Charter school News and Trends Archives

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where we feature charter school news about operations, policy, funding for charter schools, charter school facilities financing, and other trends.
It’s officially the first week of fall, and with school back in full-swing we’ve compiled a few updates including one from California and Florida. Tell us your thoughts and leave a comment.

Tell Your Students: CA State Board of Education is Looking for a Student Member

The California State Board of Education (SBE) is looking fora public high school senior to serve as a Student Board Member. Does your charter school have a student who might be a candidate?
From the application page: “Any student who is a California resident and enrolled in a public high school, will be a senior in good standing in the 2015–16 school year, and will be available to attend a statewide student leader conference November 11-14, 2014 in Sacramento, is eligible to apply.”
For more information, including the 2015–16 Student SBE Member application, please visit the SBE Student Member Application Web page, or contact the SBE by email at sbe@cde.ca.gov or by telephone at 916-319-0691.
Applications must be received by the SBE by 5:00 p.m., Monday, October 20, 2014

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Join Charter School Capital for a Webinar on Charter School Facilities Financing

We’re excited to be partnering with Procopio to lead a discussion on various charter school faciltiies options.
Presented by our president and CEO, Stuart Ellis, and Chip Eady, a lawyer with Procopio who specializes in education facilities and land development, this webinar will cover various financing options and best practices for facilities planning.

If you’d like to register, we recommend doing so as soon as possible, as we only have a few seats left, and registration closes on Monday, September 29th.

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Florida Board of Education Adopting New Charter School Contract

When the Florida Board of Education meets in Tampa at the end of September, they will be moving forward with adopting a standard charter school contract.
According to an article in the Tampa Bay Times, “The recommended new rule makes clear that the standard contract would serve as the basis for an initial draft contract. Both charter applicants and districts would be allowed to modify the document, but would have to indicate clearly how they changed it and why.”
If Florida adopts the standard contract, it would go into effect in November 2014.

On Friday, California Governor Brown began taking action on education related bills that were on his desk and he vetoed SB 1263, a bill that would have impacted charter school facility options.
SB 1263 started out as a local dispute between several school districts in the Santa Clarita Valley, the Acton-Aqua Dulce School District and the charter schools that they have authorized.
It ended up being a bill that restricted charter school facility options state-wide and threatened to shut down the Albert Einstein Academy in the Santa Clarita Valley.
As Governor Brown explains, “this bill seeks to reverse the application of a limited exemption in law that allows a charter school petitioner to locate a single school site outside of its authorizing school district, under specific circumstances. This bill would instead require the charter school to first get permission for the host district where it intents to locate.”
The retroactive nature of the legislation would have punished Albert Einstein even though it is the highest performing school in the area.
As he has shown in the past, the Governor continued to be a strong advocate for charter schools and charter school facility options by vetoing the measure.
Additionally, the advocacy efforts of Albert Einstein and their authorizer, the Acton-Aqua Dulce School District, have to be noted. Together they were able to get thousands of letters and phone calls in to the Governor’s staff opposing SB 1263. They also had several Democratic members of Congress weigh in opposing the measure while it was on the Senate Floor and on the Governor’s desk. For that they must truly be commended.
In his veto message below, Governor Brown says,”while this bill attempts to solve a real problem, I am not comfortable with the retroactive language that could force existing charter schools to change locations. I have assembled a team to examine this situation and come back with solutions that minimize disruption to students and parents.”

Albert Einstein Academy for Letters, Arts and Science, a California charter school, has been ranked one of the Top 10 High Schools in America, according to Newsweek. The Santa Clarita charter school is listed #2 out of the top high schools in the country.
This year, Newsweek took an innovative approach to ranking high schools, taking students’ poverty levels into account in their scoring.
“The question, What Are America’s Top Schools? has different answers depending on whether or not student poverty is taken into account. We realized that rather than trying to make an all-encompassing list, we could reward more great schools by examining performance from more than one vantage point. For this reason, Newsweek has published “America’s Top High Schools,” a ranking of schools based solely on achievement, and “Beating the Odds,” a ranking of schools that factors in student poverty. To measure student poverty levels, we used the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch at each school.”
Congratulations to Albert Einstein Academy for Newsweek’s recognition of the school’s great program. Charter School Capital is proud to support the school’s efforts.

