Good morning, CharterFolk.
Yesterday the Alliance teased good news about charter school enrollment growth at The Hill.
The Alliance’s full enrollment report won’t come out until next month, but it looks like charter schools have added another hundred thousand students across the nation, while districts have lost another hundred and fifty thousand.
Historically, charter schools have continued to grow when school choice spreads. But that has been in the era before universal vouchers. Will the same hold true now?
It’s too early to tell, of course, but both Broward and Palm Beach are showing district and charter school enrollments dropping this year, with the district decline in Broward being much more severe than the charter school loss.
This is the second year of Florida’s universal program including all families regardless of income status. Last year, charter schools were flat in Broward, while charter schools grew statewide by over 14,000 students, a sizable portion of charter schools’ nationwide growth.
So it may be unwise to extrapolate out urban enrollment patterns to statewide ones.
Across the nation, data has continued to come in showing universal programs serving mostly wealthy families who previously had their kids in private schools.
In Florida, we’ll soon have data about whether those leaving public schools tend to be the more affluent too.
It’s a good moment to re-visit the arguments that Petrilli and Bradford made last year about the degree to which the affluent should be included in new private school choice programs.
Bradford argued for including all families at the same dollar amount, asserting that, in the end, a program including all will be the stable system that ultimately serves lower-income students better.
Petrilli said we should include all but means-test such that low-income kids receive larger amounts of funding.
My own sense is that there’s no place for CharterFolk to be other than firmly putting our collective thumb on the scale for low-income families.
In The Hill article, Starlee stated that, other than student safety, academic rigor is the top factor driving charter school growth.
And the second thing across the board, and across race, across income, across geography, is rigor. Charter schools offer much more rigorous content where parents feel like their children are going to come out of school prepared for college, for career, for the workforce, for their life after school, in a way that they just do not feel confident anymore in district schools,” she added.
We live in a time when we’re slowly remembering the dangers of the easy A.
In Idaho, maintaining a commitment to academic rigor is certainly a part of the charter school success story.
Policy breakthroughs allowing charter schools to get approved by entities other than local school districts certainly help, as Tennessee continues to demonstrate.
In the end, the key difference maker may be the verve of CharterFolk – people knowing that our work is on the right side of history, such that we’re eager to keep pushing on no matter the obstacles we face.
This week, Ted Hirsch, Art Teacher and Community Outreach Coordinator for Community Charter School of Cambridge penned a great op-ed about his experience across the decades.
I am proud to have been a part of the charter school movement in Massachusetts since its inception. It has remained not only meaningful work, but genuinely fun. That joy comes from being part of something larger than myself, a collaborative effort among educators, students and families working together toward the shared goals of learning and building a community.
Congratulations on 30 years at CCSC, Ted!
Here’s to 30 more!