Free Republic

Texas lawmakers added more than $6.5 billion new dollars to public education, allocating more total state funding to education than ever before. There’s a lot of interest in where all the money is going. The biggest recipients of education funding are public school districts, which receive financing from both state coffers and locally-collected taxes. But charter schools, public schools that are funded entirely by the state, will benefit, as well. Charter schools are given more autonomy in exchange for academic and innovative results. Because charter schools are another school option for many students, they help provide a crucial impact on...

A thousand miles from Newark, in a tiny old school building tucked behind a Christian church, Cary Booker delivered the bad news. It was spring of 2011, and Omni Prep Academy, the Tennessee charter school co-founded and led by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s older brother, could no longer pay its kindergarten and first-grade teachers, the elder Booker announced, according to former teachers who were in the room. The financial woes weren’t a shock — when the school opened the previous fall it provided no books, no curriculum and almost no training for its novice educators, former teachers said in interviews...

Charter schools, homeschooling coming under heavy fire from teacher unions March 4, 2019 (American Thinker) — For the first time in a generation, there is labor unrest in America's public schools. Strikes in Los Angeles, Denver, Oakland, and West Virginia as well as threatened strikes in other localities are more than teacher unions flexing their muscles to get more pay and benefits for their members. At issue everywhere is the success of charter schools and the perceived threat they pose to the nation's public schools. Indeed, Ray Domanico of the Manhattan Institute points out that the increased activism of the...

CHARLESTON, W. Va - UPDATE: 2/20/19 @ 7:30 p.m. Union leaders have announced that the teacher work stoppage has ended and that schools will reopen Thursday across the state.

Hours after the WV Teachers Unions announced a statewide strike, the Omnibus Education Bill passed through the Senate, 18-16. Last week, the House of Delegates made major changes to the bill but on Monday an amendment by the Senate washed away many of those changes. The new version of the bill reintroduced ESAs, with 1,000 for special needs and bullied students. It also took the number of charter schools from two to seven, with a limit of two introduced per year. Senate President Mitch Carmichael reacted to the strike on Twitter Monday night," After years of ruining our state’s public...

West Virginia teachers will continue to strike into Wednesday, although Republican Gov. Jim Justice has vowed since January he will not sign into law an education bill allowing charter schools and education savings accounts in the state. The New York Times, however, reported the teachers’ strike led to an immediate “victory” when the West Virginia House of Delegates voted Tuesday to table the bill. Similarly, the Associated Press reported union leaders were celebrating the decision of the West Virginia House of Delegates to kill the education bill that led to the strike: The House just voted on a motion made...

Now that, finally, the elections in Florida have reached a conclusion, there are lessons worth learning. One is on the subject of race. There was a fateful anomaly in racial voting in the governor's race between Democrat Andrew Gillum and Republican Rick DeSantis, now Florida's governor-elect. Given that Gillum, formerly mayor of Tallahassee, was running to become the first black governor of Florida, we might have expected black enthusiasm for his candidacy on the order of the waves of black enthusiasm for the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. But it didn't happen. Gillum received a lower percentage of the black...

California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters is certainly no stranger to controversy and scandal. In fact, she wallows in it. Waters strikes me as someone who believes she is above the law and can get away with whatever she wants. It’s one of the reasons she is seen as one of the most corrupt politicians in Congress. A new complaint has been filed against Waters and it and the new unfolding scandal surrounding the complaint has the potential to finish off her career. The complaint involves an obscure fundraising tactic that has raked in thousands of dollars from state politicians in...

Last December, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Senate Republicans scored what appeared to be a major victory for school choice by including the Student Opportunity Amendment in Congress’s tax cut package. The amendment expanded tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans to include K-12 education, giving families the ability to save up to $10,000 per child per year for private schools or religious schools. And although Democrats at the time shamefully discriminated against homeschoolers and children with disabilities by successfully working to remove those groups from the amendment, Cruz has now introduced standalone legislation that would restore both groups’ access to the...

Some 5,000 state employees have been sacked and 77,000 suspended in the purge since last month's failed coup in Turkey, the prime minister says. Binali Yildirim told reporters in Ankara that more than 3,000 of those sacked were members of the military. They are suspected of links to exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, he said. Announcing a visit to Turkey by US Vice-President Joe Biden, he again urged the US to extradite Mr Gulen. The cleric, a former ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, from where he runs a worldwide network of charities and...

