Free Republic

Debt Doesn’t Deliver : Charter Schools Are a Better Option Matthew Ladner, Goldwater Institute Daily Email, March 24, 2008 “Crazy for loving you,” Patsy Cline crooned. She must have been singing about district schools. Bill Clinton famously defined “insanity” as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result every time. Apply that notion to Governor Napolitano’s repeated calls for the state to incur huge levels of debt in order to build school district facilities. We have better options. Charter schools operate with fewer taxpayer dollars, and with no state funding for facilities. Charter schools make up nine out...

Barack Obama has been backing off post-partisan rhetoric on education, looking more like a stick-in-the-mud Democratic regular on schools and less like the reformer who supported test-based accountability and performance pay for teachers. The Chicagoan had bucked teachers' unions and other stodgy liberals, supporting charter schools in Illinois and mentorship programs in Washington, Josh Patashnik writes in the New Republic. But a campaign-hardened Obama is sounding more like a traditional lefty, waffling when the issues get tough and even employing an advisor who has worked to kill the avant-garde Teach for America (which subverts certification standards cherished by unions). Patashnik...

A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools. The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers...

I'll Have What Florida's Having: Florida's low-income Hispanic students outscore the average Arizona student. By Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. I've received quite a bit of reader mail from this previous article showing that Florida's Hispanic students outscore Arizona's statewide average on fourth grade reading exams. Some writers wanted to know if this could be attributed to the fact that Florida's Hispanic population is predominantly Cuban. The short answer is no, because the Hispanic population was also predominantly Cuban in the 1990s when scores were much lower. Other inquiries involved questions about student poverty. Statewide averages for low-income students for Arizona and...

The White House plans to announce Monday that it has proposed giving the District $32 million in additional federal funding this year for public education, including a special $20 million payment aimed at helping Mayor Adrian M. Fenty restructure public schools, federal officials said. ...... The District schools have not had an incentive-pay program, Rhee said, but she is in the process of developing one, in conjunction with the Washington Teachers' Union. She declined to talk about specifics but said support from the White House shows that federal officials think she is serious about improving performance. "When I say performance...

MILWAUKEE — Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school. Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues...

The city is pulling charter schools into the letter-grade game, and the privately run public schools have quickly jumped to the head of the class, claiming the top two spots in the city and raking in more A and B grades than traditional public schools. Just 14 of the city's 60 charter schools were graded this year, but city officials said that next year grades would go to all eligible charter schools. Of the graded schools, only one received an F, while five earned As and six earned Bs. That means 79% of the graded charter schools got As and...

It may be as quaint as the eat-right-and-exercise model of weight loss, but those are the very real pillars beneath the Knowledge Is Power Program, known as KIPP. It was developed in 1995 by two young, idealistic fourth-grade teachers in Houston. As members of the Teach for America corps, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg landed in a barrio school and quickly had their grand aspirations beaten to a pulp by reality. -snip- Their ideal school day would run from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with classes held every other Saturday and for three weeks during the summer. A "KIPPster" spends...

PHOENIX — A Maricopa County Superior Court judge refused Tuesday to immediately block the state Board of Education from telling charter schools when they have to teach certain social studies courses. Judge Robert Miles said the charter schools objecting to the mandate waited too long before filing suit. He said the charter schools have known about the plan for more than two years, even though the requirement takes effect this month with the new school year. Tuesday's ruling doesn't end the lawsuit or resolve the dispute. It simply means the schools, most of which start classes this coming week, will...

A year ago, I found that if you used Greatschools.net to rank Maricopa County public middle schools by their reading scores, charter schools make up seven of the top 10. Recently, I had the chance to tour the number two ranked school, the Arizona School for the Arts (ASA). Located on 2nd Street in downtown Phoenix, ASA teaches 370 students not only a rigorous academic program, but also an impressive array of fine arts programs--including ballet, band, drama, guitar, piano, and strings. The program covers sixth through twelfth grade, and there are plans to add fifth. ASA’s test scores speak...

