and school districts have pointed out the inefficient use of tax dollars, which results from this two-tiered system. With the mounting public mandate to improve the quality of the nation’s public education system and the need to use scarce public resources more efficiently in a difficult fiscal environment, this is the ideal time for the public sector to address this inequitable and inefficient system. Short of publicly financing charter school facilities directly with tax-backed structures, expansion of state, municipal or federal credit enhancement programs that use balance sheet pledges rather than appropriated funds to reduce interest expense for charter schools would be an extremely efficient use of a superior governmental credit in a tight fiscal environment. The resulting savings would not only be invaluable to charter schools, enabling them to spend more operating dollars in the classroom, it would reduce aggregate public outlays for public school facilities.”

This sums up the public policy argument that we made, and it was fully embraced by our State Treasurer, Legislature and Governor. We are forcing non-traditional public schools, charter schools to spend money on high interest rates and financing costs rather than spending that money in the school and ultimately in our State.

SB 152 – Charter School Financing - not only created the moral obligation for qualified charter schools, it also laid out the criteria for a school to qualify as well as risk mitigation mechanisms to protect the State of Utah.

Like Colorado and Texas, the State of Utah’s credit enhancement will require schools to be independently investment grade rated. This is a high financial bar, but we agreed that it was critical that our schools be able to reach that level before receiving the State’s moral obligation pledge. (I might note that Utah is very focused on it’s credit rating. It is one of only a handful of States that are AAA rated by all 3 credit rating agencies and is a constant discussion item in public policy debates).

In addition, we created a State level debt reserve fund that was seeded with three million dollars. This fund, which schools will pay into as part of their financing, will serve as the ultimate backstop in case the moral obligation pledge is ever called upon.

Although there are other important features to this legislation that will greatly aid charter schools and allow them to better utilize their “income,” the miracle of this legislation is the preparation and earnest way in which all parties involved approached this legislation.

After the 2011 legislative session ended, I began discussions with a few key charter school people about our next big initiative. We all agreed that facilities financing was a significant issue, but we also saw the benefit that could come out of passing this legislation.

I believe strongly in allowing charter schools to be independent and have the ability to carry out their unique charter as they see fit. However, charter schools that understand governance and wise financial management almost always seem to be successful in academically. I wanted to offer a significant carrot to those that were strong financial stewards of our taxpayer dollars.

The Utah Association of Public Charter Schools, in conjunction with the State Treasurer’s office, convened a group to begin working on this legislation. The group included the State’s financial advisor (Zions Public Finance), bond attorneys from Ballard Spahr and Chapman and Cutler, a charter school financial advisor, the Governor’s office, our legislative sponsors and a few charter school board members. (I might also add that some key charter underwriters, specifically DA Davidson and Piper Jaffray, provided invaluable support).

This working group spent countless hours over a number of months preparing the legislation. We talked openly and candidly about issues, but every participant came to the meeting willing to embrace the final goal. I was lucky; it’s not easy to get a bunch of people with different agendas to get together and work towards the common goal. However, I believe that positive working environment came as a result of having enough time to work on the issue and fully vet all concerns within the group.

That group has already started meeting after the session to begin discussing the rules and process by which the moral obligation program will work. We have outlined the steps that we will take to make this program a reality and hopefully make a significant change in the cost of how our charter schools are financed.

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Walking-the-Talk:-An-Ed-Reformer-Reflects-on-Choosing-a-Public-Charter-School

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In 2011, my husband, an Episcopal priest, was called to a church in Atlanta, GA. The two biggest decisions facing us were – where should we live and where will we send our son, Charles to school? My husband and I had lived in Atlanta from 2001-2006 before coming to D.C., so we knew a good deal about the different neighborhoods in Atlanta, but so much had changed while we were gone. And while I knew a little about the charter sector in Atlanta through my work at NAPCS, we didn’t have a strong grasp on all of the educational options in Atlanta. We had a lot of research to do, and had to do it quickly as we needed to move in the next couple of months.

