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Yay robotics!
It may be summer, but thank goodness we can still talk about learning. Here’s a great conversation with Ken Sowers, teacher and robotics advisor at Ohio Virtual Academy, touting the benefits of STEM education for students. Yes, even when school is not in session.
The even bigger picture
Sounding a similar note, Jeanne Allen and Katie Nelligan of the Yass Prize organization opined in Forbes this week about the potential for charter schools to help educate the next generation of inventors, entrepreneurs, and tech workers. With greater flexibility and innovative learning models—along with a surge in popularity and support nationwide—charter schools, they write, are “central to America’s education future.”
Expansion stories
Florida has long been a hotbed of school choice innovations, so much so that more than half of K-12 students now attend school somewhere other than their zoned district building. The Sunshine State is working to continue that momentum, including the newly-revamped Schools of Hope program, specifically designed to open high-performing charters in districts with low-performing buildings. Lawmakers hope that limiting district say in charter approvals and allowing for charter co-location in underused district buildings will help supercharge the effort. West Virginia, by contrast, is much newer to the school choice arena, with its first charter school having opened in the fall of 2022. That first school, West Virginia Academy in Morgantown, has been growing steadily since then and leaders are now starting the process of building their own campus on 19 acres at the edge of town. Kudos! If all goes as planned, WVA will move from its rented, repurposed downtown space to their awesome new campus in fall 2027.
Non-expansion stories
A regular reminder that not all the news can be good. First up, the long-planned September 2025 opening of a new multi-lingual charter school in Baltimore County, Maryland, announced in April and already recruiting students, has now been delayed for at least a year because the local district refused to sign off on the opening before the deadline. Despicable. Secondly, a federal judge has ordered Memphis Street Academy in Philadelphia to close permanently after several straight years of poor academic performance. School leaders believe they are being unfairly targeted by the Philly school district due to the competition for students and say that the performance metrics being cited are unfair and racially discriminatory. No word yet on next legal steps, but obviously time is running short for the school to win an appeal and reopen in the fall.
Could go either way
As we have been following, a flurry of recent law changes in Indiana have altered the education landscape in many Hoosier cities. Nowhere is that clearer than in Indianapolis, where the new Local Education Alliance continues to try and figure out how to run both charter and district schools in a co-operative, rather than a competitive, fashion. This report on the group’s recent July meeting—where opinions differed strongly about who should be in charge of public school buildings in the city—indicates that a lot more work is going to be needed before the term “alliance” will come anywhere close to being functionally accurate.
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