charter school teachers

What District and Charter School Teachers Think About the Biggest Issues in Education

Editor’s Note: This survey was published by Educators for Excellence, a teacher-led nonprofit that ensures teachers have a leading voice in the policies that impact their students and profession.

We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support school choice, charter school growth, and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.


Voices From the Classroom: A Survey of America’s Educators

We are excited to share the results from our second edition of Voices from the Classroom, a nationally representative survey by teachers that captures the views and opinions of our colleagues across the country on a wide variety of education issues. The purpose of this survey is to provide decision-makers with key insights from untapped classroom experts — teachers.

This survey comes at a time ripe for change. Too often during the last two years, in districts across the country, teachers have felt that they had to walk out of their classrooms in order for their concerns to be heard. As teachers, we see our students’ challenges up close each day, and we know the many ways our education system is currently failing them. We have the knowledge, skills, and passion to lead the changes we know our profession and schools need, but we are rarely given the opportunity nor are we appropriately compensated when we are.

This election year, however, offers a unique opportunity to address what is preventing our students from reaching their full potential and us, as teachers, from thriving in our careers. We don’t need tweaks; we need meaningful change. This report offers a guide for the changes we want to see.

Download the Survey

 

Future of Education

The Future Of Education: Hear What The Experts Envision

Editor’s note: This post was originally published here on April 15, 2019 by Education Dive and written by Jessica Campisi. While our main public education model has remained the same for generations, proponents of education reform are fighting for change. Read on to hear what this distinguished body of experts as they share their thoughts on the future of education and what they envision a modern educational system should look like. One thing they have in common? They’re all focused on building an educational model that provides the best possible futures and outcomes for all of our nation’s children.


RISE 2019: What do education experts envision for the modern schoolhouse?

As the industry shifts and tackles its top challenges, experts in early-childhood, charters and testing shared how each fits into a new, more innovative educational model.
When it comes to education, the basic framework has remained the same for decades. But as new pieces fade in and out of the classroom experience, some experts and scholars are wondering if it’s time to take a look at the overarching model itself, rather than just its parts.
At the 2019 Reagan Institute Summit on Education in Washington, a five-expert panel, with each member representing different areas of education — early-childhood, charter schools, testing, blended learning and wraparound services — gathered to tackle the question of what the modern schoolhouse should look like in today’s educational climate. The panelists were:

  • Diana Rauner, president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund
  • Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
  • Trevor Packer, senior vice president of Advanced Placement (AP) and instruction for the College Board
  • Howard Stephenson, Utah state senator
  • Dale Erquiaga, CEO of Communities in Schools

“We live in an era when change is rapid in so many aspects of our lives,” former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas said in introducing the panel. ”Our education system needs to evolve to equip students with the tools they’ll need to succeed.”
Each panelist used their knowledge bases to describe their thoughts on modern education and what it needs. Below are some of their remarks.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
DIANA RAUNER: We know that children are born learning, and we know that the critical foundations of everything we’re trying to build — in terms of school success, workforce development, citizenship — really begins with those foundational skills that are built at the very first years of life. Social-emotional skills like self-regulation, collaboration, grit, executive function — all of those things that allow students to become successful students require a level of self control and development that begins at the very earliest years of life. We have to understand that parents are the very first teachers of their children, and so when we think about the early-childhood piece of education, we have to include parents and families all the way through, but particularly at the earliest years.
What we [also] know is the early-childhood system isn’t really a system, so while some educational experiences will happen in traditional schools, a lot of early-childhood education will happen in a lot of different places. So that system has to include community centers, families, homes — as well as churches and other public settings.
NINA REES: The goal of many of those who started the [charter] movement was about giving teachers more agency in what a school would look like. And to this day, most of our charter school leaders are former teachers and principals in the traditional system who came to the chartering space to do something different. When you look at our highest-performing charter schools … all of these schools have a number of things in common, which is that not only are they innovating and serving their students well, but they’re now also doing something that we never thought was possible, which was to get these students to college and through college.
I think it starts at an early age — we have to make sure that our children are ready to start school [and are] ready to learn. But if our K-12 system is not able to sustain the gains in early-childhood education, it’s very difficult for them to then graduate high school ready for college. So, we’re part of this puzzle through and through, and I hope that despite some of the backlash in some of the states, everyone understands that at the end of the day, if you really want to innovate in the public school system, charter schools are probably your best bet.
TREVOR PACKER: I don’t see how we ever become truly internationally competitive across disciplines unless students have time to focus on doing a few things very well. There isn’t a limitless amount of time for students to do hours and hours of additional homework and still have some sort of family and faith and fun during their secondary school years. So, I worry about that, and I worry about the pressure from higher education on students to spread their time very superficially in their high school years.
We have a college admissions process where there’s 10 slots for students to enter all their extracurricular activities. When you have 10 slots, you feel like, “Well, I should be doing 10 extracurricular activities.” So, I have concerns about all of those pressures, and some of those pressures are AP exams. We find colleges that have a formula in the background that will say, “If a student takes 10 APs, we’re going to give them extra points in college admissions,” when our research shows that one or two APs a year maximizes your college readiness.
We need to partner more effectively with higher education to stop the madness. There’s been all this attention on the Hollywood scandal, but what about all these families that are playing by increasingly Byzantine rules for college admissions? How can we calm down and give students time to really do a few things well in high school? What can high schools do, what can state standards do, [and] what can state requirements do to clear the clutter and give students time to excel?
HOWARD STEPHENSON: It’s not about the device and it’s not about the computer. We’ve heard a lot about parent choice and teacher agency, but I’d like to propose that the most important marketplace that we are often ignoring is a student’s agency. That is the marketplace that matters. The engagement of students — that’s what matters. And that’s why in Utah, we have K-3 reading software for 55,000 students who are below grade level.
Teachers use this as a tool to do the heavy lifting of instruction in competency for reading, rather than replacing the teacher. The teacher then uses the prompts made by the software to provide 1-on-1 or small group instruction. So, rather than trying to be a sage on the stage … we honor the agency of the student by engaging high-quality software.
This should be commonplace — if we use the tool not to replace a teacher, but to repurpose the role of a teacher to be more effective.
DALE ERQUIAGA: I grew up in rural America. And I grew up at a time when my parents still told stories of their schoolhouse being a place where you went for dances, you went for rummage sales, you went for potlucks after school hours. Schools were the centers of communities. And in my lifetime, we turned them into walled environments that looked as much like prisons as they looked like schoolhouses.
I think what you’re seeing in the country right now is a resurgence of that desire for whole communities and schoolhouses to be more welcoming and feel like they are places for families not just in those school hours, but [also] in evenings, afternoons, weekends and summers, as well.
I work in an organization that’s name is exactly what we do — I work in communities in schools. We broker community resources inside schools, whether those are food, clothing, shelter, transportation or something much more complex. And we find that that interaction of communities and the schoolhouse and families and students is exactly what the most at-risk kids in our country need to get across the finish line.


Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We help schools access, leverage, and sustain the resources charter schools need to thrive, allowing them to focus on what matters most – educating students. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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Education Reform
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May14, 2019 here by The 74. It was written by Earl Martin Phalen, founder and CEO of the George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academies.
We are strong believers in education reform, school choice, and the responsibility we have as a country to provide equal educational opportunities for all of our nation’s children. We also think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources on school choice, charter school growth, and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.


Phalen: Modest Reforms Are Not Enough to Give Millions of Kids a High-Quality Education. We Need Bold Action to Transform Our Schools

This essay is part of a special series commemorating the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. Read more essays, view testimonials from the families who changed America’s schools and download the new book Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision at our new site: The74Million.org/Brown65.
Many believe that the historic Brown v. Board of Education case was only about integration. It wasn’t. It was truly a courageous effort to leverage the legal system to help ensure that through education and hard work, all children can fulfill their tremendous innate potential.
While this value was one of the fundamental pillars of our great nation, it was not the reality for many. For many American children, education — in addition to housing, health, safety and access to capital, to name a few — was both separate and unequal.
Brown was an effort to ensure all children had access to a high-quality education that, when combined with their hard work and effort, would position them to pursue their dreams. Sixty-five years later, while there has been so much progress in so many areas, access to a high-quality education is still out of reach for millions of American children. By conservative estimates, nearly 9,000 of our nation’s 98,000 public schools are abysmal. Every day, 5 million children are being separated further and further from their tremendous, God-given, innate talents. Every day, we are setting up millions of our children to fail.
Although many initiatives and billions of dollars have been invested into reforming our schools over the past few decades, those efforts have produced only modest improvements. Other efforts to improve the quality of education for all American children have focused on offering low-income families choice, through charter schools and, for those who could afford it, vouchers. Charters, when implemented well, have brought the vision and spirit of Brown to life: Institutions like the Kauffman School, Brooke Charter School, Success Academies, Rocketship, KIPP, IDEA Public Schools and many, many more have provided excellence and given children the opportunity to transform their futures — and their families’ futures — through a good education.
Unfortunately, modest reforms to traditional public schools, and the development and expansion of charter schools, cannot solve this problem alone. Today, charters make up only 5 percent of the schools in the United States, and while many have been exceptional, many more are mediocre at best and horrific at worst.
More and more, I believe that we must take bold action in transforming our nation’s failing public schools, where most of our children currently go. Organizations such as Green Dot, Democracy Prep and Friendship Charter Schools are demonstrating that not only is school turnaround possible, it can be done in authentic collaboration with our public school districts and educators. In fact, their models’ successes are centered on collaboration, realizing the genius of Brown to create positive change from within the system, thus closing the gap between what is needed today and what is possible tomorrow.
Because of the valiant and courageous leadership provided by several of these nonprofit organizations, Phalen Leadership Academies entered the turnaround space. Founded only six years ago, PLA, named in honor of my parents, has already successfully transformed five F-rated schools into A-rated schools. And we did this with most (87 percent) of the same staff, a strong educational model and a fierce urgency that reflects our love for our scholars.
Today, millions of American children are attending schools that are chaotic and unsafe; where little teaching and learning is taking place; and where students are being pulled further and further from who they are meant to be. I truly hope that those who can and those who care use every ounce of their power to give these and all our children the education and the futures they truly deserve.


Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We help schools access, leverage, and sustain the resources charter schools need to thrive, allowing them to focus on what matters most – educating students. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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Education Reform
Editor’s Note: This article on Puerto Rico’s education reform efforts, was originally published here on March 27, 2019 by EducationNext and written by Robin J. Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. After Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico, their secretary of education made headlines by making wide-sweeping changes to address the issues with their long-struggling education system. Read this article to understand how new investments, creative thinking, and locally driven community support are the cornerstones of a concerted effort to make their path forward and create sustainable education reform even perhaps here on the mainland.


Resilience, Hope, and the Power of the Collective: What Puerto Rico Can Teach the States about Education Reform

