Champions required
Ramona Edelin, senior advisor at the D.C. Charter School Alliance, published a timely op-ed in the Washington Examiner on Election Day. In it, she extolled the virtues of charter schools—especially for low-income students and students of color—but lamented the fact that charters “lack the political champions” they need to overcome concerted opposition.
Persevering during the pandemic
Two looming questions for schools in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is how to measure Covid-related learning loss in students and what to do with the results. An in-depth piece from EdWeek looks at this question and the answers provided by schools across the country. This includes Dayton Leadership Academies, whose principal, Tess Mitchner Asinjo, explained how her school brought students into the building in small, staggered numbers for several hours of assessments this fall. The losses, she said, were overall less severe than her staff feared but that work would begin immediately on remediation. An upside to the effort: kids got to meet their new teachers in person. “It felt more like real school,” said Mitchner Asinjo.
Tussling in West Virginia
West Virginia’s charter school law requires that proposals for new schools be approved by the elected board of the district in which they will be located. No applications have yet been successful. One caveat to the law says that applications will be considered automatically approved if the board in question doesn’t vote within 90 days of receiving the application. A proposal in Monongalia County is at—or past—that deadline, depending on who you talk to. Wrangling is underway.
Settlement
Concept Schools, headquartered in Illinois and managing charter schools in several states including Ohio, settled a civil suit in federal court this week by agreeing to pay $4.5 million in response to claims that it engaged in non-competitive bidding practices with regard to the FCC’s E-Rate Program for technology support.
The future of charter schools
Following Education Secretary DeVos’ announcement last week that the US DOE would no longer block religiously-affiliated charter schools from accessing federal funds, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli dug into the two recent Supreme Court decisions upon which DeVos premised her plans. “For better or worse,” he writes, “religiously-affiliated charter schools are on their way.
