Year One

Forty states and DC filed their Race to the Top apps by yesterday at 4:30. It’ll be awhile before we know what’s in them (and much longer before we know whether the plans have legs). But today’s January 20th, the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, and a good time to take stock. Whatever his wins and losses in other areas, there’s no question that Obama and his Ed Sec Arne Duncan have shifted the terms of debate on ed policy – and moved charters into the center ring of reform. We’ve seen a lot of press about charter cap-lifts but that’s only part of the story. Duncan’s personal commitment to charter growth and accountability – and sometimes his direct intervention -- have combined with the dollar clout of RTTT to produce a number of gains (and avoidance of losses).  Here’s a partial list:

Connecticut: Successfully defeated budget cuts to charters proposed by the governor (2009).
Delaware: An existing moratorium was allowed to lapse (2009).
Illinois: An additional 60 charters are now allowed. (Duncan said months ago that he wouldn’t give his home state a grant unless they took action on the existing cap.) (2009)
Indiana: An attempt to place caps and a moratorium on charters was defeated. (2009)
Louisiana: The state’s cap of 70 charters was removed. (2009)
Minnesota: An attempt to implement caps and a moratorium was defeated. (2009)
Ohio: Ensured governor’s proposed budget cuts were restored by legislature. (2009)
Rhode Island: Ensured state funds for new charters. (2009)
Tennessee:  A bill to allow an additional 40 charters and to expand the types of students eligible to attend charters was enacted. (2009)
Michigan: Enacted a comprehensive public education reform bill in late December that lifts long-standing caps by allowing replication of high-performing charters. (2009)
Iowa: The state’s cap of 20 conversion charters was removed, as was the pilot nature of the charter law. (2010)
Massachusetts:  Made a significant lift in the most important cap (there are several), that will permit an estimated 35,000 new charter seats in low-performing districts. (2010)

I say this is a “partial” list because this doesn’t take into account things like the new CA parent “trigger,” passed as part of an RTTT package, that can result in more low-performing schools becoming charters. It doesn’t capture the gains in movement credibility because charters were at the table in formulating state plans. And of course the list doesn’t include non-charter states  -- but watch this space. With an eye toward Round 2 grants, about half of the non-charter states are in serious discussions about finally enacting public charter school legislation (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, and West Virginia).  This is a remarkable development after years of flat-lining in these states.

Of course, the Race produced some ugly spats – none worse than the spectacle we saw over the past weekend in Albany.  New York did submit an RTTT app yesterday but without expanding the charter cap or fixing their big “eligibility” issue, the law that prevents use of student data in teacher evals.  It’s an embarrassment that unlike Michigan, Massachusetts, and other states, NY wasn’t able to get its act together and pass a real reform bill. But folks, no news is good news in this case – the bill they were considering was a disaster.  Abetted by their friends in the state and NYC teachers’ unions, some legislators wanted to gut the state’s best authorizers and impose other restrictions on opening charter schools.  This had nothing to do with Racing to the Top; it was a cynical attempt to use the grant competition as an excuse to stifle the state’s charter movement. Chalkboard has the best post-mortem, and don’t miss the link to Fred Dicker’s NY Post piece, with its all-you-need-to-know pic of the bill’s sponsor huddling with the UFT’s lobbyist.

Good for Gov. Paterson for standing firm, and good for the charter leaders who worked overtime on this.  But watch out for the same shenanigans to pop up in Round 2, and Round 3, and every other time there’s a chance for anti-charter mischief.