Last month, the US Department of Education and the National Charter School Resource Center hosted an Accountability Summit to explore emerging accountability challenges across the charter school sector and to discuss a variety of strategy and policy options to support quality as the sector expands. NACSA helped organize the event and almost 100 SEA charter school program leaders, [...]
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Last week in New Orleans, NACSA wrestled with issues of standardization and differentiation in the charter school sector. We held our annual joint meeting of our Board of Directors and National Advisory Board in the French Quarter and, despite the festive surroundings, had a number of serious and enlightening discussions. In a dinner discussion that [...]
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A new report, Searching for Excellence: A Five-City, Cross-State Comparison of Charter School Quality, by researchers at Public Impact and published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute examines charter school performance in five cities, Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis and finds that overall the charter sector in these cities outperformed their local district schools. They also found, though, [...]
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It may still be cold and drizzly in Washington this time of year, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped everybody from rolling up their sleeves. That is good, because as people launch a charter sector, there is a great deal of important work to do in the next few months. I was making the [...]
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In the second post of a two-part series, Scott Pearson, Executive Director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, addresses another big question raised in Emma Brown’s recent article on charter school growth in the nation’s capital: joint planning. Pearson says that “everyone in the city, from residents to public officials, supports the idea of more joint education planning.” But, [...]
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Guest Post from Rob Kimball, Sr. Director of Operations & Policy, Grand Valley State University Charter Schools Office Regardless of the size of an authorizer’s portfolio, a laser-like focus on school performance is critical to the practice of charter school authorizing. Grand Valley State University (GVSU)* authorizes 52 charter schools across Michigan serving nearly 25,000 students. With a [...]
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Scott Pearson, Executive Director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, has a new two-part blog post up about the questions raised in Emma Brown’s recent article on charter school growth in the nation’s capital. In the first post, Pearson argues that the sky isn’t falling for D.C. Public Schools and notes that contrary to popular [...]
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The Fordham Institute’s Adam Emerson emphasizes the critical role that new schools must play in the transformation of one million lives. The One Million Lives Campaign launched in the fall by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers has captured popular (and media) attention, mostly for its call to shutter the worst-performing charter schools. But that’s only half of its purpose. [...]
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As part of its annual Call for Quality Options, the Louisiana Department of Education has launched a new interactive information center to accompany the various ways in which the department is seeking to attract and evaluate proposals from new providers. The dashboard displays information geographically and provides parish-level detail about academic performance, opportunities for [...]
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Do struggling charter schools need a “mercy rule“? As in Little League baseball, sometimes things start out so badly for one team that you just need to step in and stop the game early. The latest study by Macke Raymond and her colleagues at CREDO prompted this question for me. I recommend reading the whole [...]
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The Washington Post’s Emma Brown scratches the surface of some of the difficult issues that arise when a city’s charter schools educate the same percentage of kids as its district schools.
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Crossposted at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Closing schools, district or charter, is almost always difficult and disruptive. We should not pretend, though, that the disruption that comes with closure is worse than the consequences of maintaining schools that fail to educate students year after year. Kids in failing schools need and deserve better options. [...]
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The Charter School Growth and Replication study released last week by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has important implications for charter authorizers. The study’s key findings–that charter school performance is established early in the school’s first term and does not change over time and that performance is consistent among a charter management organization’s [...]
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Careful replication of high-performers is one important method for growing high-quality schools. The Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation is doing just that, with recent approvals of seven new charter schools—six of which are replications. Mayor Greg Ballard has made education a major focal point for his administration. In a city where close to half of over 140,000 [...]
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The National Alliance has released new numbers from its Public Charter Schools Dashboard showing that this past fall 500 new charter schools opened their doors and an additional 270,000 students enrolled in charter schools over last year. Check out their blog post on the new numbers here and their new Details from the Dashboard feature here.
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Cross-Posted from the Fordham Institute’s “Choice Words” blog. Last week, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) launched “One Million Lives,” a multi-pronged campaign to provide better schools to one million children by closing failing charter schools and opening many more good ones. It might seem odd that an organization that supports charter schools [...]
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Today, NACSA launched One Million Lives, a multi-pronged campaign to provide better schools to one million children by closing failing charter schools and opening many more good ones. WASHINGTON, D.C. – While a great many public charter schools are among their states’ best performers and are paving the way for educational innovation across the U.S., too [...]
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Earlier this week, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) released its annual market share report (PDF). The report shows that charter school enrollment continues to grow rapidly. From 2010-11 to 2011-12, charter school enrollment grew by 13 percent. The report also shows that in many cities, including some of the nation’s largest urban districts, [...]
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