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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A New Day for Learning
The Time, Learning, and Afterschool Task Force (funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation) has released a report about dramatically restructuring the school day/year. The document offers several recommendations for organizing school time more effectively and how to create a seamless learning day for children. The report includes "real life" charter schooling examples from Big Picture Schools and the Harlem Children’s Zone.
No More Nailing Jell-O to Walls: Strategic Planning Made Clear for the Charter School Sector
This document from the National Charter Schools Institute applies the principles of strategic planning to the charter school sector. It examines three core organization processes: the people, the operations, and the business strategy, and views strategic planning as the process of integrating those processes, and harmonizing them with the external environment. The authors lead the readers through several questions in the core areas and provide recommendations on how to integrate planning strategies successfully.
Principal Blogging Project
The University of Minnesota's Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education was created to boost the number of school leaders who know how to effectively use technology in their schools and districts. The organization has started a Principal Blogging Project to encourage school leaders to create their own blogs to share news and events with the community, to market their schools, and to build community investment. Principals are finding blogs to be good vehicles for community building and charter school leaders, in particular, may find it a strong tool for marketing and public relations.
Steadying the Three-Legged Stool: Authorizers, Charter Schools, and Education Service Providers
This document is a primer for authorizers overseeing contractual relationships between charter schools and education service providers (ESP). It is designed to help authorizers understand the benefits that ESPs can bring to charter schools, as well as how to oversee these service relationships effectively. The brief identifies the main types of education service providers currently serving the charter school market and details various reasons why charter schools contract with these organizations. It also examines authorizers' responsibilities in approving and overseeing charter schools that contract with ESPs and offers a summary of best practices.
Mixed Use Facilities: Charter Schools' Innovative Classroom Choices
This document released by the Low Income Investment Fund, which has provided over $100 million in loans to support the development and operation of high quality charter schools, summarizes the benefits and challenges charter schools may experience when sharing facilities with other organizations. Mixed-use facilities can provide significant cost savings and efficient use of available space for charters. They can also provide unique learning experiences and increase the interaction between schools, parents and community members, as well as strengthen neighborhoods. The document offers several strategies for success including seeking support from people with experience in construction management, land-use planning and architectural design; finding good partners who are collaborative and share a common vision; and integrating flexibility into the planning process.
Charter Market Database
The Charter School Growth Fund, a philanthropic venture firm that makes early-stage grants and loans for the development of charter management and support organizations, has created a Charter Market Database to assist charter school operators, funders and other members of the national charter community. The database currently has profiles of 15 states and tracks information regarding startup/expansion funding; ongoing funding; facilities funding; state legislature information; governor information; charter and choice legislation; advocacy and support; state accountability framework; performance data; state charter requirements; and several other variables. The Charter School Growth Fund hopes that the database will help the broad charter school community to understand the dynamics of different public charter school markets and to share knowledge of these dynamics with each other.
Overview of Texas Charter Schools in 2006-07
This policy brief documents the type, performance, and school characteristics of most of the 207 state-authorized, open-enrollment charters and 45 district-authorized charter campuses operating in Texas in 2006. Findings include: the state's charter schools serve greater percentages of African-American students and low-income students eligible to participate in the federal free/reduced-price lunch program than do traditional public schools; based on absolute test scores, charter students in Texas have performed lower on average than students in traditional public schools; the latest state test scores, however, show strong achievement gains in charters. Texas is now ranked fifth nationally in total number of charter schools and fourth in total number of charter students.
Student Progress and Achievement in Indiana Charter Schools: the Impact of Continued Enrollment
This report from the Office of Charter School Research at Ball State University, an Indiana charter school sponsor, examines the impact of the length of charter school attendance on charter school performance. The authors find that students who have attended charter schools for three years are more likely to meet expected growth benchmarks than those who are newer to charter schools. Students who attend charter schools for longer periods of time are more likely to perform at levels closer to their national peers. In addition, they found that minority students who have attended charter schools for three years achieve at a higher level than those who are new to the school and the achievement gap between minority students and Caucasian students is eliminated in the area of Mathematics. In Language Arts, achievement seems to increase with longevity in a charter school for both minority and Caucasian students.
