National Charter Schools Conference coverage

The News 21 team will be attending the Ninth Annual National Charter School Conference to find out how charter policies are advancing on a national level.

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The conference is the largest annual event focused on charter schools, and a number of influential and innovative figures in the charter school movement will be on hand to talk about what they are doing and what is new in the charter world. We’ll be looking at what the people attending this conference are trying to do in Washington to encourage charter school growth. We’ll also report on what the public officials here, like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, have to say about their policies related to charter schools. And we’ll be dropping in on panels that address some of our themes for the News 21 project, including one on African themed charter schools, another on cyber charters, and another on how charter schools can serve special needs students.

Even though state legislatures are responsible for charter school laws, and charter schools are created and approved on the state or local level, federal policy has played an important role in the growth of the charter school movement. The Obama administration has promised to make charter school growth a part of the national education reform agenda. President Obama has called on states to lift caps on the number of charter schools that can be created each year, and the Department of Education recently announced that it would favor states that didn’t have a cap for charter schools or promised to remove any such cap when doling out some of the stimulus money for education, which is known as the Race to the Top Fund. The federal government currently provides over $200 million in grants for charter school start-up and facilities funding.

Next Wednesday, charter school advocates attending the conference will take their campaign to Capitol Hill for what organizers are calling the movement’s largest day of advocacy. Participants will be calling on their members of Congress to sign onto the All Students Achieving Through Reform Act, a bill that would create an additional grant program for the replication of charter schools that have demonstrated success in closing demographic and socioeconomic achievement gaps.