School Improvement Grants: How Many Charters are Eligible?
Charter schools are getting lots of media attention this week—from theappearance of Bill Gates at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago to the release of a new federal study that found charters have little edge over regular public schools. Then there was the bombshell that dropped late Tuesday night that some congressional Democrats want to shift $100 million in federal money meant for charters to the $10 billion bill aimed at staving off widespread layoffs in public schools.
So let me just add to this week's charter school overload.
Hearing Bill Gates call for the shuttering of bad charters—which is exactly what Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the national charter schools audiencelast year—made me think I should scour the states' applications for $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to see how many "persistently lowest-achieving schools"—the campuses that are eligible for the money—are charters.
I naively thought I could look at the 32 state applications posted on the Education Department's website in half a day's time to compile my list. It was clear after combing through Arizona's list and confirming which schools were in fact charters that I would have to scale back my ambitions.
So I settled on a sample of five states to give a snapshot of how many charters are performing poorly enough to meet the federal government's rules that