Perhaps they should have talked to some people who work with them. "A documentary being screened in cities around the country, and shown here to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), purports to show how our public schools — and public schools everywhere — are being forced to close because charter schools are stealing 'their' money," Anthony Williams, David Hardy & Sharif El-Mekki write in Real Clear Education. "The notion that the closure of several Philadelphia schools was caused by greedy charter school operators is ludicrous." "The primary culprit was a long-accumulating budget deficit (totaling $1.35 billion), brought on by...

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s director of policy planning, now denies she endorsed Today’s Zaman, the flagship newspaper of Fethullah Gülen’s Islamist cult. Here is a google cache record with Prof. Slaughter’s endorsement, and here is the page now, with Professor Slaughter’s endorsement excised. Professor Slaughter denies she made the endorsementThere are two possible explanations: (1) Professor Slaughter is being truthful, and Today’s Zaman simply made it all up. If so, this suggests that the ethics of Zaman and the organization which sponsors it are non-existent. (2) Professor Slaughter asked for the retraction only after learning about Today’s...

The evidence piles up that in our largest city, charter schools can help the poor, even while the city's traditional public schools continue to pile up an abysmal record. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that in New York City public schools: • "The new results for charter students represent an increase of 22 days of learning in reading compared to their results four years ago. Results for math have remained the same. • "For Black and Hispanic students, the analysis indicates a significant academic advantage from charter school enrollment. • "Hispanic charter school students perform at...

The Minneapolis public school system is experiencing a massive student exodus and guess where they’re going. "About 70 percent of the kids leaving the district are headed to charter schools," Beena Raghavendran and Mary Jo Webster report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "Many of these independent public schools have established themselves in north Minneapolis, catering to black parents concerned about academic achievement, discipline and safety in the district schools." "Harvest Network has three schools and plans to grow. It aims to educate 3,800 of the kids on the North Side by 2025. That would cut MPS’ North Side enrollment by...

EXCLUSIVE: Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers' The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House. Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers. It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government. Among the phone numbers which the company took - which all suddenly stopped working - were lines...

It’s National Charter Schools Week, and parents, students, teachers, and community members across the nation are celebrating the success of their independent schools.Charters are technically public schools, since they’re publicly funded, tuition-free, and open to all students, but they’re privately managed and held to higher accountability standards than traditional public schools in exchange for increased flexibility in other areas.Charters, just like any institution contaminated by governmental mandates and bungled by burdensome bureaucracy, are far from ideal. But they do offer at least some alternatives to the failing, traditional public school system that segregates children into schools based on an arbitrary ZIP code....

Despite their apolitical image, school boards, by their own admission, are anything but. "In the education arena, local governance and community ownership won big on the ballots," Katherine Shek wrote in a recap of last year's election results in the April 2017 issue American School Board Journal. "Georgia voters said no to the state taking over low-performing public schools." "Voters in Massachusetts rejected the expansion of charter schools." Shek is the manager of the National School Boards Action Center. The American School Board Journal is published by the National School Boards Association. "In Massachusetts, more than 200 local school boards...

The Turkish government has failed to convince Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency that U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind last summer's failed coup in Turkey, the BND head told a German magazine. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish government accuse Gulen of orchestrating Turkey's failed coup on July 15 in which more than 240 people were killed when rogue soldiers commandeered tanks, warplanes and helicopters, attacking parliament and attempting to overthrow the government.. "Turkey has tried to convince us of that at every level but so far it has not succeeded," BND head Bruno Kahl said in an interview...

HEADLINE: Few charter school grads earn degrees (On my USA Today newspaper) FACTS> (from article): Statistics for charter schools as a whole are hard to come by, but the best estimate puts charters’ college persistence rates at around 23%. To be fair, the rate overall for low-income students – the kind of students typically served by charters – is even worse: just 9%.

Michigan charter schools are among the most regulated schools in the country, according to the Michigan Association of Public School Academies. Here are 13 rules and laws the association says charter schools in this state must follow: Michigan law requires a charter school to be closed if it is in the bottom 5 percent of state public schools in academic achievement three years in a row. Charter school authorizers hold charter schools accountable to the requirements spelled out in a legally binding contract. The contract covers expectations and goals for the school. Charter schools can limit enrollment based only on...