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With some help from the New York Times, big teacher unions last week launched an all-out attack on America's charter schools. The victims, if the attack succeeds, are likely to be our nation's most disadvantaged minority children. For decades, our nation has been grappling with a sad reality: Too many minority children aren't learning. A major achievement gap exists in our schools between disadvantaged minority children and their more affluent peers. Massive spending increases haven't dented the problem. The solution is reform and accountability, and charter schools are part of that solution. Unlike regular public schools, which are dominated by...

"Our estimates imply that students in North Carolina do less well in charter schools than they would have done in traditional public schools and that the negative effects of attending a charter school are large," the study's authors wrote.DURHAM, N.C. -- State exam results indicate that most students at North Carolina's charter schools would perform better if they stayed in traditional public schools. The data is compiled in a new study co-authored by a Duke professor. It argues that, on average, students who attend charter schools are being academically harmed. "Our estimates imply that students in North Carolina do less...

Mr.Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Education Research Office. Buried in a new report by the U.S. Department of Education is a comparison claiming to show that charter schools — independently run public schools free from many restrictions — have lower average test scores than regular public schools. A front page New York Times story, put together with the help of America’s second-largest teachers union, recently trumpeted this previously obscure statistic. But the original report buried the finding for a very good reason. Such a broad comparison between charter schools and regular public schools is sheer nonsense....

The AFT's conclusion: "Charter schools are underperforming." Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation's report card, show students in charter schools doing less well than the nationwide public-school average, which includes middle-class students from well-heeled suburbs. Similar results are obtained within selected states. Big deal. These results could easily indicate nothing other than the simple fact that charter schools are typically asked to serve problematic students in low-performing districts with many poor, minority children. Indeed, if the AFT believes these findings, it must also concede that religious schools excel. According to the same NAEP...

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan's charter schools appear more likely than traditional public schools statewide to struggle under federal No Child Left Behind standards, according to a report released Tuesday by the state Department of Education. But there also are positive signs for charter schools in the report, requested by the state Board of Education. State education officials declined to draw broad conclusions from the data, primarily based on results from last school year's Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests taken by elementary and middle school students. "There is a wide variety of performance for charter schools," board member John Austin...

If school vouchers bettered the educational opportunities only of children who use the vouchers to attend private schools or schools in another district, many reformers would be left holding cups half empty. For the animating theory of school choice has always been that it will not only serve as an escape hatch from dysfunctional public schools but also will spark public schools to improve. Thus far this theory remains mostly untested. Through caps on enrollment, chronic underfunding, and legal attacks, voucher programs have been kept artificially small, restraining any influence they might have on local districts. The combined enrollment of...

California charter schools got a $75 million boost Tuesday when U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced a three-year federal grant that aims to help create 250 charters by 2007. Paige praised California for being at the forefront of the charter-school movement. "With this grant we recognize California's pioneering spirit," he said. "California was one of the first states to allow the creation of charter schools, and you're also one of the most welcoming states even now." Since charter schools were authorized in California in 1992, 471 campuses have been created, and one out of three serves low-income communities, according...

A decade of highly touted reforms have failed to fix the city's worst schools, Mayor Richard Daley said Thursday, and the only solution left is to shut them down and start from scratch. With that blunt acknowledgment, Daley officially launched the most ambitious effort in a decade to remake the nation's third-largest school system, a campaign that will lean heavily on the private sector for ideas, funding and day-to-day management of more than 100 reorganized schools

.....Among them: Everybody is going to college or trade or technical school after graduation today. Almost 60% are going to four-year schools — including UC Berkeley, UCLA, Pomona College, Wellesley College, Mills College, Loyola Marymount University and USC — some on full scholarships. Marco was accepted at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Chatting animatedly with the seniors as they signed each other's yearbooks — the school's first hardcover, color edition — was the tall, middle-aged man who was the driving force behind Animo and its several spinoff schools. Through all his joking, he admitted later, he was trying hard "not to...

SACRAMENTO - Although the late Sen. William J. "Pete" Knight, R-Palmdale, was laid to rest last week, pending legislation bearing his name lives on. A measure by Knight that champions school choice and educational innovation received approval from the Senate Appropriations Committee and now heads to the Senate floor. Another bill also awaits the full Senate's consideration before a May 28 deadline. Knight's Senate Bill 1531, approved Thursday by a vote of 7-1, would remove the limit on the number of charter schools that can operate within the state. The bill will encourage further expansion of these schools by allowing...