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where we feature news about charter school funding, operations, policy, charter school facilities financing, and other trends.

Thinking of Starting a Charter School?

PBS NewsHour featured a piece, “How to Start a Charter School” that details the key steps to the charter school start-up stage. Wynee Sade, the founder of Yu Ming Charter School in Oakland, California, talks about her experience opening a charter school, from conceiving the idea, writing a charter petition, seeking approval from the charter board, finding charter school funding and growth capital, and securing a permanent facility.
Yu Ming Charter School is a dual-language Mandarin immersion school. The charter school opened it’s doors in 2011 with 100 students and has grown, currently serving 220 students kindergarten through third grade.
Sade offers sage advice for those starting a charter school. “I think that the biggest piece for me is really surrounding yourself with a passionate team of folks who are committed and want to be supportive and helpful. That just goes a long way because then they reach out to their group of supporters. And where you don’t have expertise, know where you have your limitations, go seek out help to compliment your strengths because if we didn’t do that or weren’t open to different ideas, we would never be here.”

NC Education Panel Considers Fast-Track Application Process for Charter Schools

The North Carolina Board of Education is considering a fast-track option for charter applicants that have previous experience operating successful charter schools.
According to an article in the News Observer, “Charters on the fast track would not have to go through the typical planning year, and could open months after their approval at the start of an academic year…The first fast-track applications would be submitted in July and if approved, could open in 2016 rather than 2017.”
“The fast-track option recognizes that the state has experienced charter operators who know how to get a successful school started. This just minimizes the time needed to get a school up”, said Eddie Goodall, executive director of the N.C. Public Charter Schools Association.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/09/03/4119740_state-board-set-to-approve-fast.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Are Charter Schools Working? New Report from Center for Reinventing Public Education

A new report released by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) takes a close look at if charter schools are actually more successful than their district-run counterparts, and why.
Here’s some key facts that the report highlights:

Charter schools on average produce results that are on par with and, in many cases, better than district-run public schools
Charter schools are producing higher achievement gains in math relative to their district-run counterparts in most grade levels, particularly in middle school, and gains in reading that are similar to district-run schools in reading
A growing body of literature on the relationship between charter school attendance and outcomes apart from achievement finds further evidence of large positive impacts of charter schools on high school graduation, college enrollment and behavioral issues

Download the full report.

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where we feature charter school news about operations, policy, funding for charter schools, charter school facilities financing, and other trends.
This week marks the end of summer and the beginning of another school year. If recent news is any indicator, it’s going to be a year of exciting success and incredible growth for charter schools.

Charter Schools Top Rankings

Conor Williams, a senior researcher in the Education Policy Program at New America writes on The Daily Beast that “charter schools are some of the biggest winners in this year’s high school rankings list.”
As a former teacher in a Brooklyn charter school, Williams argues charter schools don’t automatically equal success. Instead, it’s the flexibility that charter schools embody that so often creates positive learning environments.
“In other words, charters aren’t uniquely effective just because they’re charters. The structures surrounding them are important. So are each charter’s teachers and administrators. But there’s growing evidence—shown in this year’s rankings—that the charter approach can make an extraordinary difference for students.”

CCSA Releases Fourth Annual Report on California Charter Schools

On the EducationNext blog, California Charter School Association (CCSA) president Jed Wallace highlights some of the most important facts gleaned from the CCSA’s yearly report on charter schools in California.
“Students at charter schools serving low-income populations are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in a school that is among the top five or ten percent of all public schools statewide.

More than half of the students (52 percent) attending charters serving a majority high poverty population attend charter schools that are in the top quartile of all public schools statewide, compared to only 26 percent of similar students attending traditional public schools. To put this into perspective, these 78,000 charter students – enrolled in top quartile charters – would make up the fourth largest school district in California and the 42nd largest district in the nation. And more than a quarter of all English learners, African American, and Latino charter students attend charter schools that are among the most outperforming schools in California. Students at charters serving a majority of historically disadvantaged students are likely to be among the most outperforming schools in the state – three times more likely to be in the top tenth percentile and 5-6 times more likely to be in the 5th percentile.”

