Free Republic

Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to revitalize schools within the city of Detroit has school-choice advocates concerned about potential threats to school choice in the city. Charter school advocates fear that Snyder’s plan creates a bureaucracy with the authority to stop the growth of charter schools or even shut them down if different political leadership put anti-charter board members in charge. The governor’s plan calls for the old Detroit Public Schools to be kept in existence for the administrative purpose of paying off the district’s debt. DPS has $483 million in operating debt and a combined capital and bond debt of...

Alabama and Montana passed historic school choice legislation this legislative session, giving parents more options in choosing the best atmosphere for the education of their children. Finally, Alabama and Montana join more than 40 states in the movement for school choice and educational freedom, demonstrating that Americans want school choice. In Alabama, the state legislature passed SB45, allowing for the first public charter schools. Within the bill, an unlimited number of conversion charter schools are permitted, while start-up charter schools are limited to ten schools per year until the law sunsets in 2020. Additionally, charter schools may be authorized by...

LaTanya Dorsey is a mother who sends her daughter to a public charter school in Eastpointe. Her daughter is on the honor roll and doing very well. Dorsey didn't expect to have a say in where her daughter went to school. “Usually, it's the district that you're in is the school that you would have to attend,” Dorsey said. “That kind of surprised me — that I did have a choice to send her to another school, so I was real grateful for that.” Dorsey said that parental choice is critical to helping students attend a school that is the...

More evidence indicates that school choice works, even in so-called blue states. The Boston-based Pioneer Institute undertook a study of charter schools in the bay state and found that “Case studies of five high-performing charters schools from around the state reveal that these schools create highly effective teaching workforces in specific ways. First, they take great advantage of the autonomy that they have to assemble their own teaching workforces, in most cases without having to consider teacher tenure or other common constraints that teachers unions impose on traditional public schools. When assembling their workforces, high performing charter schools tend to...

Necessity drives invention. In the field of military innovation, all sorts of inventions — the Maginot line, the flame fougasse, trench warfare, the Vickers machine gun — were rooted in the same urgent necessity: keeping Germans out. War is evil and ugly, but Europe experienced a worse horror when that necessity was inverted, and the totalitarian movement that controlled half of the continent decided it needed a way to keep Germans in. And so utopia’s jailers built the Berlin Wall and any number of similar fortifications. The ideologue may say that a wall is a wall is a wall, but...

Opponents of charter schools have claimed that these schools are "cherry-picking" the students they admit, and that this explains why many charter schools get better educational results with less money than public schools do. Many controversies about how students should be admitted to educational institutions, especially those supported by the taxpayers, betray a fundamental confusion about what these institutions are there for. This applies to both schools and colleges. Admitting students strictly on the basis of their academic qualifications, which might seem to be common sense, is rejected by many college admissions committees. A dean of admissions at Harvard, years...

Deion Sanders knows better than most that there's power in a nickname. When he was still just a skinny cornerback at Florida State University, he dubbed himself "Prime Time" and birthed an alter ego that would earn him fame, riches, and a place in the pantheon of the 20th century's greatest athletes, not to mention greatest egos. Yet for Sanders today, nicknames are more a matter of convenience than a conscious act of branding. "Blind Side," yells the Hall of Famer. "You're up!" It's another sweltering June morning on the artificial turf of Texas A&M-Commerce's football field. The campus, an...

Charter school growth has exploded over the last two decades and so have the waiting lists to get in them. “Today there are charter school laws in 42 states and the District of Columbia,” Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said Monday in a conference on Capitol Hill. “Close to 50 percent of D. C. public schools are charter schools.” Rees spoke at a forum assembled by the American Federation of Children (AFC) and hosted by Senator Tim Scott, R-South Carolina. “In Louisiana we’ve doubled the number of charter schools and 90 percent of New...

Unlike any of the programs identified today as “school choice,” such as opportunity scholarships, charter schools and tax credits, universal school choice transfers control of education back to parents, where it rightfully belongs, by allowing public education funds to follow the child to the school chosen by the parents. These funds — substantially less than current costs but sufficient to pay for a quality education at nonpublic schools — are made available to every parent in the form of a voucher that can be cashed only by a qualified school. With parental control comes responsibility — a prerequisite to success...

