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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National Charter Schools Week E-Greeting
National Charter Schools Week has begun! The Charter School Leadership Council is offering an attractive e-greeting that can be appended to your email messages. Just add it as an attachment and it will appear at the bottom of all your messages this week. And visit the National Charter Schools Week homepage (http://www.charterschoolleadershipcouncil.org/ncsw/2005/home.asp) and review interesting state-level activities.
State of the Charter School Movement 2005: Trends, Issues, and Indicators
This report offers an assessment of the state of the charter school movement as of 2005, focusing on the most significant trends, issues, and indicators. It contains seven chapters on several topics, including charter school growth, academic performance, accountability, impact, politics and policies, support, and public opinion. One highlight included is the “Charter Dashboard,” a selection of key indicators that describe at a glance the status and momentum of charter schooling. The author finds the movement to be dynamic and strong, with many successes, but faced with the ongoing challenges of start-up and facility problems, re-regulation, caps, state and local resistance, inadequate funding, political pressure, lawsuits, capacity constraints, and well-publicized high-profile meltdowns. He applauds the movement’s accomplishments and tremendous promise, but cautions there is “heavy lifting ahead.”
Magnet and Specialized Schools of the Future: A Focus on Change
This book provides advice on construction of a new building, addition, or renovation of a magnet or charter school. Twelve exemplary projects are described, followed by guidance on funding, finding a home for the school, designing for autistic students, specialized school design, technology, site design and landscape architecture for urban schools, acoustics, indoor air quality, sustainable design, and design-build project delivery. A draft charter school operations plan and 36 references are included.
Charter Achievement Among Low-Income Students
This brief focuses on eight studies that analyze how well charter schools do with economically disadvantaged students. The majority of them find that charters are doing as well or better with low-income students. Four studies show low-income students in charter schools doing better than low-income students enrolled in district schools; two studies show they are performing about the same; and two show they are performing worse. Three of the studies look at change over time, rather than snapshots of one-time performance, and all of these show more progress for high-poverty charter schools.
Evaluating the Performance of Charter Schools in Connecticut
This report, commissioned by the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), focuses on performance gains made by charter schools on standardized tests relative to gains made by traditional public schools. The evaluation compared the performance of students at eight state charter elementary and middle schools on the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMT) in reading, writing, and math to students in nearby traditional public schools. It tracked groups of students in fourth, sixth, and eighth grade over time and measured changes in test scores, to gauge the value added by the school. Researchers found that charter schools made much larger gains in three out of four groups, outperforming the traditional public schools by at least 10 points on all three tests. The results in this report are largely in line with a report from 2002 that showed the state's charter school students gaining more on state assessment tests.
Choosing A School for Your Child
This guidebook provides details about the school choice options families have under the federal No Child Left Behind act and lists the different types of public schools (district, charter, magnet, virtual, etc.) and nonpublic schools from which they can choose. The document is also a workbook designed to help families select a school that will be the best fit for their child by identifying the student's learning style and matching it with the school that will best meet their needs. Several lists of questions for families to consider about an individual school’s environment, faculty, curriculum, approach to learning, academic performance, safety, behavior policy, facilities, services, and extracurricular activities are provided.
Massachusetts Full Charter School Task Force Report
This report, released by the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, offers many recommendations for redesigning the state’s charter school funding mechanism and application and oversight processes. Recommendations include: (1) charging public school districts a maximum tuition rate of either $5,000 or 75% of per pupil spending of the sending district for each student attending a charter school, (2) requiring charter schools to complete end-of-the-year financial reports, (3) providing transitional financial assistance to school districts impacted by the closure or non-renewal of a charter school, and (4) enhancing fairness, transparency and accountability within the Department of Education’s charter review process. The report states that while charter schools are worth continuing, the state should initiate a full and independent review of the effectiveness of charter school policies and charter schools before spending additional resources.
Texas Charter School Legislation and the Evolution of Open-Enrollment Charter Schools
In 1995, the Texas Legislature authorized the creation of three types of charter schools: (1) home-rule district charters, (2) campus (or program) charters, and (3) open-enrollment charters. Open-enrollment charters are independent school districts, whose service areas may cross one or several existing district attendance boundaries. This paper focuses on Texas open-enrollment charter school legislation and the characteristics of 159 open-enrollment charter schools in the state. The researchers found that open-enrollment charter schools in Texas were more racially and economically segregated than other public schools; likely to provide self-paced individualized instruction; and were more likely to have significantly greater teacher turnover than other public schools in the state.
Choices in Education Database
This database offers information on school choice laws and enrollment opportunities in each state. The site also provides archives of school choice research, news, and chronologies of school choice policy arranged by state.
Strong Charter School Laws are Those That Result in Positive Outcomes
This paper argues that strong charter school laws should be judged not by the amount of autonomy they grant or the conditions present that lead to increased numbers of charter schools, but rather, by the positive outcomes they provide. Considering data from a federally-sponsored study and findings from nine large-scale evaluations of charter schools, the author identifies and explains the key features of strong charter school laws and state-level factors that are related to strong laws. The characteristics of slow growth, bipartisan support, rigorous approval and oversight processes, technical assistance provision, and sufficient funding are found to more likely to lead to successful charter school reform.
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