Stephan Goyne entered teaching as a "fight the good fight" kind of guy, taking a job in East Oakland right out of college. "I come from a family of teachers. It wasn't even a question of whether to do that," Goyne said. "The question was whether to do elementary, middle or high school." But after six years in the trenches -- transferred from campus to campus, forbidden from organizing field trips and ordered to teach math only after lunch -- Goyne left the profession. Now he works in real estate and runs a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in Oakland. "That last...

LOS ANGELES — There are times when, much as I love my adopted city of Los Angeles, I can only shake my head and think, “This couldn’t happen in a real city.” By real, I don’t mean to be measuring tinsel content, but civic engagement. People don’t pay attention to politics here the way they do in other cities, the media doesn’t cover it the same way (don’t even get me started on that), and the result is that politicians get away with murder. Or worse. Watts is a place that most people who don’t live in don’t set foot...

...The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run. But the surge of interest has been spurred largely by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual testing of students, with increasingly dire consequences for schools that fall short each year, including possible closing. Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach...

Education chief pushes Bush plan to lift caps on conversions ___ Illinois law caps the number of public charter schools at 60, but if President Bush has his way, school districts here and in other states could override state law to convert as many failing schools into charters as they wanted. This would be a boon for Chicago, which has aggressively pursued charters and already has used 29 of its allowed 30 charters. Margaret Spellings, Bush's education secretary, pushed the idea Thursday at a successful Chicago charter school, along with other proposed changes to Bush's signature No Child Left Behind...

"Do your students say the Pledge of Allegiance?" That was the question I posed in several ways to Marcos Aguilar, a founder and now the Tlayecantzi or "school guide" at Academia de Semillas del Pueblo Xinaxcalmecac. You see, it's charter school renewal season in Los Angeles and Semillas del Pueblo ("Seeds of the People"), a 318-student, K-7 charter in El Sereno, is one of 18 schools whose contracts will soon get a thumbs up or thumbs down from the Los Angeles Unified School District. ... But what about the trickier, more philosophical, some would say irrelevant: "To what extent do...

On exam, charter schools get edge MCAS scores buck a national trend By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | August 31, 2006 Massachusetts charter school students are performing as well as, or better than, their counterparts in regular public schools, in contrast to a recent national study, according to a state report released yesterday. About 60 percent of the charter school students fared about the same as their peers in regular schools on state MCAS exams in English and math, while 30 percent performed ``significantly higher," according to the study commissioned by the state Department of Education. About 10 percent of...

A report found that more Phila. schools met progress targets under No Child Left Behind. Mirroring statewide results, more public schools in Philadelphia met progress targets this year under the federal No Child Left Behind law - thanks to a strong performance by the city's charter schools. The improvement in Philadelphia bucks a recently released nationwide report that found charter schools lagged behind regular public schools in 2003 reading and math scores. But as well as the charter schools did, the performance of city schools operated by the for-profit Edison Schools Inc. and Victory Schools Inc. fell - and that...

<p>A federal study showing that fourth graders in charter schools score worse in reading and math than their public school counterparts should cause some soul-searching in Congress.</p> <p>Too many lawmakers seem to believe that the only thing wrong with American education is the public school system, and that converting lagging schools to charter schools would cause them to magically improve.</p>

[T]he Times’ [editorial] Exploding the Charter School Myth is squarely aimed at President Bush, his support of local control and No Child Left Behind, and at what he will say tomorrow. You see, many local residents in New Orleans have had it with corrupt officials and public schools failing their children. If yesterday you read deep into the Times’ Adam Nossiter’s 2,481 word The Katrina Year; A Future, Dimly Seen you learned: "The schools [in New Orleans], a dysfunctional catastrophe before the storm, have been removed from the control of a corrupt district office; just under two-thirds are now in...

by Mark Finkelstein August 27, 2006 - 06:29 "Comrade. Potato production 70% below target for 4th year in row in five-year plan!" "True, Kommissar. But we have solution. Will implement training and preparation program for workers!" "Budem - let's drink!" The ostensible purpose of this morning's New York Times editorial was to exult at the results of a study finding that 4th-grade charter school students performed worse than their public school counterparts, even when controlling for socio-economic background. Like a tiger on the smallest of mouses, the Times pounced on this one result to proclaim that it was "Exploding the...