Hurricane Maria’s wrath created new urgency to address Puerto Rico’s long struggling education system. As soon as electricity was back on, policy types immediately started making analogies to New Orleans. Indeed, new legislation created sweeping new authorities to restructure public education and create new public school options, including charter schools and vouchers. Puerto Rico’s secretary of education made headlines for closing more than 200 underenrolled schools before the 2018–2019 school year.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the island and learn about the unique challenges and opportunities there. I came away with a picture that is much more complex than what is portrayed in the national news. Unlike New Orleans, the island hasn’t seen a surge of volunteers, Teach for America recruits, or new donations from philanthropists on the mainland. Teachers have not been fired. School choice is a relatively small part of the picture. The existing public school system, though under heavy strain, remains in place.
Puerto Rico’s efforts to improve opportunities for young people are rich and varied and locally driven. I came away with the strong belief that people on the island have at least as much to offer us back on the mainland as what we can offer to help them.
First, a bit about the context of Puerto Rican public education.
• Declining enrollment: The student age population of Puerto Rico has been on the decline. The birth rate is now lower than the death rate. The number of school-age children was down to 340,000 in 2017; just 300,000 students remained after the hurricane. Projections show further declines in coming years.
• Hurricane impact: 82 percent of households suffered damage from Hurricane Maria. School-age children missed an average of 78 days of school. More than 20 percent of children were reported to have suffered attention and emotional problems post-hurricane.
• Intensive needs: 35 percent of students qualify for special education services—more than double the rate on the mainland. Eighty-one percent of students are below the poverty line.
• Undervalued workforce: The median worker in Puerto Rico earns about half as much as the median worker on the mainland, and similar disparities apply to teachers. The average teacher makes $29,000 a year—and opportunities abound for bilingual teachers to double their salaries on the mainland. As a result, the island has seen a mass exodus of teachers. Districts on the mainland actively recruit and hire away some of Puerto Rico’s best talent. Exacerbating the problem, there is a shortage of teachers with English and STEM skills and a huge retirement wave coming. Nearly half (14,000) of Puerto Rico’s teachers are expected to retire in the next five years. Finding school leaders will be a problem, too.
• Stagnant achievement: only 10 percent of 7th, 8th, and 11th graders achieved proficiency in a standardized math test last year. PISA results in math, science, and reading lag behind the average for Latin American countries. There is chronic absenteeism—one out of every four K–3 students is absent 10 percent or more of the time.
These combined statistics of Puerto Rico’s situation are sobering. Finding a path forward must go well beyond any one reform, policy, or strategy, or person. They will require a concerted and sustained effort, new investments, and creative thinking, all locally driven. There is no “proven” path to follow in the states or elsewhere. The solutions must be uniquely Puerto Rican and must be powered by Puerto Ricans. I visited three schools that leave me wholly confident that this can happen.
ColaborativoPR: intensive community-based supports for high school students. Loiza, a deeply impoverished community on the northeastern coast, is the center of Puerto Rico’s Afro-Latino community and home to a promising effort to ensure more young people attend, and successfully complete, post-secondary education. More than 50 percent of Loiza’s youth live below the poverty level, and 48 percent of 18- to 20-year-olds are not in school. According to the 2006 census the median income for families was under $10,000. It is well-known for its cuisine and traditional “bomba” dance.
The Colaborativo was established by six foundations, along with a suite of community partners, to motivate and support Loiza’s high school students to complete high school and pursue post-secondary education.
The organization partners with Centro Esperanza, which has provided educational, music, and psychological services in the community since 1977, including a Montessori kindergarten. The Colaborativo did research on what was holding students age 18-20 back from attending college and then did further work to identify the high schools in the area with students least likely to attend college. They then partnered to provide remedial math and science education, mental health support, and college and career guidance.
Counselors take students on college visits and help them fill out financial aid forms, whatever is needed. The goal is to help students manage the difficulties of life so that can focus on education, identify their interests and strengths and apply to college.
Without these supports, students say they would not have been able to manage the process and paperwork given that their parents had not been to college themselves. We met one young woman who has gone into business administration at University of Puerto Rico.
Another is studying graphic design and though she has been accepted to Syracuse, she is doing her first year of college in Puerto Rico before she decides whether to move to New York. She says that the Colaborativo “always pushed her to look for the best”. We heard about another student who was deeply depressed after her mother died and didn’t want to go to college. After working with psychologists, she was able to go. The key, the students say, is in providing individualized support and encouragement to students. They wish schools would adjust more to the personalized needs of individuals, provide more exposure to possible careers.
Being in the students’ community has been essential. Counselors know the local dynamics at play and they know the kids. The Colaborativo works to ensure that students meet with counselors in recognized “peace places” where are all treated equally. After the Hurricane, and during the period where students were unaccounted for and not attending schools.
More than 80 students showed up at the Colaborativo. Sister Cecilia Sorrano, of Centro Esperanza, says she believes education should be about transformation and about creating healthy communities. She says they try to get students to compete with themselves, not others, and provide individualized supports that respect each student.
Instituto Nueva Escuela: Montessori for all. Nueva Escuela is part of a loose network of 50 K-8 schools that bring a traditional Montessori education to 14,200 Puerto Rican students. Nueva Escuela (not associated with the Centro Esperanza Montessori kindergarten) was started by Ana Maria Garcia Blanco, a revered educator and community leader who radiates warmth and energy. All of the markers of a Montessori class are apparent: the beads, the candles, etc. Students with special needs are fully included in the small classes. The school feels joyful and students seem confident. The network touts impressive (though unconfirmed) statistics: high rates of continuing education, many in selective high schools and colleges, no drop-outs, no serious incidents of violence, and no drug use.
Ana Maria insists that what makes the schools effective is much more than the Montessori curriculum. The model has three tiers: Montessori, collective decision-making, and family engagement. She is adamant that the most important element is the “collectivo”—the collective decision-making body that adjudicates issues that arise. Parents can be employed as aides and teachers at the schools. Teachers are fully engaged in all decision-making. The collectivo says that if a teacher is hired who is not fully on board with Montessori or is struggling, it is not a problem: “We make sure they are not alone,” providing constant coaching and guidance.
The schools operate as public schools under a special division of the Puerto Rico department of education. They receive a line item in the budget of around $6,400 per student. The nonprofit organization run by Ana Maria supplements that funding through private donations and provides teacher training and support for running effective collectives in schools that voluntarily join the network.
Proyecto Vimenti (Lifelong learning in English): The first and only charter school on the island. Proyecto Vimenti is run by the Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico. The organization provides after-school programs to local students but found that they were spending more time working with students on academic remediation than on play and enrichment. And they realized these students’ families were locked into cycles of poverty that led to hopelessness and domestic problems, making it difficult for students to achieve upward mobility. Concerned, they started developing plans to open a school that would tackle education and poverty as interlocking pieces, drawing from all of the Boys and Girls Club’s programming and resources.
Vimenti was preparing to open as a private school for Kindergarten and first grade when Puerto Rico passed its education reform law in March 2018, which allows for charter schools. As a charter, Vimenti will eventually serve 190 students and will grow to include to 5th grade. Students receive intensive academic and social-emotional support and from an early age learn competencies, like coding and design-thinking, that can help qualify them for well-paying jobs later in life—primarily in technology, tourism, and health care. Health and welfare screenings and supports have identified many students with vision impairment who were previously considered as needing special education.
The large and modern building is meant to be a central gathering place and a hub for community resources to serve a holistic set of family needs. There is an adult employment training and entrepreneurship center that provides workshops and support for basic job skills, like how to conduct oneself at work, how to dress professionally, and how to apply for jobs. Those seeking work, typically single mothers, get help finding jobs and even have access to work-appropriate clothing. Entrepreneurship classes support families to take marginal business activities, like food carts, to a more sustainable level. Vimenti’s belief is that a two-generation approach to addressing intergenerational poverty is critical. Students need skills, Vimenti believes, that will position them for new opportunities, but they also need to see the adults in their life modeling how to seize those opportunities.
Vimenti chose to operate as a charter school to have access to government funding. They could not have operated on private dollars alone. But being the island’s first charter has come with plenty of challenges. There is community suspicion that charter schools are a mainland reform and the funding levels are very low. Under the education reform law, charter schools receive base funding of $1,800 per student, plus add-ons for special needs, poverty, etc., bringing Vimenti up to an average of around $3,500 per student. This is just a fraction of the total $7,639 spent per student in Puerto Rico’s public education system. Without the financial backing and trusted brand of the Boys and Girls Club, it’s hard to imagine this school could have launched successfully. The school pays teachers 50 percent higher than other schools and heavily subsidizes the cost of the program through private donations.
Beyond the schools, I learned of efforts by Puerto Rico’s College Board to create a Spanish version of Khan Academy, which will provide online assessments and opportunities for students to practice in weak content areas, and is providing career and college data to school counselors. The Flamboyan Foundation (run by my friend Kristin Ehrgood) is focused on K–3 literacy and recently partnered with Lin-Manuel Miranda for a special island showing of Hamilton that raised money for Puerto Rican arts and arts education. The Puerto Ricans I met were amazing people, focused on finding locally crafted solutions, and not waiting for answers from anyone.
Secretary of Education Julia Keleher, whom someone described as “a fast-talking Philly girl who speaks fluent Spanish,” was appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature in December 2016. Julia has brought a new intensity and urgency to address the deep dysfunctions and corruption in the educational bureaucracy and wants to move more decisionmaking to the local level. Though charter schools have gotten much of the attention about the reforms, they are very small but important part of the story. More broadly, people speak of the reform focus as an effort to bring Puerto Rico’s education system into the 21st century, including training and supports for educators, a less centralized system (previously all principals in the state reported directly to the secretary of education), and efforts to update the technology infrastructure.
I left with a strong feeling of possibility for Puerto Rican education. The needs are enormous and multidirectional. Nascent efforts to build solutions could go awry in many ways. And the overall underfunding and underinvestment in our fellow Americans’ education system is shameful. But many determined and creative people are at work and great things are happening as a result. They are working in partnership—crossing organizational lines and eschewing the traditional boundaries of school in recognition of the fact that schooling must be integrally related to other community assets and needs, and to opportunities for upward mobility.
These efforts largely emerged in the absence of policies designed to nurture them. People don’t talk about “scaling” solutions in Puerto Rico. They create solutions and hope that others will do the same. They focus on recognizing the interconnectedness between school, family, and community, not on academics alone. For us on the mainland, it raises the question of how policies can support, rather than stifle, bottom-up problem-solving that connects educators more closely with the communities they serve. On the island, it raises questions about how policy can help sustain promising initiatives, enable existing efforts to reach more students, and allow new ones to develop. Puerto Ricans want to be a productive part of economic revival and opportunity for youth. The work ahead is to help them catalyze those possibilities.


