The Charter Blog

In Los Angeles yesterday, the board of education voted to make Birmingham High School the city’s fourth conversion charter. School board member and BHS alum Tamar Galatzan voted for conversion, reported the Los Angeles Times today. "My community is crying out for choices," she said. "My community is crying out for innovation."

The good news from Arizona is that twice as many charter high school students could pass a basic citizenship test than could their district peers. The bad news is that their pass rate was 7%.

But goshdarnit , does anyone know what Al Franken thinks about charter schools…?

The thing that makes the new education blog over at the National Journal a little different than the rest is that every week now the magazine is offering up a question and seeking responses from a range of leaders from non-profits like ours to Education Secretary Duncan. So the first question this week was...

Folks at this week’s National Charter Schools Conference applauded Arne Duncan and gave Michelle Rhee a Standing O – but after hearing Howard Fuller’s closing speech they were positively Fired Up! 

This is a guy who doesn’t mince words, including when talking about certain “scoundrels”  in our own movement. Click here for the video.

NS

After delivering a keynote address at the National Charter Schools Conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took a few questions on charter funding, facilities and how states' attitudes toward charters will affect their access to funds available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Read the Q&A transcript below and the complete keynote address here.

“Welcome to Washington. We come together in an absolutely historic time in which we can transform public education in our country. Over the past hundred days I've visited over fifteen states and dozens and dozens of schools in those states: high-performing schools, struggling schools, charter schools, traditional schools - inner-city Detroit, West Virginia, Milwaukee, an Indian reservation in Montana. What was fascinating is how similar all the challenges are - inner-city, urban, rural, and suburban.

A new report, just out from CREDO at Stanford University, looks at performance of charter school kids in 16 states as compared to peers in traditional public schools. Mostly it repeats what we already know:  that performance ranges from great to poor, and is strongly affected by the quality of authorizing, among other factors. The report also offers support for Obama’s bust-the-caps position, saying that kids in non-cap states do better.

Freshman Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) is one of the bright lights of the Class of 2009 in Washington. What's his secret to early success? In this piece written for CNN, Polis explains... "To be effective in Congress, you must focus. With so many issues and debates occurring at any given time, it is easy to spread yourself too thin and lose sight of your goal." And what's his focus?

Consistent with previous speeches voicing strong support for public charter schools, Secretary Duncan on Monday reiterated the call for state governments to lift caps on charter schools saying, “We don’t put a cap on graduation rates. We don’t say ‘We have reached our goal of 20% graduation so we don’t need to graduate more kids.' In the same sense we should not limit charter schools.” 

By a vote of 20-14, the Maine Senate this afternoon narrowly rejected a bill already passed by the House to make Maine the 41st state with charter schools. The vote came despite impassioned speeches on the floor of the Senate...

Will the state legislature move a bill this week to the Governor to make Maine the 41st state with a charter school law? The latest news is that the House has approved a bill that the Senate's rejected. The Senate's back in session this afternoon at 2 pm. If they don't to go caucus right away - and they might - you can catch the action by tuning in...

Just when things weren't looking so good in Augusta, several hours ago (Friday afternoon) the Maine House voted "yes" to establish charter schools in the state for the first time.

Today, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan visits North Star Public Charter School Academy in Newark NJ as part of his 15+ state listening tour. North Star is beating all the odds - and the competition...

The Illinois General Assembly took two steps in the right direction with the passage of Senate Bill 612 last weekend, becoming the first state to respond to President Obama’s and Secretary Duncan’s appeals to lift caps on charter school growth...

Students from Howard Road Academy Charter School in Washington, D.C. heard that we'd invited President Obama to speak at the National Charter Schools Conference in Washington, D.C. on June 21-24, were so excited that they wanted to tell him themselves. That's how we ended up with this heartfelt video invitation. Read more to find out how you can help them!

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released The Condition of Education 2009 today. The Condition is a gold mine for researchers and policy wonks: acres of test scores and survey results, Excel sheets groaning with figures on school spending and teacher demography.

The Washington Post posed this question recently to NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein: Enrollment in [regular] D.C. public schools is dropping quickly as charter schools proliferate. Is that a positive trend? Klein is in position to know. Since his appointment by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, his impact has stretched far beyond NYC to include, among many things, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's plans to shake up the education status quo.  

Kudos to the leaders of the Renaissance Charter School in New York for taking time out of their busy schedules to hold a community panel last week and debunk a few of the myths that some charter school opponents are fond of spreading. No, charter schools aren't...