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By Arianna Prothero
Education Week
September 18, 2014

Unions have struggled to gain traction in the fast-growing charter sector. As the number of charter schools has grown nationally, the number of unionized staff members has shrunk according to the most recent data from the Center for Education Reform.

Only about 7 percent of charter schools were unionized in 2012, down from 12 percent in 2009, according to a 2014 annual survey by CER, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.

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Arianna Prothero
Education Week
September 17th, 2014

Despite a national decline in the number of charter schools with unionized staffs over the past few years, one high-profile charter chain based in California is not only unionized, it’s also expanding into new states.

Green Dot Public Schools has had a unionized staff since its inception 15 years ago. But nationally only 7 percent of charter schools were unionized in 2012, down from 12 percent in 2009, according to a 2014 annual survey by the Center for Education Reform, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.

Carolyn Thompson, The Associated Press

BUFFALO, N.Y. – (AP) — The state has been shortchanging charter schools through a funding formula that delivers only a portion of the resources received by traditional public schools, according to a lawsuit filed against the state Tuesday.

The state Supreme Court lawsuit seeks to have the formula declared unconstitutional and rewritten by the state Legislature to ensure that charter schools can deliver the “sound basic education” that students are guaranteed by the state constitution and previous legal rulings.

“The total number of charter school children being deprived of their rights is staggering,” said Harold Hinds, legal director for the Northeast Charter Schools Network, which along with five charter school families, brought the lawsuit on behalf of the state’s 107,000 charter school students.

It is at least the second lawsuit filed against the state this year over education funding. In February, a coalition of public school parents and advocacy groups alleged that New York has not complied with terms of an agreement that resolved a 2006 case. The lawsuit, brought by New Yorkers for Students Educational Rights, is pending in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Tuesday’s lawsuit said charter school students receive as little as 60 percent of the funding district students receive and also have to pay for their own buildings. Charter school students in Buffalo, for example, receive $13,700 per pupil, while the per-pupil allotment at district schools is $23,500, according to the suit.

The system is discriminatory, the plaintiffs said, because the majority of charter school students are black and Hispanic.

“Charter schools give parents an option and cultivate a culture that enhances children,” said plaintiff Russell Bell, whose three children attend King Center Charter School in Buffalo. “There should be justice for these children.”

The suit names the state government, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state Assembly, Senate, budget office, Board of Regents and Education Commissioner John King Jr.

A state Education Department spokesman said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit was praised by the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C., which called the plaintiffs “brave.”

The Alliance for Quality Education, however, criticized the action. The Albany-based public education advocacy group issued a statement saying the lawsuit “will only divert more money away from public schools, at the expense of our children.”

Arianna Prothero
Education Week
September 16th, 2014

Parents go to great lengths to meet the special and often demanding needs of children with disabilities. In Diana Diaz-Harrison’s case, that meant opening a charter school in Phoenix for her son, who has autism—and for other students like him—when she felt his needs weren’t being met in regular district-run schools.

There are few data on exactly how many of these special education-focused charter schools exist. A tally by the Center for Education Reform, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, counted around 100 such charters in the 2012 school year. Some of those independently operated public schools, like the Arizona Autism Charter School, are disability-specific; others, like the Washington-based Bridges Public Charter School, serve children with a range of disabilities as well as their typically developing peers.

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Blake Neff, The Daily Caller

A group of parents in Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., has filed a lawsuit against the state, saying that the state’s formula for funding charter schools illegally shortchanges them compared to public schools.

The suit, Brown v. New York, was filed Monday night and announced Tuesday afternoon with the aid of the Northeast Charter Schools Network, an advocacy group for over 200 charters in both New York and Connecticut.

It claims that New York systematically gives charter schools less money than standard public schools. Buffalo charters, for instance, receive only $13,700 per pupil, they claim, while standard district schools receive $23,500. Such a disparity, they say, violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law.

That is especially the case, the charters argue, since students at charters are far more likely to be black, Hispanic, or from low-income households than students in the state at large.

A total of 107,000 children in New York state attend charter schools. However, thousands more remain on wait lists to attend, a wait list that could be shorter if charters had more money to work with, the suit says. By denying charters the money needed to accept more students off of wait lists, the state is condemning students to remain in failing public schools, argue the plaintiffs.

“Charter schools are the only opportunity most inner city children have to an education of excellence,” said plaintiff Maria Dalmau, who has two daughters in a Rochester charter. “Every child deserves an opportunity like the one my daughters have.”

The lawsuit is very similar to one filed in July in Washington, D.C., where the city’s charter schools alleged that the District favors standard public schools by supplying them with free services worth thousands of dollars and unavailable to charter schools.

“For all but the most privileged families, Buffalo and Rochester are educational deserts that starve our most vulnerable children of all meaningful access to the American dream,” says the lawsuit. “Public charter schools offer a glimmer of hope for many families, but the ability of these charter schools to meet this profound need is stymied by an unconstitutional funding scheme.”

The funding situation is exacerbated, the lawsuit claims, by the typical requirement that charter schools supply their own building and pay rent on it, a burden public schools do not have to meet.

The Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter school interest group, was quick to praise the lawsuit in a statement sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The seven brave charter school student plaintiffs and their parents deserve applause for taking necessary action to secure equitable resources for a ‘sound basic education,’ as their constitutional right is being violated with charter school students receiving a mere three-fifths of funding that district students receive,” the Center said.

Groups that support traditional public schools took a cooler view on the lawsuit, arguing that it merely seeks to divert more money away from revenue-starved district schools.

