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Just a few weeks ago, Bridge Magazine released a statewide ranking of schools, which took student socioeconomic background into account. Bridge's methodology is almost identical to that used in the Mackinac Center's High School Report Card. Not surprisingly, the results were similar: Both Bridge and the Mackinac Center identified Star International Academy as the highest-ranked school. On the heels of Bridge's release, Jeff Padden wrote in a column for Bridge Magazine that charter public schools are twice as likely to be low-scoring than conventional public schools. Padden comes to this conclusion by comparing the distribution of conventional and charter public...

A new study taking race, poverty and other areas into account when measuring performance shows that students in Michigan public charter schools do better academically than their conventional public school counterparts. The students who took advantage of school choice had academic growth 82 percent above the state average in reading and 72 percent above the state average in math. The report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) followed more than 85,000 charter school students in 273 schools and took into account grade level, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English language learner status, special education status, gender and prior...

A recent report from the Cato Institute highlights a different type of competition fostered by school choice: public versus private. As Adam Schaeffer discusses in the report, charter schools, since they are government subsidized, are enticing parents away from the private education sector and back into the public school system. This increases the number of students on the education rolls and thereby leads to increased taxpayer costs. “We [Schaeffer and Richard Buddin] estimate that charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008,” writes Schaeffer. “These students required an additional $1.8 billion in annual public expenditures.”...

Education, like many other things in America under the current Administration, is in decline. The youth of this country must be competitive with the youth of our major global rivals. That being said, they must be equipped to do that, which means the current education system must be reformed. In a country where, economically, competition has allowed the best to thrive and the worst to disappear to make America the most prosperous nation in the world, it only makes sense that the same idea would be applied in the education sector as well. The key to success of a society...

The president of the state’s largest government employee union, the Michigan Education Association, recently said the for-profit education management companies that manage online charter public schools here will make “hundreds of millions of Michigan taxpayer dollars” if a bill is passed increasing the arbitrary cap on the number of students allowed to enroll. This claim is laughable. Fiscal data from the two current online charters now allowed shows the vast majority of their money is spent on instruction and instructional support to students. Teachers and instructional supplies make up the bulk of this spending. Further, audits show the management companies...

Santorum Bashes Public Schools, Says They're Stuck In Factory Era By Mitchell Landsberg February 18, 2012 Reporting from Columbus, Ohio— Republican GOP hopeful Rick Santorum may be the most prominent homeschooler in America. So it might not have been surprising that, on Saturday, he told a conservative Christian audience that he intended to homeschool his children in the White House. In his remarks to the Ohio Christian Alliance, however, Santorum went further, seeming to attack the very idea of public education. In the nation’s past, he said, “Most presidents homeschooled their children in the White House.… Parents educated their children...

Possible IRS rule change alarms charter schools. The IRS is proposing changes to the rules for Charter Schools. You have until Monday to comment at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools website.The issue is this: The regulation would force those charter school teachers who have chosen to be in the state retirement system and are currently contributing to their state retirement plans to quit their charter-school jobs or lose the money that has been contributed to their accounts by the state. Teachers can keep what they've put into the account, but anything the state has put in would be...

Jennifer Jarosz is one of several parents in St. Helen, a small, rural community in Roscommon County, who wants to be able to place her children in a charter public school. She testified Dec. 1 in front of the Michigan House Education Committee. But currently the state's charter cap is blocking the schoolhouse door. "Our community is surrounded by two school districts with an average graduation rate of 75 percent,” Jarosz told the committee. "Educationally we are already an under-served community and it is only going to get worse if we are not provided some opportunities for educational alternatives.” The...

The metal bleachers in the middle of the school gymnasium fill slowly with expectant parents and playful youngsters. All of the adults are here on this warm spring afternoon for the same reason: to find out if their children will gain admission to South Arbor Academy, a Washtenaw County public charter school that has become so popular that it conducts a public lottery each spring to divvy up any openings in its K-8 program. Kindergarten is the most sought-after spot. The school has 77 seats available for the fall of 2010, but about 51 of those will be taken by...

Two Democrats, Sens. Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, and Hoon-Yung Hopgood, D-Taylor, announced this week that they would introduce a constitutional amendment to ban schools operated by for-profit entities in Michigan. “Our education institutions should not be guided by a mission statement focused on making a profit,” Sen. Warren said. “Michigan's children deserve to receive an education focused on their success and empowerment – a mission with no room for profits and corporate management.” In response, Senate Education Committee Chair Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair, contrasted the Warren-Hopgood resolution, which targets groups that manage charter schools, with the fact that numerous for-profit...

