My case study on the charter conversion of seven Washington, DC Catholic schools was just released by Seton Education Partners. If you're at all interested in urban charters, CMOs, Catholic schools, or the crisis of faith-based inner-city education, you might want to check it out. It's the story of why and how a set of academically successful but financially struggling Catholic schools used the chartering mechanism to keep their doors open for disadvantaged kids in the nation's capital.
The report's release coincided with a conference at the University of Notre Dame on potential solutions for these endangered faith-based urban schools. I wrote a summary of my major takeaways from that gathering in this week's Gadfly (see here). To whet your appetite, here are three:
- I suspect that many, many more Catholic-charter conversions are on the way...and very soon at that.
- The US Department of Education needs to get engaged post haste.
- The major ed reform foundations, especially those in the business of charter start-ups and replications, ought to take note; ideally, they'd give some thought to which is a better investment: attempting to turn around persistently failing schools or helping preserve academically successful schools.