Support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We help schools access, leverage, and sustain the resources charter schools need to thrive, allowing them to focus on what matters most – educating students. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can

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Education Reform

Education Reform: The Lessons Learned and What’s in Store

Editor’s Note: This article discussing the need for a reinvention of public education and education reform was originally published here, by The 74, and was written by Robin Lake, Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education as well as affiliate faculty at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Robin shares her perspective (one we agree with) on our mandate as a country to prepare our children for a challenging economic future, enabled by new possibilities for an agile learning system that maximizes the potential of every student. Unfortunately, the current state of education does not support these goals effectively. So what have we learned? What’s working? What’s not? Lake provides some interesting perspective in this article.
We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.
Read the complete story to learn more.


Robin Lake: On the 25th Anniversary of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a Look at Lessons Learned & New Imperatives Ahead

At the Center on Reinventing Public Education, we are celebrating our 25th anniversary. We are thinking a lot about our principles and lessons learned.
At our core, we believe schools can make a difference even for the most disadvantaged children. To do that, they must be coherent — meaning they must be grounded in a set of explicit values, hold all students to high standards, provide academic supports, give students opportunities for meaningful relationships with adults, and demonstrate links between school and real life. They must be free to try different approaches and use time, money, and teacher talents differently. Since schools will differ, parents must be free to choose. And governance can and must protect students without making schools into incoherent bureaucracies.
We still believe in these principles and are still working to make them reality. Yet there is an even deeper principle beneath CRPE’s work: We know that no idea is so good that it will work exactly as expected. People who want to make a difference must keep their eyes open, expect surprises, and learn from them.
By following this last principle, we have seen many of our hopes and expectations about the value of charter schools and the power of citywide portfolio strategies confirmed. But we have also learned about their limitations. We see many current efforts to improve public education frustrated by political logjams. More than ever, we are driven by the imperative to prepare children for a challenging economic future, enabled by new possibilities for an agile learning system that maximizes the potential of every student.

Hopes and Expectations Confirmed

Over the past 25 years, we have seen that coherent schools have long-term benefits for students, into and through college. They can make teachers more effective — and happier, too.
A quarter-century ago, charter schools were mostly theoretical. The very first ones were operating in only a handful of states. Once criticized as likely bastions of privilege, they have created coherent educational environments for thousands of disadvantaged children, and thus become lifesavers. In districts with open-minded leadership, they can serve as educational laboratories and sources of innovative ideas, as the original visionaries suggested.
But charter schools do not have a monopoly on excellence. District-run public schools, given the right levels of autonomy and support, can specialize and become excellent.
We have also learned that low-income and poorly educated parents can make good choices. Just like advantaged parents, they seek the school where their child is most likely to be valued and motivated, not the one with the highest test scores. But disadvantaged families also need access to resources, including information and transportation, to exercise choice on an equitable basis.

Factors Limiting Progress

However, as we look across an educational landscape where progress is slowing in many cities and leading education policy thinkers are searching for new ways forward, we’ve also had cause to reflect on the factors limiting reform efforts to date.
In response to signals from funders and state regulators, charter schools have too narrowly focused on average test score gains and college acceptance rates. This has slowed innovation. And charter schools, once established, often begin to act like the status quo, resisting transparency, innovation, and accountability — the forces intended to drive continuous improvement in portfolio school systems.
At the same time, middle-class families often don’t see any personal benefit from charter schools and other forms of public school choice, and they can perceive these things as direct threats to the advantages they currently have. In a related vein, nobody in the school system wants to redistribute money, even when it is obvious that schools serving low-income and students of color get the lowest-paid teachers and meager support from district programs.
All this means leadership matters. Yet superintendents and school board members can simultaneously want coherent schools and take actions that remove school freedoms and reinforce a culture of compliance. Even when city leaders succeed in making progress by replacing weak schools with more coherent ones, continuous improvement cycles don’t necessarily continue forever, and key indicators like student achievement often plateau. This is in part due to political pressure to keep schools open and in part a failure to innovate further by looking at new ways to help students succeed.
A newer wave of efforts to transform public education to more individualized, engaging, and mastery-based classrooms too often fail to truly serve every student’s needs and — as our recent study showed — are stymied by the habits and rules of a system designed for sameness.

New Imperatives, New Possibilities

All told, we have learned that school coherency is necessary but not sufficient. Every student needs a learning environment that makes sense, where the parts add up. But tomorrow’s students will also need access to new skills and forms of knowledge that will determine their ability to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Schools will need to enable individual students to hone their talents and develop the special skills that can define their lives as earners and citizens. Students of every background will need these kinds of opportunities, especially those with the most disadvantages. To create new pathways to upward mobility, we must bridge institutional divisions, especially between K-12 and higher education, teach to the individual rather than the mean, and look outside the boundaries of today’s traditional schools to expand opportunities for students.
Today, we are releasing a volume of essays that begin to explore these new possibilities. We look forward to the conversation ahead.


Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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charter-like schools9 Tips For How To Create More Successful Charter-Like Schools In Urban Districts

Editor’s Note: This article from The74, was originally published here on September 19, 2018 and was written by David Osborne and Emily Langhorne. David directs the Progressive Policy Institute’s education work and is the author of Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System. Emily Langhorne, a former English teacher, is an education policy analyst and project manager with the Progressive Policy Institute.
This article highlights how, over the past 15 years, the fastest improvement in urban public education has come from cities that have embraced the key tenants that have led to charter schools’ success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability for performance. In order to compete, many districts have recently tried to spur charter-like innovation and increase student achievement by granting their school leaders more autonomy.
Interestingly, studies in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles showed that public charter schools outperformed both traditional public and in-district autonomous schools on standardized tests in three of the four cities studied. But getting a charter isn’t always an easy road in today’s political landscape. In this case, in-district autonomous models may be the second-best option. Learn how districts can increase the success of these schools if they take guidance from these nine lessons learned from districts already embracing this new charter-like model.


Osborne & Langhorne: Where Politics Make Charters Difficult, 9 Tips for How Urban Districts Can Create Charter-like Schools — and Improve Their Success

charter-like schoolsOver the past 15 years, the fastest improvement in urban public education has come from cities that have embraced charter schools’ formula for success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability for performance. To compete, many districts have recently tried to create charter-like schools to spur innovation and increase student achievement by granting their school leaders more autonomy.
District-run autonomous schools are a hybrid model, a halfway point between charters and traditional public schools. They’re operated by district employees, but they can opt out of many district policies and — in some cities — union contracts.
Our recent analysis of state exam scores from 2015 and 2016 in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles showed that public charter schools outperformed both traditional public and in-district autonomous schools on standardized tests in three of the four cities studied. In the one exception, Memphis, the district concentrated its best principals and teachers in, and provided extra funding and support to, its autonomous iZone schools.
However, when the political landscape makes chartering difficult, in-district autonomous models may be the second-best option. Districts can increase the success of these schools if they heed these nine lessons learned by the four cities in our study.

1. Protect unrestricted autonomy

When autonomy is limited, so is principals’ ability to meet students’ needs. Districts need to give these schools unrestricted staffing and budgeting authority.
Staffing autonomy allows school leaders to hire effective staff who believe in their school’s vision and to evaluate staff based not only on performance but also on cultural fit. Forced placement of teachers not only harms student learning; it can also undermine a school’s culture. As one autonomous school principal in Los Angeles said, sometimes a principal needs to “lose a teacher and save a school.”
Budgeting autonomy enables principals to hire staff according to their schools’ unique needs — for example, bringing on additional guidance counselors rather than a dean. Leaders who control their own budgets can fund hands-on learning, purchase tablets for blended learning, hire a full-time substitute teacher, or employ any of a hundred other innovations.

2. Create a district office or independent board to support and protect autonomous schools

Autonomous school leaders spend a significant amount of time fighting to exercise the autonomies they have been promised. Sometimes, they get so frustrated, they leave. Districts with autonomous schools should create a central unit dedicated to supporting them, defending their autonomy and advocating on their behalf when disputes arise.
An alternative is to create a 501(c)3 nonprofit board, as Denver has. These boards are appointed, not elected, so they are free to make decisions that benefit students and schools without fear of political backlash. The boards oversee school progress, provide financial oversight, select school leaders and evaluate their performance, and protect them from district micromanagement.

3. Articulate a district-wide theory of action and secure buy-in from central office staff

Changing the mindset of the central office requires a huge cultural shift. Autonomous schools necessitate that many parts of the central office do things differently, so employees need to believe in the connection between school autonomy and student success, rather than seeing autonomous schools as an inconvenience and/or a challenge to centralized authority. District leaders need to openly discuss why they believe school autonomy will produce better performance, share this information publicly with school leaders, central office employees, teachers, and the community — and constantly reinforce the message.

4. Turn some central services into public enterprises that must compete with other providers for schools’ business

The fastest way to change the mindset of central office staff who provide services to schools — such as professional development, food, maintenance, and security — is to take away their monopoly. When internal service shops have to sink or swim in a competitive market, they almost always swim, because they are much closer to their customers than private competitors are. But, in the process, they increase their quality and reduce their costs.


RELATED
Five Reasons Independent Charters Outperform In-District Hybrid Schools


5. Authorize district-run autonomous schools like charter schools

Rigorous authorization has been essential to the success of strong charter sectors. Districts should use similar processes to authorize their own autonomous schools — allowing only the most promising applicants to open schools and removing those that prove ineffective. A careful authorization process weeds out weak proposals at the beginning reviews performance along the way and replaces schools that fail with stronger operators.

6. Ensure continuous improvement by using a clear system of accountability to close and/or replace failing schools

A common shortcoming among districts with autonomous school models is their failure to impose consequences that create real urgency among teachers and principals — closing and replacing failing schools. Every district should implement a performance framework that requires schools to show academic growth. If they fail, the district should provide additional supports during a probationary period but replace them if they still don’t meet targets. If a school is successful, the district should provide resources and incentives to encourage it to open another campus, as Denver does with its Innovation Schools.

7. Invest in developing autonomous school leaders

Giving schools autonomy does nothing to help student achievement if school leaders follow district procedures rather than looking for ways to be innovative. Districts need to invest in developing school leaders so they can take advantage of their freedoms. Careful selection of and support for principals has been a large part of the Memphis iZone’s success. Novice principals there are placed in partnerships with experienced principals, meeting over the summer and throughout the year to collaborate on strategies for leveraging autonomy to achieve results.

8. When possible, give families a choice of autonomous schools

Families and students who can choose their school tend to show more commitment than children who are assigned to one. Choice empowers them, and people who feel empowered are more likely to give their best efforts. In addition, systems of choice allow for the creation of schools with a variety of learning models, so students can select a school with the culture and curriculum that best fit their needs.