A local law firm on Tuesday filed a class action suit in Hampden Superior Court against two major cable companies, Charter Communications and Comcast, charging each with “gouging” their customers by not automatically giving credit or refunds for lengthy service outages following the recent snowstorm. Lawyer Jeffrey S. Morneau of the Springfield firm Connor Morneau & Olin, filed two separate class action suits against the area’s two major cable companies. Each suit is filed on behalf of three plaintiffs, but as Morneau pointed out, the action covers “all persons residing in Massachusetts” who are customers of either company and who...

Agassi has used the platform that tennis gave him to pursue his lifelong goal of giving children in need a better education. He founded his own school in Las Vegas 10 years ago and just forged a partnership with Canyon Capital to provide $500 million of funding for 75 charter schools across the country in the next three years. "Andre Agassi has done more to help others than any athlete has ever done," his former coach Nick Bollettieri says. "He helped take tennis to another level, but what he is doing now with education will be so much greater because...

Charter School Accused of Becoming Adult Club at NightBy Kathleen McGrory, The Miami Herald 6:15 a.m. EDT, September 2, 2011 MIAMI-DADE COUNTY— By day, the Balare Language Academy is an A-rated charter school, home to children in kindergarten through middle school. But when the kids are tucked into bed, Balare apparently becomes a playground of a different kind. Party fliers, printed and on the Web, indicate that the campus at 10875 Quail Roost Dr. has been hosting raunchy, booze-soaked bashes into the wee hours. One flier for an upcoming party features a voluptuous, scantily clad woman posing with champagne bottles....

via U.S. charter-school network with Turkish link draws federal attention By Martha Woodall and Claudio Gatti | INQUIRER STAFF WRITER FOR THE INQUIRER Fethullah Gulen is a major Islamic political figure in Turkey, but he lives in self-imposed exile in a Poconos enclave and gained his green card by convincing a federal judge in Philadelphia that he was an influential educational figure in the United States. As evidence, his lawyer pointed to the charter schools, now more than 120 in 25 states, that his followers – Turkish scientists, engineers, and businessmen – have opened, including Truebright Science Academy in North...

In an interview on the local Pittsburgh TV station this morning, a Pittsburgh Carnegie Mellon startup has found a way to to identify and purchase unused or empty return space on private charter aircraft. Interestingly, it uses algorithms developed by DARPA and used by the U.S. air force. (Would also avoid TSA gropes). BTW, I have no relationship with the startup. But, I think it is a neat idea by a local Pittsburgh startup using DARPA technology. In any event, the company is at flyRuby.com. If interested in it or want to bookmark the site: http://flyruby.com/statics/charter101 From the site:* Using...

The educational reforms some conservatives have championed for decades may actually have a chance at a second life now that a few liberals have embraced them. For example, the current darling of conservative reformers, outgoing Washington, D. C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, was a Democratic appointee in a Democratic administration in one of the most Democratic (in party registrations) cities in America. In Washington, pre-Rhee, “Over 95 percent of teachers in D. C. P. S. rated satisfactory while 10 percent of students were reading at grade level,” Jason Kamras of Teaching Human Capital said at the Atlantic Forum on K-12...

, In New York, a public school system that once was the envy of the world has become an international laughingstock. The laugh track is not likely to die out anytime soon. “Virtually the entire New York press corps do not read the state test,” Harvard professor Daniel Koretz alleged at The Atlantic K-12 Education Forum. “Last year, the chancellor’s office, in a press conference, admitted that they did not read the state tests.” Maybe they should see The Lottery instead. The heart-wrenching documentary tells the tale of two families applying to the Harlem Success Academy (HSA). Five thousand applicants...

For Hire or Charter Bethany Stotts, July 8, 2010 In their interim report on a National Study of Charter Management Organization Effectiveness, Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education contrast charter management organizations (CMOs) with coexisting public school districts and explain how the leaders of the former have considerable latitude in terms of hiring, firing and other institutional practices. “In contrast to typical school districts in which school leaders frequently complain about the lack of flexibility in allocating school resources, well over one-third of surveyed CMOs (41 percent) allow their schools to determine the number of teaching positions needed...

HOUSTON - It's a story you saw First on FOX: A charter school has fired one of its teachers -- accused of beating up a student on video. A classmate captured the entire incident on their cell phone. The teacher in question, identified by school officials as Sherri Davis, was officially terminated on Monday night. “Now that officials at Jamie’s House Charter School have been able to review the video on Fox News, we are horrified at the actions of the teacher,” principal David Jones said in a statement.

While some may go on a field trip to the zoo or a museum, students from a Minneapolis charter school went to the state capitol to take part in a protest. Sixth, seventh and eighth graders from Southside Family Charter School chanted, held signs, and demanded answers on welfare reform outside of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's office Tuesday...