On average, the funding gap between charter schools and traditional schools is 22 percent, or $1,800 per pupil. The average charter school ends up with a total funding shortfall of nearly half a million dollars.
Source: Charter School Funding: Inequity’s Next Frontier
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Expanding the Circle: Charter Schools and the News Media
This handbook is designed to help charter school leaders and faculty identify key messages to share with the public, select spokespersons, work with reporters and editorial boards, write opinion pieces, and become generally media-savvy.
Teacher Professional Partnerships: A Different Way to Help Teachers and Teaching
This document explores a new way to think about the role of teachers in school -- teachers as "owners" of the school. Other professionals, like lawyers and doctors, routinely own their practices. They make decisions about hiring, dismissals, pay, and the work of the practice. This document asks: "Why not teachers?" More and more schools are forming around this idea, and this document explains the concept.
NACSA's Online Library of Charter School Authorizer Resources
This library is the most comprehensive clearinghouse and directory of documents and websites created by charter-authorizing agencies and related state education departments nationwide. It provides access to a collection of resources, policies, protocols and tools used by diverse authorizers in all areas and phases of chartering practice. Documents can be browsed by category or agency.
Education Week's Charter Schools' Issues
Education Week, the leading journal for those involved with K-12 public schools, provides and regularly updates an online resource that describes charter schools, their benefits and challenges, and trends. The website links to recent Education Week articles about charter schools, new reports about charter schools, associated organizations, and charter school terms.
Facilities Financing: New Models for Districts that are Creating Schools New
Much of the work being done by the new organization, Education|Evolving, is to help create and sustain an "Open Sector" -- a "space" in public education that is open to new schools (often charter schools) that are started from scratch by teachers, parents, community organizations and multi-school networks. Since this new model of public education may outstrip funds available through traditional sources of facilities financing, the brief examines promising emerging solutions under three headings: tapping non-traditional sources of funds for school financing; finding ways to economize and rethink the use of brick-and-mortar buildings; and, establishing real estate trusts and intermediaries. The report provides details on each of these strategies, including specific examples of how districts and schools have implemented them, and a list of additional readings on the topics.
Innovations in Education: Successful Charter Schools
This guide from the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education profiles some of the nation's highest performing charter schools. The guide is divided into two parts: The first section provides an overview of common elements of these excellent schools, including: organizational structure; leadership and mission; innovative curricula and programs; efforts to promote a community of continuous learning; partnerships with parents and the community; and accountability for results. The second section provides descriptions about each of the schools featured. The schools highlighted include Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy (TX); the BASIS School (AZ); Gates Charter Language School (CA); Oglethorpe Charter School (GA); Arts and Technology Public Charter School (DC); School of Arts and Sciences Charter School (FL); Roxbury Preparatory Charter School (MA); and, Community of Peace Charter School (MN).
Do EMO-operated Charter Schools Serve Disadvantaged Students?
This paper examines over 500 charter schools in 13 states to see how state policies foster or hinder EMO-managed charter schools' service to disadvantaged students and how the characteristics of charter schools themselves affect this outcome. The researcher finds that certain policy characteristics (multiple chartering authorities and requiring the transportation of students, etc) are important for encouraging schools to serve low-income and minority students. Being managed by a large-EMO was positively, but not significantly, related to charter school enrollment of low-income and minority students.
Condition of Education 2004
The federal government's annual "Condition of Education" summarizes important developments and trends in public and private education. The 2004 edition includes 38 indicators in six main areas: (1) enrollment trends and student characteristics; (2) student achievement and the longer-term, enduring effects of education; (3) student effort and rates of progress through the educational system among different population groups; (4) contexts of elementary and secondary education in terms of courses taken, teacher characteristics, and other factors; (5) contexts of postsecondary education; and (6) societal support for learning, including parental and community support for learning, and public and private financial support of education at all levels.
Starting Fresh: A New Strategy for Responding to Chronically Low Performing Schools
This report investigates the strategy of replacing schools that consistently fail to meet the educational needs of students with "new" schools. Though these new schools operate in the same buildings as the schools they replace, they are "new" in every other important sense. They have new leaders as well as substantially new staffing. Because they are starting from scratch, the new schools can build their cultures, routines, and systems from the ground up. They have the freedom to select new staff who are committed to the chosen design and the autonomy to manage staff and resources as they go forward. The report finds that when these schools open anew they begin to implement well thought out designs, developed or adapted specifically to address the needs of the target population of students.
Source: Public Impact
Charter Schools and the Teaching Quality Provisions of NCLB
This paper defines the No Child Left Behind requirement for "highly qualified" teachers and what the charter school community must do to meet this challenge.
Source: Education Commission of the States
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