Eric Cooper, Stamford Advocate

If 2013 is any indication, then we can expect approximately 56 million children to go “back to school” in an American elementary or secondary school, by early September. And when these students walk through the classroom doors, more than 3.7 million teachers — their partners in learning — will be there to greet them (the Center for Education Reform,www.edreform.com).

All in all, American public, charter and private school teachers are highly experienced, well-practiced professionals. Nearly 40 percent have 15 or more years of teaching experience; only 11.3 percent have four years or fewer. Practically all had some sort of professional development during the previous school year: Almost 85 percent had enrichment in subjects they taught; and more than half participated in professional development that involved reading instruction (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011-12, www.nces.ed.gov).

But as America’s educators prepare to make more positive differences for children this school year, a part of me hopes teachers are guided by their hearts — as well as their heads.

Yvette Jackson, my colleague at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, calls it rediscovering “the glow” (“The Pedagogy of Confidence: Inspiring High Intellectual Performance in Urban Schools,” Teachers College Press, 2011.) With all of the emphasis on teaching answers to specific tests so we can help children raise test scores, I believe teachers need “the glow” — now maybe more than ever.

As Dr. Jackson writes:

“Remember what it was about you that made you feel you had something to offer students to help them learn. What was that something? Remember that first year of teaching and the hope that generated your desire to reach students. What did that motivate you to do?

“Remember your first concrete evidence of success and how it tweaked your passion and emboldened you to use your gifts to unlock the gifts in your students? What were those gifts you acted on?

“Remember the student for whom you had the most profound impact. How did you engage them? What did it feel like when you realized you had in fact made an impact? Remember your strengths, your skills, your attributes, your passion?”

First-year teachers typically say they entered the field to further social justice and the pursuit of learning. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder suggests new teachers feel an “impetus to bring youngsters into the fold of a community that is larger than themselves.”

Like Dr. Jackson, I want teachers to remember their early years in teaching and return to what drew them to the field in the first place.

This spark enables teachers to reach those first students who make a difference in their professional lives. That success, in turn, becomes an important part of their foundation as teachers and informs their early teaching styles.

Their approach to teaching might have change over the years, informed by experience or other factors. That’s to be expected. However, there is a bit of magic that allows teachers in their early years to connect with students in a powerful way — to be “the one” their students were waiting for.

When treated like the authorities they are and supported by sustained professional development, many teachers never lose the passion, skills or talent that drove their early success. When that professional development is guided by best practice, and cognitive and neuroscience research, we now know that the results help all students to achieve. Yet too often, we also know that state and national policies lead to an over-emphasis on test preparation — robbing students of engaged academic learning about real-world, higher-order skills such as creativity and problem-solving.

To become “the one the students have been waiting for” begins with the belief and expectation that all students have a unique talent and gift waiting to be uncovered. Belief and expectation are the key elements of hope. As Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School wrote in his book, “The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail In The Face of Illness,” “hope can be imagined as a domino effect, a chain reaction in which each link makes improvement more likely. It changes us profoundly in spirit and in body.”

As the school year begins, students trust that their teachers will guide them toward hope — defined by Dr. Groopman as “the elevating feeling we experience when we see — in the mind’s eye — a path to a better future.”

May teachers seeking to rekindle their passion for the job regain the spark that ignites a transformed learning environment — one where educators, parents and students collectively work to improve opportunities for ALL young people.

Stamford resident Eric J. Cooper is president of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (www.nuatc.org.)

Steve Williams, Daily Press

The Center for Education Reform is by no means the only privately funded organization devoted to broadening school choice for parents and their children, but it’s one of the most effective. It was founded in 1993, at the beginning of the voucher and charter school movement, and was, according to its website, “founded to bridge policy and practice and restore excellence in education, through promoting choice and accountability in schools.”

In a recent report, CER noted that some 13 states and the District of Columbia now have voucher programs, which is 13 more than there were 21 years ago. But of course, since these states don’t kowtow to either the federal government or formal public education, programs vary widely. Which means those states are hothouses for seeking the best way to achieve excellence in education. As it should be in a free market economy.

That melting pot of reform thus opposes one of the most pernicious of our government directed education system’s dictates, that ZIP codes determine what schools students attend. That very fact damages the whole idea of school choice, and education suffers accordingly.

So those 13 states have embarked on their own reforms by passing laws circumventing the system. Some of those laws allow voucher programs A new study from CER now ranks the laws of such reforming states according to the level of choice being provided. In Wisconsin, the statewide voucher program has a cap of 1,000 new vouchers that can be awarded every year. This is in a state with over 850,000 students enrolled in elementary and secondary schools. Colorado has also launched a voucher program in one county, but it offers only 500 vouchers to a school-aged population of around 62,000.

That contrasts with Indiana, where Republicans have ensured that here are no limits on the number of vouchers.

California — no surprise here — is among those states where no voucher programs are allowed, and even our charter schools struggle in the face of virulent hostility from the teachers’ unions.

If this hostility prevails, our public education system — already producing pathetic results despite continuing assaults on taxpayers for ever greater funding — will remain mired in bureaucracy, while the Indianas will be producing hundreds of thousands of graduates prepared for higher education and the work force. And California’s badly educated graduates will still be joining the growing ranks of the country’s dependents.

Is that what we want? No, but that’s where we’re headed. So give us no grief about the widening gap between the wealthy and the poverty stricken, because the gap is a direct result of a public school system incapable of reform.