Students at Rocketship Mosaic charter in San Jose discuss a book they’ve been reading. Credit: John Fensterwald, EdSource Today
California Charter Schools Associationchief executive Jed Wallace turned rhapsodic in a message last month to charter school operators summarizing the impact of the new school funding system on their campuses. The Local Control Funding Formula represents a landmark victory, he said, a sort of Brown v. Board of Education moment for the charter school movement.
Jed Wallace, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association
“Instead of being seen and treated as second-class citizens with separate funding streams constantly at risk of reduction or elimination, charter schools will now be funded in the same way that traditional public schools are funded,” he wrote. “As such, we think it legitimate to claim that, for the first time since the inception of our movement more than 20 years ago, charter schools have become fully vested members of the public education community.”
Some charter school leaders won’t go that far. They are irked by one restriction in the formula in
California’s shift to a new weighted student funding model represents just the most recent example of how Democratic state policymakers here are charting a different course in education policy than the Obama Administration and Congress. As I noted in a post last week, California and Washington have taken distinctly different approaches to achievement gaps that increasingly are most closely... [[