9. Explore district-run autonomous models from other cities

By examining a variety of successful strategies, districts can find and adapt the model that best fits their political climate and meets the needs of their community.
In addition to the four cities we studied, Springfield, Massachusetts, and Indianapolis, Indiana, have launched interesting in-district autonomy strategies.
The Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, created as an alternative to a state takeover of several schools, contains nine struggling middle schools and one high school that have been given significant autonomy, overseen by a seven-member board of four state-appointed officials and three locally appointed members. The teachers union negotiated a new contract that includes longer hours, increased pay, and some compensation based on performance.
Indianapolis’s Innovation Network Schools, which start with full charter-like autonomy rather than with waivers from district rules, are the fastest-improving in the district. They have the same exemption from laws, regulations, and contract provisions as charters, and while the schools operate in district buildings, the principals and teachers are employed by the nonprofit corporation that operates the school. Each school’s board hires and fires the principal, sets the budget and pay scale, and chooses the school design. The nonprofits have five- to seven-year performance contracts with the district. If schools fail to fulfill the terms of their contracts, the district can refuse to renew them; otherwise, the district cannot interfere with their autonomy.
By following the recommendations above, districts can create self-renewing systems in which every school has the incentives and autonomy to continuously innovate and improve. At the same time, they can offer a variety of school models to families, to meet a variety of children’s needs.
Whether school boards will have the courage to close failing autonomous schools full of unionized district employees will always be a question. The long-term sustainability of in-district autonomy after the leaders who championed it have left is another Achilles’ heel. But if done well and sustained, such schools have the potential to improve public education in urban America


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Charter School Capital is proud to deliver access to growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. In the past 10 years, Charter School Capital has invested more than $1.8 billion to 600+ charter schools, helping them provide a high-quality education to more than 1,000,000 students across the country. If you are trying to meet operational expenses, expand, acquire or renovate your school building, add an athletic department, enhance school safety/security, or buy new technology, complete the online application below and we’ll contact you to set up a meeting. Our team works with you to determine funding and facilities options based on your school’s unique needs.


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charter school fundingThe Charter School Funding Misconception: Who’s money is it?

This article was originally posted here on September 5, 2018 by The74 and written by James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It is an opinion article that challenges one key assumption about charter school funding: does the funding for public schools belong to the child or to the district? This question is at the heart of education reform arguments.
Proponents of school choice believe that every family deserves to choose the best educational option that suits their child’s specific and unique needs—whether that school is a traditional district public school or a public charter school. Opponents of the charter school movement believe that families that choose the public charter school are “taking” money away from traditional district schools. As this writer suggests, this may hold true if you believe the child, and the funding that follows them, are district property.
Do the traditional district schools have less money if the student opts for a public charter school? Yes. That is the natural result of freedom of choice as it is within any other industry, so why should it be different for education? If your local charter schools are outperforming your local district schools or offer your child something unique to their needs, shouldn’t you be able to make that choice?
If you think the funding belongs to the district and not the student, this writer makes an enlightening comparison to shopping at Walmart versus shopping at your local farmer’ s market, “It presupposes that the customer belongs to Walmart; that any time the individual chooses to buy cucumbers from a local grower or salsa from an aspiring entrepreneur, he or she is “robbing” the dominant grocer.”
We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.
Read on for the complete article.


Shuls: Do Charter Schools Take Districts’ Money? Only If You Think Children, and the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property

How would you respond if you stumbled across a headline that asked, “How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?” It’s a ridiculous question. It presupposes that the customer belongs to Walmart; that any time the individual chooses to buy cucumbers from a local grower or salsa from an aspiring entrepreneur, he or she is “robbing” the dominant grocer. That’s just absurd. Yet this is the standard frame we use when talking about education. We blithely assume that education is wholly different from any other field.
Consider, for example, a recent headline on the Education Writers Association’s website: “How Much Do Charter Schools Cost Districts?” It’s the same question, and it is just as absurd as when talking about groceries. Worse, it is unethical, because it dehumanizes children, reducing them to economic units. In this formulation, neither they nor their parents are individuals with aspirations, endowed with free will and the ability to act in their own self-interest; they are a mere funding stream for public school districts.
This type of headline is all too common. Most people wouldn’t even bat an eye at it. But this isn’t just semantics. It gets at the heart of the way many people view public education.
It is only in education that we presume the customer is the rightful property of a specific supplier and therefore “costs” the supplier when he or she goes somewhere else. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the public education system in the United States: We presume the tax dollars that fund a child’s education belong to the public school district and the child belongs in a public school seat.
If, heaven forbid, parents want to use those education funds at a charter school or a private school, they must prove that “choice” works. We demand that school choice programs justify themselves by increasing student achievement on standardized tests, or increasing graduation rates, or fixing decades-old segregation issues. We would never ask the farmers market to prove its tomatoes are bigger and juicier than Walmart’s as a condition of operation.
It doesn’t stop there. A few years ago, one writer went as far as to say, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” You can almost hear Snowball from Animal Farm repeating the mantra, “Four legs good, two legs bad.” It’s us versus them. We treat public education as if it — the system, the school district — were the ultimate good to be served. Just google “school vouchers” and look at the images. The internet is replete with political cartoons that characterize school choice programs as systematically dismantling traditional public schools, brick by brick.
Challenges to this concept are not new. In his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education, Father Virgil Blum wrote that “our educational policy must be philosophically based on the dignity and transcendent value of the individual, on the integrity and freedom of the human person; it must be legally based on the Federal Constitution, recognizing the individual student clothed in all his constitutional rights.” We are no closer to that reality today than we were 60 years ago.
Our commitment to educating every child, regardless of wealth or ability, is a reflection of our highest and noblest ideals. What we do today in our public education system is a feat that was almost unthinkable even 100 years ago. Yet in the process of building that system, we somehow lost our purpose. Instead of the system serving the children, we now insist the children must serve the system.
If we are ever to change this, we must first change how we talk about public education. We can’t presume, as the author of the Education Writers Association piece did, that children and their funding inherently belong to the public school system. Do public school districts have less money when a student goes to a charter school or a private school? Absolutely — as they should. This is what happens in any industry when customers choose to spend their dollars at one place instead of another. More to the point, it is what happens when students leave a district school for any reason.
In the final analysis, we must realize that public education is not about the school system, but the students that it is supposed to serve. They have value. They have worth. They should have choices.
James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.


Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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California charter school
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on August 13, 2018, here, by EdSource, and was written by John Fensterwald, who writes about education policy and its impact in California. They interviewed Gary Hart – the “father” of California charter school law – and he shares how he feels about things now, 25 years later. Is it as he envisioned? What would he change? What is working/not working?
Our mission is to see continued charter school expansion, the overall growth of the charter school movement, and more students better served by having educational choice. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please read on to see EdSource’s original post.


Gary Hart, author of California’s charter school law, reflects on its impact
He’d change the appeals process if writing it today.