The Beginning of Charter Schools

A fascinating op-ed in the New York Times this weekend tells the story of one man who first conceived of the charter school concept and pitched the idea to American legislators.

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

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, who authored the editorial, are fellows at the Century Foundation and co-authors of “A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education”.

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where we feature charter school news about operations, policy, funding for charter schools, charter school facilities financing, and other trends.
This week we have two fascinating reports released by experts at the forefront of the school choice movement. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Fact or Fiction? New Report from National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS)

The National Alliance recently released a report that examines some myths and inaccuracies about public charter schools.
Here’s a summary of the topic found on the first page of the report:
“Between the 2008–09 and 2013–14 school years, the public charter school movement experienced a dramatic 80 percent increase in the number of students and an astounding 40 percent increase in the number of schools.
Despite this growth, there is still an overwhelming unmet parental demand for quality school options, with more than 1 million student names on charter school waiting lists. While charter schools enjoy tremendous bipartisan support among policymakers and the general public, they also have some vocal critics who perpetuate a number of myths about charters. This paper lays out some of these myths and provides responses based on facts and independent research findings.”

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2014 Education Next Survey Report Released

Education Next’s yearly survey on education policy was released this week. There are over 50 questions in total. They cover a wide range of topics such as American school performance compared to other countries, school spending, school choice and college readiness.
The survey, in it’s eighth year, is administered to a representative sample of American adults and public school teachers.
The report points out that the public is gaining awareness of school choice, and continuing to support it. “The practice of school choice has now spread to such an extent that more than one-fourth of all American families have a school-age child who has been educated elsewhere than in a traditional public school. Many American families are ignoring the bright lines routinely drawn between traditional public schools on the one hand and charter schools, private schools, and home schooling on the other. ”

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Independent Charter-Approval Boards Being Opened in More States

An article in Education Week examines the growing number of states that are creating independent charter school authorization boards.
“Such boards go by different names but are generally authorizing bodies separate from other state and local agencies whose sole purpose is to authorize charter schools statewide. The press for quality—a recurring theme in the charter school debate—has pushed authorizing to the center of the discussion because, many argue, charter schools ultimately reflect the caliber of their authorizer.”

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where our team will feature charter school news about operations, policy, funding for charter schools, charter school facilities financing, and other trends.
This week is all about school staffing and “the growing need for school choice.” Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Why are 50% of U.S. School Staff Non-Teaching Employees?

A new report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute examines why the number of non-teaching staff in the United States has increased by 130% in the past 40 years.
Here’s a summary of the topic found on the first page of the report:
“The number of non-teachers on U.S. school payrolls has soared over the past fifty years, far more rapidly than the rise in teacher numbers. And the amount of money in district budgets consumed by their salaries and benefits has grown apace for at least the last twenty years.
Underneath the averages and totals, states and districts vary enormously in how many non-teachers they employ. Why do Illinois taxpayers pay for forty staff per thousand pupils while Connecticut pays for eight-nine? Why does Orange County, Florida employ eleven teachers aides per thousand students when Miami-Dade gets by with seven”

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The Cost of Neighborhood Schools, and the Growing Need for School Choice

The former executive of New Schools for New Orleans, Neerav Kingsland, has written an essay for the Washington Post about the challenge of neighborhood schools.
“For much of our nation’s history, neighborhood schools have been bastions of exclusion, not inclusion. And this exclusion persists to this day.

For every child who gets preferred access to a neighborhood school, there are many other children denied access to this same school. What is inclusive for one set of students is exclusive for a much larger set.”

Kingsland’s essay follows the announcement that the D.C. mayor’s office has released plans to redraw elementary school boundaries, a proposal that could affect thousands of families.

Welcome to Charter School Capital’s weekly round-up where our team will feature news about charter school operations, policy, funding for charter school, facilities financing, and other trends.
As charter school leaders and their teams prepare for students to return to school this Fall, at lot is going on in the charter school world. We hope you’ll find this round-up valuable. Read on!

