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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Building Choice Website
The Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education has created this online toolkit to support public school choice efforts around the country. Designed for school administrators and others involved with education management, it offers an array of tools taken from real life experiences and used by districts and schools that have succeeded in implementing public school choice programs. The site includes five key action areas: Create a Vision, Communicate with Parents, Manage Operations, Support Schools, and Evaluate the Program. Each focus area offers several types of resources including vignettes illustrating promising practices; sample materials such as forms, brochures, and meeting agendas; tools such as templates and example processes developed specifically for the website; and links to other helpful websites, articles, and organizations. Several charter resources are included.
Learning on the Job: When Business Takes On Public Schools
In this book, Steven Wilson, former CEO of Advantage Schools, examines leading Education Management Organizations (EMOs) to document the challenges and successes of their business and educational models. Wilson looks at Edison Schools, Chancellor Beacon Academies, Sabis, National Heritage Academies and the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). While acknowledging that EMOs still have more to learn about the real-world challenges of running schools, he is passionate about the promise of private involvement in public schooling.
Bruce Guadalupe Community School: A Model for Charter School Success
Bruce Guadalupe Community School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin has evolved from a parochial school to private non-sectarian school to a choice school, and finally to a charter school. A K4-8th grade school with a largely low-income Latino student population, it has succeeded with consistently rising student test scores, outstanding parent participation, and strong staff retention. New charter school developers will find this book especially helpful as it details the process and challenges of starting a charter school.
Challenges Facing Utah Charter Schools
This study compares district and charter school finance in Utah and documents that charters suffer from a significant funding shortfall. In 2004, charter schools received $801 per pupil less than district schools. Over two-thirds of the difference is due to the exclusion of several revenue sources from the "local replacement funding" formula for charter schools. These include debt service revenues and state funds that supplement local property taxes. A smaller portion of the funding difference is caused by differing student populations. (Charter schools in Utah do not enroll as many disadvantaged students who qualify for certain types of federal aid.) The authors suggest that to reduce the funding gap between charter schools and districts, policymakers should focus on facility support and revenues that are provided to charter schools on a per-pupil basis.
Empowering Teachers and Parents with Charter Schools Can Bring New Opportunities to Urban Areas
This article, written by Caprice Young, former Los Angeles Unified School District board president and current CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, details how less regulation and more accountability in the charter school model has led to increased student achievement in urban areas. She documents how California's charter schools are relieving overcrowding, providing small, safe, and high-achieving learning alternatives, and keeping public school teachers and administrators engaged in the teaching profession. She discusses how charter and university leaders are collaborating on developing high quality education options serving inner city and other historically disadvantaged students. If the charter model can be replicated throughout the whole system, she believes that all public school children will succeed.
Data Wise: A Step-by-step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning
This book offers clear and concise steps for analyzing data resulting from student achievement results and accountability requirements. It is designed to help educators learn how to capture teachers' knowledge, foster collaboration, identify obstacles to change, enhance school culture and climate, and improve students' results from data analysis.
The State of Charter Schools in Colorado 2004-05
This study analyzes data from the 2004-05 school year related to the characteristics of Colorado's charter schools, including student achievement. Charter students generally made larger gains in reading, writing, math and science in the past three years than students in traditional schools. Elementary public charter school students did better academically than students in traditional public schools. Charter and non-charter students generally scored similarly within the middle school years in reading and math. Charter high school students performed below non-charter school students in writing, reading and math in the high school years. Researchers found that high school charters in the state seek to enroll students considered to be at-risk. Charter schools are an increasingly popular choice for families in Colorado. Since 2001-02, charter school student enrollment has increased by 49.5 percent.
Getting Inside the Black Box: Examining How the Operation of Charter Schools Affect Performance
Using student achievement and survey data of both charter and district public schools from Los Angeles, the researchers examine the connection between operational features (such as non-core subject instruction, autonomy, and leadership characteristics) and student achievement. Surprisingly, greater emphasis in foreign languages is found to result in poorer math and reading test scores. Researchers suggest that the time spent on learning a foreign language may "crowd out" core subjects. After controlling for student and school characteristics, they find that while charter school principals have more control over discipline, assessment, expenses, curriculum, and staff management than district school principals, there is no strong evidence that leadership autonomy leads to higher test scores. The authors recognize that greater autonomy in charter schools may have other benefits than test score improvement for teachers, parents, and students.
The Effect of Charter Schools on School Peer Competition
Examining charter and traditional public schools in California and Texas, the authors find that black students in both states are more likely to move to charter schools and tend to move to charter schools with a higher percentage of black students, and those schools are more racially concentrated than the public schools they leave. Students who move to charter schools are on average lower performing than other students at the public schools they leave and that this performance gap is largest for black students. The researchers conclude: "These findings should relieve some of the fears of the critics who argued that charter schools could become white enclaves and skim the best students. In fact, it appears that charter schools are targeting some of the more challenging students. However, on the downside, charter schools, through black student choices, may create greater segregation and expose these students to less diversity."
2006 Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference
The sixth annual Wisconsin charter school conference, sponsored by the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, will take place April 2-4 in Appleton. State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster keynotes the opening general session. Presenters include Howard Fuller, John Witte, Tom Scullen, and charter school leaders.
Stunting Growth: The Impact of State-Imposed Caps on Charter Schools
This report identifies the states with legislated limits on charter school growth and documents the impact these laws have on families seeking high quality public schools. While restrictions in 25 states and the District of Columbia create a negative effect on charter school expansion, state-imposed caps are found to be severely constraining charter school growth in 10 states. Nine states have reached have their caps as of January 2006: Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island. Policy recommendations include: (1) never limit quality schools and authorizers; (2) include sunset provisions; (3) make new charter laws free of limits; and, (4) create a federal role for encouraging growth.
Chartering 2.0: Designing the Future of Charter Schooling, Summit Proceedings
In August 2005, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools gathered some of the nation's top charter school leaders and education reform experts to consider and prepare for the next generation of the charter school movement. This document details the key points from keynotes and breakout sessions.
2006 National Charter Schools Conference
U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is now scheduled to participate live, via satellite, on March 2 at the 2006 National Charter Schools Conference (to be held February 28 - March 3, 2006 in Sacramento, CA).* In a conversation with John Merrow (host of PBS' Learning Matters), she will discuss the impact of what is happening in New Orleans on the overall charter school movement. Other featured speakers include Bill Nye the Science Guy and a host of national charter experts and advocates who will share their perspectives on the state of the charter movement. View programming (over 170 sessions and table-talk discussions to choose from) and speaker details, as well as register and make hotel reservations at the conference web site at http://www.charterconference.org. To register by phone, call 800-280-6218. *Participation subject to Senator Landrieu's schedule.
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