What does the “father” of California’s quarter-century-old charter school law think of it now? EdSource recently caught up with former State Sen. Gary Hart, a Democrat who represented Santa Barbara in the Assembly and Senate for 20 years before retiring in 1994. In 1992, as chairman of the Senate Education Committee, he authored the nation’s second charter school law. Sue Burr, a consultant to the committee at the time and currently a member of the State Board of Education, played a major role in drafting it. EdSource writer John Fensterwald asked Hart in an interview and in writing what he was trying to do then and how, in hindsight, he might write a different law today. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
The original law capped the number of charter schools statewide at 100, with no more than 10 in any one district and 20 in Los Angeles Unified. In 1998, the Legislature raised the limit to 250 charter schools plus an additional 100 more each year after that.
EDSOURCE: Is it as you envisioned, that we would have more than 1,200 charter schools in California?
HART: No. It’s always hard to predict how legislation is going to play out. Although it was very contentious, I didn’t view it as something that was going to be earth-shaking or have the magnitude that it has.
The original law called for up to 100 charter schools. That was changed a number of years later. When the law first passed, we had no idea as to whether there would be any charters. It was like you give a party and you don’t know if anyone will come or not. It was kind of slow in the beginning. The accelerated growth has been just extraordinary, and it’s not something that not only myself, but I don’t think anybody else could have predicted or even imagined.
EDSOURCE: So what do you attribute that growth to? Are the charter schools from what you can tell doing collectively or individually what you would have hoped?
HART: It’s really hard to generalize because charters vary so much. Generally speaking, I’m supportive. With any legislation of this magnitude, there are always going to be issues and concerns. I do think there has been such a focus on how many new charters, it’s focusing on quantity and I had hoped initially there would be a lot more focus on quality, a more careful review of charters.
EDSOURCE: One of the questions originally was whether charters should be seen as a way to innovate and set examples for other district schools to learn from or to give parents a choice in high-poverty neighborhoods where they are dissatisfied with their schools. Those are really two different focuses.
HART: I think it was both. First and foremost was innovation and reform, giving an opportunity for people to do things differently and not be constrained by all of the rules and regulations from the district, from collective bargaining.
I heard over and over again from school folks, “Stop passing all these laws. We’re spending all of our time being compliance officers and bureaucrats and we’re not able to do our jobs as educators.” I thought that there was some truth to that and so passing this law really gave an opportunity for educators to be educators and not be as concerned about rules and regulations.
After the law was passed, there wasn’t much that came forward either from teachers or administrators or school board members who had complained bitterly about state laws. Instead of going out and doing it, a lot of people resisted. That’s not to say they were wrong because going through the whole process can be quite time-consuming and there’s a lot of blood on the floor sometimes for establishing these things.
This other aspect was also important — the people who felt that the existing schools, particularly in low-income areas, were not serving their needs; their school districts were too large or dysfunctional. They needed to have something that would be their own.
One of the concerns was, “This charter law will be for sophisticated parents who have a lot of time on their hands.” It was somewhat of a surprise to see that places like LA Unified and Oakland and other large urban school districts were where the charters were taking off. I think there was a dissatisfaction on the part of parents, but also because the business community and the foundation community got behind these efforts and provided resources. I never anticipated that charter management organizations would have such an important role.
EDSOURCE: The financial impact on a district was not part of the law. Was it brought up at the time?
HART: I don’t think so. The law didn’t have large-scale financial ramifications. We were talking about 100 charters statewide.
The bill was a major effort to try to defeat the voucher proposal that was going to be on the ballot and we saw it as an alternative to vouchers that would not go down that path of providing the large taxpayer subsidies to private schools and violating the church-state separation right. (Editor’s note: Prop. 174, which would have given parents a tuition subsidy to a private or parochial school equal to half of per-student funding at public schools eventually did make the November 1993 general election ballot; voters defeated it 70 to 30 percent.)
There was strong teacher opposition to the charter legislation from both AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and CTA (California Teachers Association) even though ironically, I got the idea from Al Shanker (the late president of the American Federation of Teachers) who had written about it. I was a great fan and Shanker had come out and testified on a number of occasions to legislation that we were considering.

“Charter fights in places like L.A. Unified have become almost religious wars, where large amounts of money are spent, and having an appeals process that is less political makes sense to me.”

The focal point of the unions was largely to ensure that collective bargaining laws would not be tampered with in the charter law. That issue was very contentious and I refused to budge. My position was that there needed to be a choice for teachers whether to form a union at a charter school.

Legislative ‘jiu-jitsu’

EDSOURCE: How did you ever get it passed?
HART: It wasn’t easy. The unions were strongly opposed and many other education groups — ACSA (Association of California School Administrators) and CSBA (California School Boards Association) — were neutral perhaps because they didn’t want to antagonize CTA. It was pretty lonely out there. We engaged in some legislative jiu-jitsu and pulled the bill out of conference committee and passed it quickly off the Senate floor with no debate and sent it to Gov. Wilson, who signed it into law. If we had followed traditional procedures and the unions had had time to work the bill, it likely would not have passed.
EDSOURCE: Did it become apparent that there would be resistance and that some folks in many districts at the time didn’t like competition? You knew that, right, because you set up an appeals process?
HART: We did, and it wasn’t that we had a cynical view towards school districts, but there was a potential conflict of interest that made, I thought, an appeals process a good idea. School boards and school administrators might oppose any charter because it might mean less district control, less revenue and more competition. So having an appeals process made sense and I thought county boards, who were also elected and had a sense of local issues, were the right bodies to hear appeals. Six years later the charter law was amended to provide another appeal to the State Board of Education. I understand now the state board spends up to half its time hearing charter appeals, which I’m not sure is a good use of state board time given all the other policy matters on their plate.
EDSOURCE: Would you eliminate that ultimate appeals process because it’s not a good use of (state board) time, or do you think someone else ought to be the ultimate authority or should you just keep it at the county level and whatever happens there happens?
HART: I still believe a charter appeals process is a good idea but charters are now becoming a campaign issue with some county boards of education so I’m not sure they are the right venue for appeals. Charter fights in places like L.A. Unified have become almost religious wars, where large amounts of money are spent, and having an appeals process that is less political makes sense to me. Perhaps the State Board of Education could appoint an expert panel to review and have the final say on charter appeals. I favor making the process less political and handled by more neutral people.

Financial impact on districts

EDSOURCE: Some districts are very frank about the financial impact of charter schools. “Look, we can’t afford it. We’re making cuts and you’re asking us to start new charter schools adding to the financial problems we have.” If you were to redo the law, would you hold a district harmless for the financial impact or compensate it for the impact of a charter?
HART: Some districts face loss of revenue due to charter growth, and many districts face unsustainable long-term employee health care costs and all districts face escalating pension contributions. A review of state financing seems in order. We have had funding adjustments to mitigate for declining enrollment. Perhaps something like that ought to be considered for districts with many charter schools. But a strict “hold harmless” for districts losing students to charters doesn’t make sense, as it would reward districts for not being competitive and it might also provide an incentive for districts to push out “undesirable” students. Trying to accommodate various factors that are affecting the financing of a district gets very complicated. There are unintended consequences you have to be careful about.
Districts have many financial challenges and it seems to me that charters are not the primary or even significant part of the financial problems districts face in the long term — those problems are going to remain with or without charter schools.
EDSOURCE: Looking back, seeing what people are saying now are some of the challenges to the law, what changes might you make?
HART: We now have more than 1,000 charter schools in California and we know little about their successes and failures. Some work has been done comparing charter to traditional public schools on student achievement but, given the great variety of charter schools, I’m not sure about the value of that body of research.
I would be interested in research on topics like school size — charters tend to be smaller. School mission — charters tend to have a specific rather than a comprehensive mission. Accountability — it’s easier to dismiss staff in charter schools. And school governance — charter board members are not elected by the general public and do not have to raise money to run for office. There’s a lot to explore with 25-plus years of experience and data.
I think we’re hungry for highlighting and replicating what is working well, whether it’s in a charter school or in a traditional school. We don’t do a good job of that.


