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Teaching the trades
Spectrum News had a great profile of Ohio Construction Academy, a dropout recovery charter school in Columbus. Students earn credits in traditional courses to complete their graduation requirements while also learning the skills they need to become licensed as electricians and welders, among other career paths. “Our program has been built on hands-on learning, get our kids up and moving, let them roam around freely being productive,” said OCA’s directory of high school operations Matt Demosky. His students “learn the importance of communication, teamwork and also learn a valuable trade skill that they can get certified in and not have a job but a career for life.” Many students move directly into good jobs upon graduation thanks to the school’s annual job fair. Awesome.
P is for peer pressure, which is not proper
In not-so-good news, The 74’s Patrick O’Donnell digs into the data on chronic absenteeism for Kindergartners in Ohio, and it seems pretty bad. Lots of district and charter schools across the state are reporting crazy-high percentages of their youngest students absent more than 10 percent of the school year. What’s worse: the leaders of Lincoln Park, a charter school in Cleveland, have been undertaking some odd-sounding efforts—including peer pressure from the chronically-present kids—to change the game. Not a good story at all.
Modernization is the wave of the future
Missouri governor Mike Kehoe this week authorized the creation of a School Funding Modernization Task Force. Kudos to Kehoe for including a number of charter school leaders and advocates on the panel—including the executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association, and a founding board member of KIPP:St. Louis. The task force will begin its work soon, with its final report recommending a new K-12 funding formula—due December 1, 2026.
Anti-charter bias baked in
The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune lambasted Chicago Public Schools this week for continuing their all-out assault on charter schools. At issue this time is a deed restriction on the future use of 21 long-shuttered district buildings as charter schools. Those buildings, purpose-built for education, are going up for sale soon but no charter operations are allowed, and most private school uses are similarly forbidden. The editors condemn these restrictions as anti-student and anti-community, and guarantee that they will limit the potential for unloading the properties at all. “Ultimately, restrictions on vacant CPS property sales are part of a broader problem, and that’s education officials’ open hostility toward alternative education models,” they conclude. “CPS leadership often claims to support equity and student-centered policy. But actions such as deed restrictions, charter caps and building lockouts send the opposite message. Educational ideology, not student need, is steering the ship.”
The view from a remote area of Wyoming
The news outlet WyoFile brings us a fascinating and detailed story from the far west central part of Wyoming, at the Idaho border. The town of Alpine is a small but growing bedroom community, most of whose residents work in the larger resort town of Jackson. The nearest public schools are almost an hour away by bus and many families were interested in getting a school in Alpine, especially for their elementary-age students. The local district said it would be years before the population would grow enough to even consider a new school, so efforts turned to creating a charter school. Everyone seemed to be on board with the plan, until a school operator was chosen… Well worth your time.
The view from Capitol Hill
Appropriately for this National Charter Schools Week, a hearing was held Wednesday in the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Education, Elementary and Secondary Education, looking to highlight proven charter school programs and to discuss ways of expanding those successes across the country. K-12 Dive gives us three big picture takeaways from the testimony and the discussion that followed: 1) While the debate was sometimes contentious, a number of witnesses took pains to spell out that competition between districts and charters generally results in better outcomes for kids. 2) Defining what makes a charter high-quality is sometimes more art than science, but there are a number of clear common traits emerging among successful schools. 3) There are several pieces of federal education reform legislation in the works that would focus on providing high-quality options of all kinds to students.
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