The Charter Blog

Over the weekend DOE released a “Blueprint” for reauthorization of ESEA.  There’s a lot to like from the charter perspective and a lot that will bear watching as Duncan’s ideas move through the legislative sausage-grinder. There’s a serious commitment to choice including charters, magnets and “autonomous public schools” (although the document talks about a “priority” for charters, which is good). Also present is the emphasis on growth (which as Paul Peterson notes, stands on the shoulders of NCLB’s testing requirements) and doing away with a status-based AYP in favor of one based on a trajectory toward college and career-readiness.

As you may know, I recently announced my decision to step down as CEO of the Alliance this summer, although I will remain in harness as “Senior Advisor” for another year after that.

According to the New York Times, district-run schools in charter-rich NYC neighborhoods are responding by stepping up marketing to attract and retain students.  Welcome to our world!  The real news is that a bunch of schools, both charters and traditional public schools, scored an A on the city’s latest report card.

From Fordham’s Terry Ryan, there is news of an important move by Ohio’s ed department--to put an authorizer out of business for conflicts of interest and, how shall we say...assembling the worst portfolio since Lehman Brothers.  Accountability and transparency about the work of authorizers is practically unknown under existing state charter laws, which is why our model law called for it.

Last week’s announcement of RTTT finalists is the next brick laid on the U.S. Department of Education’s road to reform.  And now, there’s a big-bad-wolf effort from those who fear the reforms encouraged by RTTT – like supporting the growth of high-quality charters.

The Alabama Education Association doesn’t want charters…even if their students and schools will lose out on desperately needed RTTT funds. They’ve created the new ad campaign below to scare the public, but there’s just one problem. The claims in this ad aren’t true. Let’s break it down.

The U.S. Department of Education announced finalists this morning for the first round of the Race to the Top (RTTT) competition.  Here's our breakdown of the 16 finalists:

The city of Newark is planning to break ground on a $120 million project called Teachers Village that will be built around three charter schools.  The  village will include affordable housing and hip, funky retail places for charter school teachers.  The idea is that these teachers will actually be able to be a part of the community where they work.  They will help to renew the neighborhood and revitalize the community. 

Of course, this isn’t exactly a brand new idea.  In many communities across the country, high-quality public schools are the hub of the community.

Diane Ravitch is probably the only person in America who would begin re-evaluating her entire belief system while sitting in a research seminar at the American Enterprise Institute.

That’s the most surprising episode in her new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." She's been telegraphing the rest of her findings in months of speeches, op-eds and Tweets. In fact, after blogs titled “The Problem With Charters,” and worse, I expected a much tougher argument.

This morning the President teams up with Colin Powell’s America’s Promise Alliance to announce the Grad Nation initiative. It’s “turnaround-plus” – taking severe measures with the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools but stressing the “dropout factory” theme – and establishing a goal of getting far more kids to graduation.

Interesting Sam Dillon piece in today’s Times. Though I wouldn’t necessarily call Tom Hehir  an “advocate,” Dillon’s right to say the pro-charter folks were calling for “guardrails.”  Don’t confuse such “proper monitoring” with re-regulation, however. What Greg Richmond is saying is the same thing we’re saying in the Model Law and elsewhere. You have to have quality controls or you risk creating a lot of mediocre charter schools.

Also,  for a much fuller response to the charge that charters are under-enrolling kids with disabilities, check out these Ed Week letters from Eileen Ahearn and others. This is, regrettably, a subject that lends itself to the kind of superficial “oppo research” that showed up in too many Member questions yesterday. You need to understand two complex phenomena – special ed and charter schools – to see why their intersection requires such care.

In a packed hearing  today, a bipartisan House Ed and Labor Committee took its first formal step toward ESEA re-authorization by talking about charter schools – specifically, Rep.

The News and Advance reports that Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell has reached a compromise with the unions representing teachers, school boards and superintendents in his bid to expand charter schools.

In other headlines...
‘L.A. Teachers Gain Control of 22 Campuses in Reform Effort’
In Nebraska, a Rural Charter Schools Bill
Ga. Charter School Head Will Testify to ‘Rough Road to Approval’

There’s been entirely too much of this in the news recently. Yeah, we don’t have a charter law but we have these kinda sorta partnership-type thingies that are almost like those charter schools you talk about.

No charter law = no charters. That should be a hard and fast rule for Race to the Top judging.

I was a fat kid. When adults said “Let’s Move” (the name of Michelle Obama’s new campaign against child obesity), I usually got about as far as the refrigerator. It wasn’t until after college that I started to exercise and I sure wish it had been earlier. So today, while stranded at home in the Great DC Blizzard and struggling not to notice that box of Wheat Thins (badly-named!), here’s a thought:

Charter schools ought to be in the forefront of this campaign. They can try new approaches to nutrition and motivation, and ought to have the kind of tight links with parents that can create a seamless web of support for kids to change habits. Some charters are attacking the problem creatively -- as in the Edible Schoolyard program at Green Charter School in New Orleans.

What are you and your school doing to get kids moving?

