Morning Shots

March 1, 2013

First Fridays, a monthly charter school tour event sponsored by CityBridge Foundation, FOCUS and Charter Board Partners, gives people in the DC metro area a chance to see some truly amazing schools at work. Today, our VP of Research, Alison Consoletti, with 25 other choice supporters, checked out Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, an elementary Chinese language immersion school.

This school, opened in 2008, now serves 439 students in grades PreK-5. While walking through the school halls, the 5th grade student tour guide explained how all subjects – even Chemistry – are taught in both English and Chinese.

Our group got to sit in on a PreK class, where 100% of their school day is taught in Chinese. Students from all walks of life were singing and acting out songs in Chinese, while also learning what the characters meant. It was truly a sight to see.

Since Yu Ying has been open, the school has performed stellar academically, and today is rated Tier 1 Status, according to DCPCSB’s Performance Management Framework.

There were over 700 applications for just 70 spots this last year. And because demand for a challenging immersion program is so high, Yu Ying is working with other immersion charter schools in DC to create DC International, a middle and high-school that would offer International Baccalaureate and continued foreign language instruction.

We can’t wait to see what school First Fridays is going to take us to next!

March 1, 2013

In a follow-up to their initial 2009 report on the Bay State, CREDO has released its latest Charter School Performance Report on Massachusetts, a six year study that analyzes the effectiveness of Massachusetts’s charter schools and in particular, their performance in the Boston area.

The report was largely positive on both math and reading tests, notably when comparing Boston charter schools to their public school counterparts. When analyzing just Beantown charters, the report found that 83 percent had significantly positive learning gains in both reading and math and no city charters were performing lower than the local public schools. That’s a pretty good sales pitch for charter schools in Massachusetts.

For a little more background on CER’s long history with CREDO and our concerns with their methodology, which they use in this report, here’s a link to help you out: a little intro to CREDO.

February 28, 2013

It’s not surprising that Louisiana’s charter school authority expansion fell flat in its first year.

Louisiana’s experience is proof that not all efforts to improve laws are created equal. Strong charter school laws do not require new groups to apply to become authorizers. It is actually a disincentive to do so.

Strong laws permit universities and other publicly accountable non-education entities to become authorizers without asking permission and hold them accountable for the outcomes of their schools. That’s because the purpose of independent and multiple authorizers is to establish new pathways for school creation and oversight separate from existing state and local education agencies.

States that allow for truly independent authorizers, granted by law to operate with unbridled freedom, yield greater charter school growth and quality.