New Report Shows Encouraging Improvement in Arizona Charter Schools

The Arizona Department of Education’s recent release of the 2014 AIMS test scores show that more than 70% of Arizona charter schools have improved in math and reading. The Phoenix Business Journal interviewed Ildi Laczko-Kerr, vice president of academics for Arizona Charter School Association, who noted:
“The fact that we saw such a large number of our schools improve from one year to the next is reflective of the changing systems in their schools and designing them to meet the needs of their students.”

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Strong Reactions to University of Arkansas’ Report on Charter School Productivity

Last week in our charter schools news roundup, we featured a new report released by the University of Arkansas that looked specifically at cost effectiveness and ROI when comparing the productivity of public charter schools to traditional school districts.
The report has stirred-up some debate among public charter school and traditional school district experts. NPR’s All Things Considered interview education policy experts Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan who argue that the comparison made by the University of Arkansas doesn’t actually add up.
But Eric Hanushek, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, voices his support for the report after reviewing the report’s methodology and key findings. “This study is path breaking and is likely to spearhead a new and important policy debate. Until the 2008 recession, schools largely acted as if they were immune from considering finances and returns on expenditures, but we now know that this is no longer possible. This timely study invites a more rational discussion of policy choices, not just with respect to charter schools, but also in a wider context.”
Patrick Wolf, the University of Arkansas head researcher, gets into more detail about the study he lead with his team in a Wall Street Journal interview and an Education Next response piece.

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Washington Post: D.C. Charter Schools Sue City, Alleging Unequal Funding

The D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools filed a federal lawsuit last Wednesday under the grounds that the city has provided unequal funding to charter schools. According to the Association, since 2008 charter school students have received roughly $2,150 less each year from District of Columbia than the district students.

A recent interview in Education Week highlights some charter school policy issues to watch for this year.
Todd Ziebarth, the senior vice president of state advocacy for the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools gives us a guide to 2014 charter school policy.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Q. What policy trends do you expect to see in the charter sector this upcoming year?
A. Funding and facilities is one, authorizing and accountability has been and will continue to be a policy trend. I think we counted about seven states in the 2014 session that took steps to impact charter authorizing and accountability.
I do think that set of anti-charter bills that came up in Illinois will continue to come up. One in particular which is the whole issue of full-time virtual charter schools. That is often an issue of debate in new charter laws. The question is: Will this [law] allow full-time virtual charters and will they be for-profit?
Of all the issues in the charter space, that one seems to be the most problematic for folks. It combines full-time virtual education with another challenging issue which is for-profit providers. For some people, full- time virtual education is a problem; for others, for-profits, is a problem. But the bigger question is are full-time virtual models a good fit in the charter space?
There’s a lot of heat around that issue, and my guess is that will continue to be one of the more problematic issues.
The entire article is available at Education Week.

Charter schools are changing the face of education in America, and whenever change starts to happen, debate tends to follow.
Most charter school administrators and educators are used to hearing a wide spectrum of questions and concerns – some better informed than others.
Ember Reichgott Junge, charter school advocate and author of Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story , has been touring the country talking about her book, and addressing common charter school myths and misperceptions including those around charter school funding.
A story in the Minnpost last week highlights specific misconceptions that Junge frequently discusses:
1) Charters divert money from school districts
One of the most heated, and complex, issues in the charter school movement is whether public money should follow the student, which is the way the system is currently designed, or whether the students should follow the public money.
“The question here is who gets to spend it,” said Junge, “the parents and the teachers at the school or a district superintendent? … The real issue is that superintendents don’t get to spend the money the way they want.”
2) Charter schools don’t perform as well as district schools
Junge correctly points out that you will find studies supporting both sides of this argument, and that there isn’t a simple answer. “it’s a false comparison. Whether the school is a charter or district run is not what determines whether kids learn,” she said. “And that’s determined by whether the school is engaging its students.”
Ember Reichgott Junge is a former US Senator for Minnesota. She is highly regarded among charter school experts for helping author the nation’s first charter school law in Minnesota.