Nashville’s charter director Alan Coverstone is looking for charter operators interested in turning around a struggling middle school. It’ll be a “real” conversion, and the new operator will have the autonomies provided under the state’s charter law – which should please even the most hardened turnaround skeptics.

This morning Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project (CRP) releases a report portraying charter schools as “a divisive and segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”  For those of us in the movement, the CRP’s arguments are a trip through the looking glass. Where we applaud the charter founders who set up inner-city schools to serve the kids in greatest need,  the CRP sees only a geographic concentration “that skews the charter school enrollment toward having higher percentages of poor and minority students.”   Where we brim with pride at the million or so minority parents who choose to send their kids to charter schools, the CRP – well, it pretty much ignores them. Where we know high-quality charter schools are addressing a profound civil rights issue –the denial of educational opportunity – the CRP sees them as part of the problem.

For a group with Harvard and UCLA pedigrees, it’s a remarkably shoddy job, with page after page of tables comparing charter school demographics to those of entire metropolitan area school systems – as if the charters were evenly distributed among Chicago, Joliet and Naperville, in one example. (Next time you visit an inner-city charter school, stroll down the street to the neighborhood district school – the kids will look pretty similar.)

The CRP’s analyses are based almost solely on demographics -- for example, showing the percentage of minority populations in charter vs. other public schools, and the “exposure” that students of one race have to students of other races based on these numbers. But in the era of NCLB and disaggregated data, we know that schools and  systems with neatly aligned proportions of ethnic and racial groups can still have appalling achievement gaps among them. Take a look at David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff to see how some of our great charter schools actively prepare their mostly-minority students for their future in a diverse and competitive culture – taking their students to college visits, consciously modeling and stressing middle-class values, and so on. These schools produce achievement and confidence through relentless focus and consistent, high-expectations culture – which most of their students did not experience in any prior setting, whatever the demographics.

What’s most painful is that we all share Dr. Orfield’s aspiration for cities and school systems full of vibrant diversity. There’s even some interesting conversation going on within our own movement (as in Petrilli’s recent post) about working for more diversity in charters.  We know the federal government can do a better job of collecting good data on charter and other public schools, and we certainly want authorizers to be vigilant in assuring that charter schools reach out to diverse populations when recruiting students. And we’re fine with expanding magnet schools (which the report advocates)  -- so long as we realize that they are often selective and do not replace charters’ open-enrollment approach that works especially well for kids who wouldn’t make it into the magnet pool.

But this kind of broadside won’t get us there, if only because it so defies the actual reality of our day. The report actually suggests that states deny charters to CMOs that operate racially isolated charters. So, in the name of diversity, the CRP would forbid even our best CMOs from opening new campuses in the inner city -- despite their track record of producing spectacular gains for the very minorities Orfield and company purport to serve.  Astonishing.

Early press here.

Obama’s FY2011 budget request looks to be a major boost for charters but don’t pop the cork just yet.  This is just the beginning of the long, long budget process -- and the proposal itself is more complicated than usual.  Currently, the three charter programs (startup grants and two facilities programs) are getting $256 million – and in FY2010 the Department was also granted the ability to use federal start-up  funds to support replicating and expanding successful charters.  With the FY11 proposal, it’s a whole new game.  The charter programs got consolidated into a $490 million program called “Expanding Educational Options” that now includes support for “autonomous public schools” as well as Public School Choice, Smaller Learning Communities, and Parental Information efforts. There’s no set amount that is strictly for public charter schools – which needs attention -- but in the voluminous materials released today there are some interesting signals about how the increased funding might flow. 

Nelson Smith, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, released the following statement on the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal:

The Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget request includes a significant increase in funding for public charter schools. With a floor of $310 million for the Charter School Programs and the potential for increased funding under a newly consolidated Expanding Educational Options program, the Administration has stated clearly its strong support for successful public charter schools. However, the proposed new program provides $490 million for several purposes including “autonomous schools,” and it is unclear how much of the increase will be directly available to support public charter schools.

We share the Administration’s interest in moving toward systems of public schools that have real operational autonomy combined with accountability for performance. However, we also know that the promise of autonomy is littered with compromises that provide neither site control nor serious accountability. Our strong preference is to guarantee both autonomy and accountability by creating public charter schools under strong state charter laws.

We look forward to working with the Administration and Congress to ensure that the final Fiscal Year 2011 appropriations continue progress toward fulfillment of President Obama’s promise to double support for high-quality public charter schools during his term.

Morning Joe welcomed the AFT’s Randi Weingarten today with the John Legend/Deborah Kenney clip we’ve been playing - -and then asked her some tough questions about the union’s role in last week’s Albany debacle. You’ll recall that the UFT’s insistence on anti-charter “poison pills” produced a stalemate that failed to lift the state cap, thereby torpedoing NY’s chance at $700M in R2T funds. Take a look at Randi’s response, and then read the Daily News and Time Magazine coverage. Yes, the union supported an inadequate cap lift but in the name of “accountability” would have turned all charters over to the state’s weakest authorizer.  The AFT’s spin doctors can’t fix this one.