Opening Doors: How Low-Income Parents Search for the Right School
Researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education have found that given the opportunity to select the schools their children attend, parents in low-income families choose schools using the same tools as parents with higher incomes, and that charter families in particular use a variety of resources for decision-making. Families rely on multiple sources of information, including school visits, meetings with administrators and teachers, printed materials, and word-of-mouth reviews from family and friends, in deciding which schools their children should attend. Charter parents were found to be "voracious users of information," with 72 percent of charter choosers report using two or more sources, compared to 59 percent of non-charter choosers. In gathering information, charter parents are more likely than other choosers to speak to principals or administrators (85% compared to 76%). Charter choosers are also more likely to use websites than other choosers (50% v. 28%) and attend school fairs (56% versus 37%).
Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference, April 15-17
The 7th Annual Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference will be held April 15-17 at the Country Springs Hotel in Waukesha. The conference will kick off on Sunday, April 15 with a free Charter Schools Fair. The fair is a celebration of charter schools in Wisconsin that is open to the public from 1 – 4 p.m. Charter schools from across the state will celebrate students' achievements through demonstrations, performances, and displays. The conference continues on Monday and Tuesday with 45 concurrent sessions and presentations from several speakers, including Morgan Brown, Assistant Deputy Secretary of U.S. Department of Education, Janice Ereth, Special Advisor to Children’s Research Center and Todd Ziebarth, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. For more information see the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association website or call 608-661-6946.
14th Annual California Charter Schools Conference, March 27-30 in San Diego, CA
The 14th Annual California Charter Schools Conference will take place March 27-30, 2007 at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center in San Diego, CA with a focus on "Teaching and Learning in High-Quality Charter Public Schools." The conference will offer sessions that share strategies and best practices that can be utilized to improve student achievement and charter school operations. The schedule for more than 200 breakout sessions and table talks is now available. For more information, send an email to conference@charterassociation.org or call 213.244.1446, ext. 2201.
Charter School Quality and Parental Decision-Making with School Choice
Analyzing the mathematics and reading performance (measured by average value-added) in Texas' charter schools, the authors of this article find that the performance of charter school students typically begins below that of students in regular public schools in the early years of operation. By the fourth or fifth year of operation, however, they find no significant differences between both types of public schools. The authors also find that the parental decision to exit a charter school is significantly related to school quality and that there is little evidence of systematic differences by family income in the relationship between the probability of exit from a charter school and charter performance. They conclude that "the results provide little support for the fear that lower income parents may have more difficulty acquiring the requisite information on school quality, though it is important to recognize that charter school families are not randomly drawn from the entire school population."
Do Charter Schools Threaten Public Education? Emerging Evidence from Fifteen Years of a Quasi-Market for Schooling
This article offers evidence that charter schools have not "skimmed" top performers from urban district schools and are not a threat to the public education system. The author does question the long-term sustainability of charter schools because of their reliance on private donations. He suggests that a positive consequence of the struggle for funding equity might allow charter schools to become allies with districts in a joint effort for increased public education support.
National Charter Schools Conference, April 24-27: Register Before March 1 to Avoid Late Registration Fees!
US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is confirmed as a keynote speaker during the closing General Session on April 27. She will join Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham and Kevin Johnson, former NBA star and Founder of St. HOPE Public Schools, as keynotes at the 7th National Charter Schools Conference, set for April 24 – 27 in Albuquerque. More than 3,000 charter school colleagues will convene in the "Land of Enchantment" to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the charter school movement. Go to the conference website to register, make reservations or participate in the Virtual Career Fair. Hosted by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the conference will feature more than 120 breakout sessions, focusing on Quality, Policy, Advocacy and Capacity. For questions, call 206-463-3344 or e-mail nationalconference@publiccharters.org.
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