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Building a brighter Cleveland
Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s plan to close and consolidate dozens of underutilized school buildings—dubbed Building Brighter Futures—is moving full speed ahead. Discussions are already underway around the community about what to do with the many school facilities that will be vacant starting this July. Those discussions, unfortunately, don’t seem to include charter and private school operators, who should—by letter and spirit of Ohio law—have first pick. Fordham’s Chad Aldis is quoted and linked in this coverage, via a blog post from back in May. And just so we don’t forget the great things that can happen when a charter school does locate in a closed district building, here’s some timely coverage of Breakthrough Schools’ brand new gymnasium space added on to its Woodland Hills campus on Cleveland’s east side and dedicated with a big neighborhood celebration last week. Woodland Hills was, as you might have guessed, a former CMSD building that is still serving its community—bigger and better than ever—today.
Living up to the promise
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley extols the virtues of Success Academy and other New York City charter schools this week; schools whose low-income pupils are defying the odds and showing huge academic successes, just as their founders promised. Riley says that these high-performing schools should be expanded immediately to clear their enormous waiting lists and their methods studied and replicated by other schools to help even more students across the country.
The view from Idaho
Bluum CEO Terry Ryan and ExcelinEd Senior Policy Adviser Matthew Joseph expressed similar thoughts in an Idaho Ed News piece recently. “Idaho’s charter sector is growing, in demand, and relatively high-performing,” they write, largely fulfilling the promise of education innovation and success. However, Idaho is the only state that subjects charter schools to both strict compensation controls and restrictive staffing rules, which serves to stifle specific innovations in terms of staffing, schedules, instructional models, and the use of technology. Charters schools have earned the right to “fully align their resources with their educational vision,” Ryan and Joseph conclude. It is past time for Idaho to “let its strongest charter schools show what real autonomy can achieve.”
Even more innovation
Speaking of innovation, here’s a look at Strive charter school, coming soon to the South Bronx. Strive will be “a one-stop shop” for working families, said school founder Eric Grannis (husband of Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz). The school will be open twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for 50 weeks of the year. This includes a regular school day, before- and after-school programming, and three meals a day. The K-5 school is scheduled to open late this summer.
A quirky tale
Skillern Elementary, a popular charter school in Hamilton County, Tennessee, will be expanding to 72 kindergarten seats this fall. But it shouldn’t be. The school district that oversees Skillern mistakenly advertised to fill 72 seats—and filled every one—before leaders realized that they had only been approved by the state for 40 seats! After much hand-wringing, some debate, and several emergency votes, the district and the state agreed to allow all 72 students to start. But they are requiring detailed transition planning from staffers to make sure that they can all be accommodated in higher grades at Skillern and on into the Ivy Academy middle and high schools to which Skillern grads traditionally matriculate.
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