Of course, there were lots of options before us. Charles was turning 4 on September 7, 2011, missing the cut-off for Georgia Pre-K by 6 days, so we needed to find a preschool for him for the coming year, while at the same time thinking through a longer term strategy for elementary school. Some friends encouraged us to go the private school route, while others suggested moving to neighborhoods known for high-quality traditional public schools. However, we talked to one close friend (whose son is a month younger than Charles), and she was planning to send her son to the new East Lake Early Learning Academy (ELEA) for Pre-K through 3, and then to Drew for elementary school. We thought this might be a good option for Charles and gave it a closer look.

Because of its academic success and role as the cornerstone in a major neighborhood revitalization, Drew was well-known in the national charter sector. I had a chance to visit Drew during the 2011 National Charter Schools Conference in Atlanta, was able to see first-hand what great work they were doing, and was immediately impressed. Ultimately, we decided to move to the Kirkwood neighborhood of Atlanta so that we could send Charles to ELEA, which would allow him to matriculate to Drew beginning in Pre-K. We were drawn to Kirkwood because of its in-town location, incredible diversity, and convenience to both ELEA and Drew – only 5 minutes away! But more than that, Drew met some very important criteria for my husband and me – diverse student body (racial and socio-economic status), high academic performance, and strong parental commitment.

Our experience with the East Lake Early Academy was great, and Drew has been an excellent choice for Charles so far. His team of three teachers is phenomenal, and the emphasis on language and literacy development in the early years is impressive. But I expected as much coming to a school so widely acclaimed and with such a strong reputation for academic performance. What I have been most impressed by, however, is the level of parental involvement and commitment. Parents assume tremendous responsibility for the school’s success and partner with the teachers and administration to make things happen. School started on July 30th, and shortly before then, I joined a Drew Charter Schools Parent group on Facebook. Today, it has 183 members, is growing, and is THE source for information and dialogue about issues related to the school.

Is Drew perfect? Of course not…but what school is? I’m excited to be part of a community of parents for whom failure is not an option. Though I left NAPCS earlier this year to go to graduate school, I feel blessed to still be connected to the movement and impact change, now in an even more personal way.

Photo: Author Rhonda Fischer and her son Charles, ready for his first day of school at Drew
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Washington-Moves-From-Laggard-to-Leader

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This week, The Charter Blog will feature guest posts from state charter support organizations capturing their reaction to their state's ranking on the 20 essential components from the NAPCS model law (see Massachusetts).

In its first year of competing in the race for best charter school law, Washington won a bronze medal! On behalf of the coalition that wrote the initiative and campaigned for its passage, we are proud and pleased that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has given our law a prestigious #3 ranking.

After four prior ballot box losses, Washington voters approved our first charter school law last November. Being 20 years late to the party gave us some clear advantages. We knew that strong authorizing, oversight and accountability would lead to better schools, so we looked to the Alliance’s model law for guidance.

Washington’s law creates a state commission, allows multiple authorizers, and is well aligned with the model law’s quality control components. It also provides operational autonomy to charter schools. The WA law specifically references the National Association of Charter School Authorizer’s principles and standards for quality authorizing. Washington started with a cap on the number of charter schools because we want to lead with quality.

Now the real work begins to ensure that we open 40 great charter schools over five years, serving the kids most in need of better educational opportunities.

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What-does-the-growing-K-12-enrollment-in-Minnesota-charters-and-the-decline-in-district-enrollment-mean003F

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

As people prepare to come to Minneapolis next week for the national charter conference, they might be interested in this:

Over the last decade, the number of K-12 students attending charters in Minneapolis has increased by more than 9,000, from 1,921 in school year 2001-02 to 11,125 in school year 2011-12. Over the same time period, the number of K-12 students attending district public schools in Minneapolis decreased from 47,658 to 33,503
Over the last decade, the number of K-12 students attending charters in Minnesota increased about 29,000, while the number of K-12 students attending Minnesota district schools has declined by more than 45,000. From 2001-02 to 2011-12, Minnesota charter enrollment grew from 10,162 to 39,129, while district K-12 enrollment declined, 831,535 to 785,729.