House Democrats have introduced legislation as a measure to place a moratorium on any new charter public schools opening in Michigan. However, the pro-school choice Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) reads the bill differently. According to GLEP Executive Director Gary Naeyaert, as drafted, House Bill 5852 would eventually spell doom for all of the charter public schools in the state. “What we have uncovered is that the legislation they claim would just push the pause button on increasing the number of charter schools would, in reality, close every charter school in the state over time,” Naeyaert told Capitol Confidential. “Language...

At the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, several public charter school officials lauded the rising popularity of charter schools across the United States. Kenneth Campbell, president of Louisiana’s Black Alliance for Educational Options, Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. public charter school board, and Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president of state advocacy and support for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, spoke at the event. Ziebarth summarized findings from a recent study by his organization, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, on the health of public charter schools in the U.S. Their study, “The Health of the Public...

All four Harlem Success Academy charters serve primarily minority student populations (all are 93.5 to 97.1% black and Hispanic) and low-income households (75 to 80% of students at these schools qualify for free or discounted lunch), and yet all are ranked academically higher than about 97% of all schools in New York state based on 2013-2014 standardized test assessments in math and reading. What a truly amazing academic success story! Harlem Success Academy 3, an elementary school where 95.2% of the students are black or Hispanic and 80% are from poor households who qualify for free or discounted lunch, performed...

Charter schools are gaining momentum, and a recently-passed bill in the House of Representatives will help make it easier to start and maintain charter schools. The Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act, an amendment to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was introduced to address the growing education sector. charter school poster The concerns, elaborated by the House Education and the Workforce Committee, are that charter schools “face difficulty in securing facilities to house their schools” and “have difficulty obtaining the funds necessary to build or rehabilitate facilities.” Also, they [are] concerned about charter school quality and...

New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, like so many others who call themselves "progressive," is gung-ho to solve social problems. In fact, he is currently on a crusade to solve an educational problem that doesn't exist, even though there are plenty of other educational problems that definitely do exist. The non-existent problem is the use of tests to determine who gets admitted to the city's three most outstanding public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These admissions tests have been used for generations, and the students in these schools have had spectacular achievements for generations. These achievements...

Hell hath no fury like a congressman scorned. Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel is giving the teachers union a lesson in political retribution for snubbing him and endorsing his rival Adriano Espaillat for Congress, sources said. Rangel is hitting the union where it hurts — by vigorously supporting non-unionized charter schools. The unions have been fighting desperately to stop or slow down charter-school expansion. “The congressman was disappointed the UFT [United Federation of Teachers] dumped him for Espaillat. I see Charlie speaking out more forcefully on the charter-school issue,” said a Rangel ­insider. “He doesn’t have to be concerned about offending...

I know a lot of people on this site are against public schools, and rightly so. I just wanted to share a Charter School that does deserve credit for what they are doing. Basis Charter Schools, http://basisschools.org/ is leading a revolution in the education industry. One of my children will be attending there this year for 5th grade. He just tested into Algebra 1, for 5th grade!! There is no way that a typical public school would allow him to do that. My other child just finished 6th grade. She took Algebra 1, Latin, separate courses in Chemistry, Biology, and...

new orleans — NEW ORLEANS — The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old work sheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good. Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’s Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week. With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.

In the twenty-three years since Minnesota became the first state to adopt a charter school law, the legislative slog to expand educational freedom elsewhere has borne massive advancements for parents and students. Often tedious and sometimes nasty, the success of this long fight has hinged on the willingness of stout legislators in state houses across the country to forge coalitions of the unlikely. We've done that exceedingly well in Georgia and have much to celebrate as we mark National Charter Schools Week. Now, that's not to say that we haven't suffered setbacks, like in 2011, when Georgia's high court ruled...

Amidst all of the 24/7 coverage of the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a news story did manage to bubble up from the depths and it posed an interesting question.Are Democrats really concerned about minorities and the poor?Are they really looking to help them achieve success and prosperity in life? In a move that garnered more attention than newly elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio probably expected, a decision was made to close some, and limit the growth of other Charter schools in New York City. De Blasio’s major foe on this issue is Success Academy Networks...

Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time — and, above all, some serious thought — into how to go about doing it. Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to "reach out" is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black "leaders" like Jesse...