Last year New York State recalibrated its achievement levels for grades 3-8 after years of grade inflation. It was a sobering day for public education, charter schools included.
A new item on the UFT’s web site overlays maps of school closures and charter school openings, showing how they both are concentrated in the South Bronx, Harlem, and central Brooklyn. “This may be a coincidence,” the union intones, “but it certainly doesn’t look like one.”
Last week the State Education Department (SED) received a record 91 Letters of Intent for new proposed charter schools. Seventy applicant groups intend to establish charter schools in the five boroughs of New York City. Twenty-one applicants are from outside New York City and include groups seeking to start schools in Binghamton, Brentwood, Copiague, Hornell, Jamestown, Nassau County, Niagara Falls, Poughkeepsie, Rotterdam-Mohonasen, Utica, Westbury, Yonkers, East Ramapo, Buffalo, and Rochester.
The New York City Charter Center would like to congratulate the following schools for their success in becoming authorized by either the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute or the New York State Education Department.
Our CEO, James Merriman, appeared on Fox 5 news last night to talk about Chancellor Klein's resignation and the appointment of Cathie Black as the city's new schools Chancellor.
Charter schools are thinking hard about whether to accept Race to the Top grants, wondering whether the requirements for teacher evaluation will represent a slide back to bureaucratic micromanagement. Advocates like Tom Carroll are right to ask this question. Charter schools have learned the hard way about the importance of protecting their operational autonomy, and at the Charter Center we’ve backed them at every turn.
Today is the deadline for charter schools to decide if they’re going to participate in the Race to the Top program. While participating has implications for charter school autonomy, as pointed out by several pro-charter organizations over the past few days, there are three reasons we think schools should sign on, as I detailed in a letter to the City’s charter leaders this morning.
As “Waiting for Superman” shines a bright spotlight on successful charter schools, some newspaper coverage out of Sonoma County, California reminds us again that “charter school” doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere.
Waiting for Superman opens today. Here's our roundup of reviews.
