Education Commission of the States
May 2003
With funding from the federal "Public Charter Schools Program," the Education Commission of the States has produced four fine policy papers that address the timely and tantalizing idea of "charter districts," which the authors more or less define as school districts (or subdistricts, virtual districts, or parallel districts) in which every school is a charter school (or something similar) and the "central office" doesn't actually run any of them in the traditional way. This is a drum that ECS has been pounding for several years, one that I thought was mostly a fantasy. But when you construe charter districts as these papers do, it turns out that several already exist and others are in the process of becoming. (For the best tour of the present charter-district scene, go to a previous ECS paper called "Charter Districts: The State of the Field," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/37/04/3704.doc.) In the new quartet, Todd Ziebarth authored the paper called "State Policy Options for Creating Charter Districts," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/92/4492.doc. John Augenblick wrote "How Can We Fund Charter Districts?" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/90/4490.doc). Bryan Hassel penned "A New Kind of School District: How Local Leaders Can Create Charter Districts" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/91/4491.doc). And Nelson Smith is the creator of "The New Central Office: How Charter Districts Serve Schools and the Public Interest" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/93/4493.doc). These are smart, knowledgeable, and creative writers at the top of their games, and this collection amounts to a dandy policy handbook for establishing charter districts. Now all that's required are the vision, will and political oomph.
