Good day, CharterFolk.
Let’s get across the country quickly.
We start with a doozy — flying blind on whether students leave K-12 ready for the adult world.
That’s a wow, CharterFolk.
At this particular moment? Getting even less visibility into how our schools are preparing students for the future?
Just … wow.
Meanwhile, the DC story we reported on last week about teacher training programs being cut off was revealed by The 74 a couple days later to be a $600 million problem.
With charter schools doing the disproportionate amount of new hiring of teachers in the country, our schools are feeling the impact even more acutely.
Now comes word of the Administration cutting off scholarships to HBCUs.
Thinking they have an angle, parents are going after a program in Chicago supposedly designed to support Black student achievement.
I’d be more upset if I felt CPS was genuinely committed to supporting Black students.
Historically, Chicago charter schools have excelled in serving Black students.
So, you would think Brandon Johnson’s administration would do all it could to allow charter schools to grow and serve even more Black students. Instead, it threatens harm to charter schools, forcing Black parents to come to their schools’ defense…
… while it undermines the long-term financial well-being of many district schools serving large numbers of Black students.
Charter schools excelling with Black students is a pattern that plays out in communities across the United States, as Rhonda Dillingham’s op-ed this week in North Carolina demonstrated yet again.
Next door, the feds told South Carolina they wouldn’t need to justify their authorizing structure in order to retain CSP dollars.
Helpful.
As is the progress that charter schools are making in the Indiana legislature on longstanding funding unfairness.
In North Dakota, one of only five states to not have a charter school law, a good bill made it through the Senate …
… but got snagged in the House.
The article reports that rural Republicans are the stumbling blocks.
In Texas, stumbling blocks were primaried, and now it’s not a question of whether an ESA bill will be approved, but how big it will be.
It’s a question of whether huge or gargantuan new funding will be needed to afford them.
In Florida, as vouchers are on the cusp of becoming universal …
… the answer is gargantuan.
We will see.
Will overall expenditures on education remain constant as states implement universal voucher/ESA programs?
My bet is that overall expenditures will rise, but most of the benefit will go to families who already had their kids in private schools, while rampant inflation in private school tuition will consume any remaining value.
It will lead to whole new arguments attempting to justify increased expenditures in education.
This is a novel one — economists at Harvard, Duke and USF arguing that, relative to GDP, education investment in the United States significantly trails other countries.
Let’s end on some good news.
A big grant is giving one of the fire-affected charter schools in Altadena a new temporary home.
Meanwhile, LAUSD committed to spending bond funds to rebuild burned schools, including a charter school campus in the Palisades.
It’s a complicated landscape, CharterFolk.
Steps forward and steps backward happening simultaneously all over the country.