Charter School Capital logoSince the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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Charter School ExpansionHow Is Charter School Expansion Challenging the Status Quo?

This video was originally published here by PragerU. It asks the question if every other sector of the American economy has the opportunity to benefit from the ability to compete and improve, why not the education sector? And, is it unfair to hold minority parents and students hostage in underperforming public schools? Overall, charter school expansion has provided an entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo and delivered results that make it worth continuing to expand this educational option for parents.
Our mission is to see continued charter school expansion, the overall growth of the charter school movement, and more students better served by having educational choice. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other post that we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please watch the video and read the transcript below to learn more.

Are Charter Schools Better Than Traditional Public Schools?


Historically, education in the United States has been split between private schools and traditional public schools. However, this dynamic changed in 1991 when Minnesota passed the first law establishing charter schools in the state. Since then, a majority of states have some kind of charter school system. But what exactly is a charter school?

What are Charter Schools?

• Charter schools offer education ranging in grades K through 12 without charge to students.
• Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but are generally subject to fewer rules and regulations than traditional public schools and they usually receive less public funds per pupil than public schools.
• Charter school students typically take the state required standardized tests as public school students.
• Depending on state law, these schools can be started by parents, teachers, nonprofit groups, corporations or even government organizations.
• Charter schools may focus on specific skills and subjects like math or science or may be aimed at students who require alternative learning methods such as teaching lessons that use visual or more hands-on approaches.
But these entities just can’t start one whenever they please. They must first obtain authorization from either the school district, city or state, depending on how the charter school laws are structured. And the charter school model has achieved various levels of success.

Charter School Expansion

Over the past 25 years, the number of charter schools in the US has skyrocketed, forcing more competition and faster improvement among existing public and private schools. As of 2016, there are almost 7,000 charter schools serving three million students and since 2000, charter school enrollment has increased by 600%.
But as charter schools have become more popular, opposition has grown. Teacher unions and other public school activists argue that charter schools take money away from traditional public schools. However, it’s unfair to hold minority parents and students hostage in underperforming public schools.
Challenging the Status Quo
Overall, charter schools have provided an entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo and delivered results that make it worth expanding this option for parents. According to a 2015 Stanford study, not only do charter schools provide significantly higher levels of growth in math and reading for all students, but minority and low-income students benefit disproportionately more.
Charter schools are becoming a bigger part of the US education system every year and for millions of American families, they offer a much-needed choice that’s different than a one size fits all public school.
Every other sector of the American economy has benefited from the ability to compete and improve, why not education?


Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to Charter School Capital logocharter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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charter school solutions

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Philissa Cramer and Monica Disare. It was originally published here on April 19, 2018 by Chalkbeat.  As the election season is upon us, there is no better time to think about how some charter school solutions could potentially make students more civically minded. I think we’d all agree that our young people – our future voters – should understand that their voices and their votes both matter and count. This interesting article asks (and answers) the question, “Can schools encourage students to be more involved citizens?”

We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please read on to learn more.


Can schools encourage students to be more involved citizens? A new study suggests yes they can.

In a city of roughly 1,800 schools, many have names that have little to do with what students experience.
Not so for Democracy Prep, a network of charter schools that a new study concludes makes students far more likely to vote once they turn 18.
The study, conducted by independent researchers commissioned by Democracy Prep, took advantage of New York City’s charter school admissions rules to examine the impact of applying to, getting accepted to, and enrolling in the network’s schools on later civic participation.
Looking at more than a thousand students who applied between 2007 and 2015 who were old enough to vote in 2016, the researchers found that just being selected in the admissions lottery was correlated with a slight increase in voting rates. Students who were chosen voted 6 percentage points more often than students who were not.
The impact was much greater on students who were chosen and actually enrolled: They voted 24 percentage points more often than students who applied but never got a chance to attend.
The findings suggest that Democracy Prep is achieving its explicit goal of promoting civic participation. They also offer one answer to the question of whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, undermine democracy.
“Democracy Prep provides a test case of whether charter schools can successfully serve the foundational purpose of public education—preparation for citizenship—even while operating outside the direct control of elected officials,” the researchers write. “With respect to the critical civic participation measures of registration and voting, the answer is yes.”Seth Andrew, who started the network with a single middle school in Harlem in 2006, said he was pleased by the findings — and unsurprised because the network has baked civic participation into its culture and academic program. Students must take on a personal “Change the World” project and pass the U.S. citizenship exam to graduate.
“This idea of ‘change the world’ was very central to what we were trying to get our kids prepared and excited to do,” he said.
Creating more engaged citizens takes more than just adding a civics class, said Katie Duffy, the CEO of Democracy Prep. Schools have to make democracy a part of the daily culture, she said.
“The more you talk about the importance of voting, the importance of elections, the importance of advocacy,” she said, “the more it becomes ingrained in our kids.”
The network has also long used Election Day — when district-run schools are often closed so their buildings can be used as polling stations — as a teachable moment.
In 2008, Democracy Prep students spent the day working to get out the vote in their neighborhoods. Four years later, Democracy Prep schools were among the few housed in city space that got special permission to stay open — and the network sent students out to advance the “Vote for Somebody” campaign it had kicked off in a catchy viral video. The next year, students promoted a different message — “I can’t vote but you can” — in an effort to boost the city’s 11 percent primary election voter participation rate.
The network’s influence extends far beyond its students. In 2012, six years into the network’s existence, officials estimated that students had helped 5,000 New Yorkers register to vote. Now, the network runs 22 schools in five states.
Andrew said the study’s findings about the impact of the network — which he left in 2012 to work on other civic engagement initiatives, including at the White House — offer only a start at a time when the United States lags behind other developed countries in voter turnout.
“I was thrilled with the outcome,” said Andrew. “But then as the guy that founded Democracy Prep I feel like there’s a whole lot of room to grow.”
Correction: A previous version of this story described the increase in voting caused by Democracy Prep as a percent figure, rather than in percentage points.


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