In some schools, camera's always on Classrooms are now being taped. Critics raise privacy concerns. By Dan Hardy Inquirer Staff Writer When students act up in Nicole Snook's second-grade classroom at Graystone Academy Charter School in South Coatesville, she has a quick remedy. " 'Don't forget, you're on the screen and your parents might be watching. You have to be 100 percent,' " she tells her students. "They say: 'You do, too,' and I agree." In each of the 500-student charter school's 21 classrooms, a video camera records the every move of students and teachers. There are monitors in a...

Most charter schools currently operate without a union, and a study last July by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research showed that charter schools slightly outperformed public schools serving similar student populations. The nations largest teachers union has announced an aggressive campaign to organize charter-school teachers, beginning in California, one of the first states to allow charter schools.

Act an `experiment' allowing few institutions OLYMPIA _ Over the objections of lawmakers who predicted that charter schools would drain badly needed dollars from the rest of public education, the state House of Representatives voted Wednesday to allow the controversial schools. "We have nothing to be afraid of, allowing people to freely choose the kind of education their children deserve," said Rep. Joyce McDonald, R-Gig Harbor. "They don't have to run out of their local school, but we don't have to chain them there, either." Hours later, the state Senate also approved the bill, which now goes to Gov. Gary...

All the proof state Board of Education member Roberta Schaefer needed to OK controversial new charter schools were the letters before her from public school students. Schaefer ridiculed the letters against a proposed school in Marlboro for their missing punctuation and sloppy spelling - including a misspelling of the word ``school'' in one missive. ``If I didn't think a charter school was necessary, these letters have convinced me the high school was not doing an adequate job in teaching English language arts,'' Schaefer said. Despite the letter-writing campaign, which Schaefer said was orchestrated by school officials, the Marlboro-based Advanced Math...

Charter school foes push moratorium By Kevin Rothstein Tuesday, February 24, 2004 With four new charter schools up for state approval today, activists rallied yesterday to stop expansion of the controversial schools. ``This is no time to be expanding unproven, untested experimental educational programs,'' said state Sen. Marc Pacheco, (D-Taunton), a sponsor of the bill, which would impose a three-year moratorium on new charter schools. Opponents maintain the formula that diverts state education aid to charters is flawed. Each student leaving a district for a charter school can take $10,000 or more in state aid, but schools complain their costs...

A conscientious federal judge, examining whether a rural Georgia school district discriminates racially because racial imbalances are observable, closed the books with a pained commentary. The Thomasville school district does not discriminate on the basis of race, despite the imbalance of black children in special education or gifted programs, ruled U.S. District Court Judge Clay D. Land of Columbus. What he found, however, is that poor children "are still waiting on the promise" of equal education opportunity. In agonized social commentary on public education, Land lamented that the promise has not been fulfilled "for many children who find themselves trapped...

Charter schools are flourishing in Colorado, many of them with genuine and ungrudging support from their local school districts. But in a few places, school boards are putting up fierce resistance to letting parents choose the kind of education they want for their children. Charter schools that face such resistance should have a more accommodating alternative, and we urge the legislature to act this session to provide it. Perhaps the most intransigent district may be Steamboat Springs, which is currently in court defending its policy of defying the state Board of Education's ruling that it must approve a charter school...

They're dotting the I's and crossing the T's to prepare the only charter school on the Island of Venice, Florida. But students at the Student Leadership Academy of Venice won't hear the dreaded letters "FCAT." Principal Nancy Sanders said that her third-grade niece heard those letters repeatedly. To emphasize the importance of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, Sanders' niece was told, "If you don't do well on the test, we won't get the money we need." The child was so nervous she became sick, Sanders said. Sanders wants to assure parents that her charter school won't be teaching to the...

<p>SACRAMENTO - California should lift the cap on the number of charter schools, simplify funding and tighten oversight over the alternatives to traditional public schools, a study released Tuesday recommended.</p> <p>The Legislative Analyst's Office found that the cap of 750 charter schools was no longer necessary now that the schools have been operating for 11 years and are showing academic gains similar or better than other public schools.</p>

(CNSNews.com) - The nation's leading teachers' union and its largest state affiliate are planning an aggressive campaign to unionize charter school teachers, who represent a growing faction of workers outside of the unions' realm. The National Education Association is committing upwards of $1.75 million over the next three years for the effort. It will begin in California, where the state affiliate is devising a strategy to convince charter school teachers to join the California Teachers Association. "One of the things we noticed early on in the charter school movement was that the teachers in those schools were inadequately compensated in...