While the majority of Minnesota youngsters still attend district public schools, trends are clear and strong.

Widespread adoption of cell phones and computers helps explain these startling statistics: The numbers come from a new study our Center did, based on data from the Minnesota Department of Education website. The report is available at www.centerforschoolchange.org.

What does this trend mean for families, and for Minnesota public education? Many families are looking for something different, and they hope, better. But neither district nor charter public schools are always “better.” “Charter public school” like “district public school” tells you nothing about the curriculum, philosophy or instructional approach. Comparing is about as useful as trying to decide which has better gas mileage: leased or purchased cars? Because there are enormous differences within each category, the comparison does not make sense.

But the charter movement has allowed educators and parents to create new, and in some cases, more personalized, distinctive options. That has helped many youngsters and provided valuable opportunities for educators.

That’s in part why Minnesota charter K-12 enrollment rose in the last decade, while district K-12 enrollment declined. It also helps explain why charter enrollment in US charters rose from less than 100 students twenty years ago, to more than two million in the 2011-12 school year. Many Minnesota charters offer something “different.” For example:

Lakes International offers an elementary Chinese and Spanish immersion in Forest Lake.
A downtown St. Paul Arts charter makes great use of the nearby Ordway Theater and wonderful nearby dance studios.
Montessori schools can be found in Swan River School in Monticello and World Learner, Elementary/Middle School in Chaska.
There are “classical” schools like Spectrum, a small high school in Elk River, Seven Hills, an elementary school in Bloomington, St. Croix Prep, a K-12 in Stillwater, and Cologne Academy in Cologne.
Mainstream is an Arts High School in Hopkins, and New Heights is a small, personalized K-12 School in Stillwater.
Northwest Passage High School in Coon Rapids features extensive travel.
Minnesota New Country has pioneered the Hope Study and project-based learning and has helped start more than 30 other district and charters around the country.
A Minneapolis charter, Southside Family School, has an extensive civil rights curriculum and takes students periodically to visit legendary civil rights sites in the South.
Harvest Prep in Minneapolis is constantly on Minnesota's "Beat the Odds" school list and has been asked by Minneapolis Public Schools to help create other schools in the city.
Trio/Wolf Creek is an online school based in Chisago City.

Photo: St. Paul City Charter School students singing on Minnesota State Capitol steps as part of National Charter School Week celebrations.

Given the array of public charter school options, wise school districts have responded, in part, by offering distinctive programs. For example:

St. Paul offers a French Immersion, a Hmong Magnet and two Montessori Elementary Schools offer some instruction in Chinese.
ISD 196 (a suburban District) offers the “Zoo School” for 11th and 12th graders, and Anoka-Hennepin offers the STEP program for high school students.
Forest Lake has a Montessori option. Minnetonka provides a Chinese option. Edina offers a French Immersion elementary school.

At least some of these, such as the Forest Lake Montessori, were opened in response to the possibility that parents and educators would set up a charter if the district did not respond. The charter movement has helped some educators and districts recognize that there is no single perfect kind of school for all students. Some educators have recognized that identical does not mean not equal educational opportunity. Saying “one size or format fits all” is like saying everyone can wear a size 8 shoe comfortably.

As Governor Mark Dayton and Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius have suggested, we should learn from the most effective, while offering opportunities to develop new approaches (as has been done with phones and computers). Enrollment trends suggest that wise educators will look for more effective ways to organize learning and teaching. Students don’t need more district or charter public schools. They need more personalized, excellent public schools.

Joe Nathan (pictured above), formerly a Minnesota public school teacher, administrator and PTA president, directs the Center for School Change. Reactions welcome, joe@centerforschoolchange.org.

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Why-I-Decided-to-Become-an-Advocate-for-Public-Charter-Schools

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT