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Tuesday, December 22, 2020

JEFF BRYANT: A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics

A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics
A FLOOD OF NEW CHARTER SCHOOLS SHOWS HOW THE INDUSTRY MAY TRY TO THRIVE — DESPITE THE PANDEMIC



As the COVID-19 pandemic began closing school buildings and forcing schools to quickly ramp up online learning programs in April, an op-ed by Alex Medler, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers, made an appeal to Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education to change the guidelines of her department’s grants for new charter school startups to allow the money to go to existing charter schools. Medler justified the request to address “immediate needs during the pandemic.”

But when Chalkbeat broke the story that DeVos would agree with Medler and approve Florida’s request to repurpose about $10 million in grant money for new charter schools to be redirected to existing charters, Medler made the curious admission to Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum that another reason for the need to change grant requirements was because “there aren’t enough new [charter] schools being created across the country to spend all the… money on the one purpose of funding the start-up of new charters.”

Is the charter school industry, even before the current crisis, really on the skids?

The annual rate of charter school growth nationwide from 2014 to 2016 was half of what it was between 2008 and 2014, according to CONTINUE READING: A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics