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By Eric Schulzke
Deseret News
December 4th, 2014

This story is part of the Deseret News National Edition, which focuses on the issues that resonate with American families.

Lauren LeDuff was a junior at Warren Easton High School in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in August of 2005. Fleeing with her family, she finished the school year as a refugee in Houston, returning to Warren Easton for her senior year.

She returned to a transformed school.

The entire first floor of the 100-year-old massive three-story brick building had been gutted by water and mud. Half the building was still unusable when school began in the fall of 2006. Sawing and hammering echoed from downstairs and lunches were brown bag or delivered pizza.

But that was not all: The school’s name and mission had changed. Now it was Warren Easton Charter High School. It had a new principal, Alexina Medley, who was making sweeping changes. Uniforms, strict rules and an innovative program to get its students career- or college-ready followed.

The changes at Warren Easton so inspired LeDuff that she vowed to become a teacher and return to her alma mater.

“I told Ms. Medley before I left she’d need to fire somebody to make room for me,” said LeDuff, who now teaches English and communications at Warren Easton.

She was kidding, of course. No one was fired for her.

But in theory, it was possible. Like most charter schools, the new Warren Easton has no teacher unions and answers to no school district. Instead, it has its own charter with the state and its own school board that grants the principal sweeping authority to shape budgets, curriculum and mission, and to hire and fire staff.

It seems to be working at Warren Easton. With a charismatic and collaborative leader, morale of staff and teachers appears to be high, and the high-poverty student body is performing well on graduation and standardized test measures.

Not every charter school manages its autonomy so well, however. Critics point to less successful examples, including Ben Franklin Charter High School across town in New Orleans. There, they say, staff decisions were arbitrary, pay scales murky and morale poor and teacher turnover is high. Alleged mismanagement at Ben Franklin recently led its teachers to unionize.

These two schools represent each side of a double-edged sword: The charter school reality that the freedom to innovate also contains the power to mismanage or destroy. What makes charters exciting is dynamic possibility for leadership to change staff, refocus and create a new mission, but that dynamism comes with risk.

Charter schools are now a permanent and growing part of the American educational map. From school years 1999 to 2011, the percentage of public schools that were charters rose from 1.7 to 5.8 percent.

In urban schools serving underprivileged students, charters are disproportionately common. All of New Orleans’ public schools are now charters, while over half of Detroit students and roughly 45 percent of those in Washington, D.C., attend charters. These cities are leaders but not outliers: Many major urban areas are now upward of 20 percent charter.

As the charter trend expands, there is friction over how the schools are governed. Ben Franklin remains a rarity in its recent unionization. In 2012 just 7 percent of charter schools were unionized, down from 12 percent in 2009, according to the Center for Education Reform.

Critics argue that without strong teacher input, reflected in unions or some other institutional security, teachers and the schools will be at the mercy of bad leaders. Others argue that reverting to the fetters of traditional schools would squelch innovation, that real change requires strong leaders who take risks and that teacher voice can be respected without sacrificing bold leadership.

By Jeanne Allen
Washington Post
December 4th, 2014

The challenges of the Middleburg Community Charter School, described in the Dec. 2 Metro article “Charter school caught in local-state muddle,” are typical of a charter-school law that imposes non-performance inputs that have no impact on student achievement, such as a principal’s license that demonstrates process accomplishment instead of experience and success. No successful enterprise succeeds in hiring leaders based on what’s on paper. Virginia’s educators should embrace innovations that put performance-based accountability ahead of bureaucracy and paperwork.

The majority of the nation’s 6,400 charter schools succeed because they are clustered in states or jurisdictions, including the District, where freedom and accountability for results trump emphasis on licensure. We discourage exceptional individuals from entering education by imposing well-meaning but irrelevant requirements that have no effect on education. Anyone can obtain a piece of paper saying he or she has accomplished something; only the best can get results that students deserve.

The Center for Education Reform has spent 10 years fighting for a meaningful charter-school law in Virginia. The few charters there are regularly tortured by bureaucratic meddling and eventually fold as a result. Meanwhile, in the District, a vibrant environment exists for innovative schooling, demonstrating what success looks like when properly implemented.

There are no constitutional barriers to opening up such communities of learning in Virginia, only attitudinal barriers.

Jeanne Allen, Washington
The writer is a senior fellow and president emeritus at the Center for Education Reform.

By Chris Quinn
My San Antonio
November 30, 2014

Education analyst group Niche has looked at public school districts in San Antonio, Bexar County and surrounding counties and ranked them by order of proficiency in several key categories.

The districts were graded on the following: academics, health and safety, teacher quality, diversity, facilities and resources, extracurricular activities and sports.

The group’s findings resulted in this list of the 50 best school districts in our area.

The ratings were part of a larger list that ranked 8,738 school districts across the country. According to the Center for Education Reform, there are a total of 13,588 public school districts in the U.S.

You can read more about the rankings and the methodology used at www.niche.com.

By Kara Kerwin
Leader/Observer
November 19th, 2014

Too few of our modern-day state leaders appreciate the absolute role they must play in bringing about substantive change in America’s schools.

Even with more than half of states electing reform-minded governors who have either proven to be champions of reforms during their tenure or have run on platforms that don’t shy away from being vocal about putting parents and students first, it’s imperative all leaders come to appreciate good governance and reach across the aisle for the sake of children.

After all, it’s how some of the boldest reforms were born, such as charter schools in Minnesota in 1991.

Charter schools educate over 2.5 million students nationwide today, yet despite the fact that 42 states and the District of Columbia have charter school laws, the reality is that charter schools are expanding in low numbers still in many states as demand for educational options increases, as the average charter school wait list has grown to nearly 300 students.

State leaders are the key to improving education and creating an environment that will allow charter schools to meet the growing demand for excellent educational options. It’s imperative that newly elected leaders understand what education reforms like charter schools are, and what they aren’t, as myths and misinformation continue to plague media coverage and permeate public psyche.

One of the most common misconceptions is that charter schools are privately funded institutions. A 2013 survey from the Center for Education Reform (CER) found that only 20 percent of Americans correctly identified charter schools as public schools.

Charter schools are in fact independent public schools that are held accountable for student results. And, they do this with 36 percent less funding compared to their traditional public school counterparts.

Another common falsehood is charter schools “cream” students, when the reality is a majority of charter school students are non-white, or minority students. According to CER’s 2013 Survey of America’s Charter Schools, only 45 percent of charter students are white, while 52.5 percent of public school students are white.

Additionally, 61 percent of charter schools serve a student population where over 60 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Perhaps the biggest myth charter schools face today is that they aren’t accountable. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unlike all other public schools, charters must be proactive in their efforts to stay open. Calls for more charter regulation and oversight in the name of “transparency,” even from fellow colleagues in the education reform community, are misguided, as charter schools actually have more oversight and evaluation than traditional public schools because of their contracts with authorizers.

Over-regulating charter schools would convert charters from autonomous, grassroots laboratories of innovation to the very schooling entities from which they seek to break away. The hallmark of charter schools is autonomy and performance-based accountability.

It’s crucial that even those who support charter schools remember this, and don’t fall prey to letting a few bad apples result in loving charter schools to death via unnecessary regulations.

Nearly 20 percent of all charter school closures occur because a school failed to meet acceptable student performance levels according to CER’s “State of Charter Schools: What We Know – And What We Do Not – About Performance and Accountability.”

In Michigan, for example, 22 percent of charter schools ever opened have been closed, far out-pacing the national charter school closure rate of 15 percent.

Finally, the importance of a strong charter school law cannot be understated in creating a vibrant charter school sector. Strong laws generally consist of multiple and independent charter approval bodies known as authorizers, no caps on the number of charter schools allowed, operational and fiscal autonomy, and equitable funding.

In states with multiple and independent authorizers, stronger, more objective oversight is used to ensure that successful charter schools remain open and those that fail to perform are closed. States with multiple authorizers were home to nearly 80 percent of the nation’s 5,400 charter schools in 2010-11.

With over 1 million students on charter school waiting lists nationwide, demand for charter schools is clear. In fact, 73 percent of Americans support the concept of charter schools.

After over 23 years of seeing these autonomous public schools in action as viable educational alternatives for children, it’s imperative newly elected leaders separate fact from fiction when it comes to charter schools, and educate their colleagues in state legislatures to ensure that myths and misinformation does not get in the way of uplifting educational opportunities for America’s children.

Read more:Leader-Observer – Separate Fact From Fiction on Charter Schools