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Changing young people’s paths for the better
Here’s a nice look at Canton’s Academy for Urban Scholars, a dropout recovery charter school getting ready to enter its third year of operation. About 150 students have graduated in that time, including the largest-ever senior class earlier this year. Executive director Samuel Muhammad tells The Repository that all of their graduates went on to college or the workforce—including Jaleel Horton, who will start at Central State University soon, studying advanced manufacturing and engineering. Horton believes he would be in jail today if it weren’t for the academy, but even so his success wasn’t a sure thing. “I didn’t grab Urban Scholars,” he says. “They grabbed me, in a good way.” Awesome!
Huge transportation news in Columbus
In this TV news piece from Columbus, we get an idea of what some charter school leaders are thinking and feeling in regard to student transportation as the start of the new school year approaches. Spokespeople for the Graham Family of Schools and the Arts and College Preparatory Academy express cautious optimism for a good year, citing improved communication with Columbus City Schools over the summer. But past experience has been rough for both schools and their families. Relatedly, the United School Schools Network, which operates four campuses across the city (and is sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation), is taking matters into their own hands, announcing last week that they will take over transporting their own students this school year. Amazing and awesome news! Over 600 of their 900 students will likely use the service, with hope that it will become a model for charters (and maybe some districts too) across the state—a true gamechanger if successful. The service is projected to cost over $1 million dollars, with about half coming from the state and the rest from the network’s own budget. Congratulations to United and best wishes to everyone for a great school year!
More on transportation
School has already started for most K-12 students in Indianapolis, and this piece from Chalkbeat provides an interesting picture of transportation for district and charter school students in the city. This includes use of public transit passes, which seems to work pretty well for a small subset of Indy families. Most interesting is the experience of families who have students in different school types—with wide variation in transportation accuracy, predictability, and efficiency. This is important information in a city trying hard to build a unified education system around a variety of school governance models that used to be intractably siloed.
No charter schools allowed…?
Here’s a look at the three remaining states that do not currently allow charter schools within their borders—Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont—including an attempt at an explanation as to why this is the case despite charter school expansion continuing across the country. Unfortunately, the main explainer quoted here is a charter school opponent. So when she says it’s because these states love and “depend upon their rural public schools,” and that “these are not states that are going to be welcoming” to charters, you can imagine she’s providing more wishful thinking than hard fact. And kudos to EdWeek for bringing up North Dakota as a cogent rebuttal to her fantasy. It is, of course, very similar to the others in terms of rurality yet recently became the 47th state to allow charter schools. And while it will probably take some time before the first charter opens in North Dakota, as the regulatory and operational framework is currently being built at the state level, once the school choice genie is out of the bottle, all that our anti-charter campaigner can hope for is that there won’t be many of them established because “it’s rural, and it’s small.” Hilarious.
Round 2?
The American Enterprise Institute published a deep dive into the topic of religiously-affiliated charter schools this week. Authors Ilya Shapiro and Tim Rosenberger are certain that the issue will come before the courts again, since the recent tie decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Drummond case left the matter unsettled at a constitutional level. They also expect that putative future case to decide the issue definitively.
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