GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The UFT isn’t the only group concerned that some schools are under inappropriate pressure to adopt new teacher evaluations. The state’s charter schools association is also sounding the alarm.

In a bulletin sent on Tuesday, the New York Charter Schools Association tells charter schools that despite mixed messages from the state, they are bound to adopt teacher evaluations that follow the state’s new evaluation law only if they signed on to the state’s Race to the Top bid. About 80 charter schools — fewer than half of those open in the state last year — agreed to follow the state’s Race to the Top commitments, including using test scores in teacher evaluations, in exchange for a share of the winnings.

Peter Murphy, NYCSA’s policy director, said his group had gotten questions from some charter school administrators who are confused about whether they are obligated to follow the state’s evaluation law. But more than that, he said, the group was “reminding the universe” that no matter the value of the State Education Department’s reform agenda, charter schools are not bound to abide by it unless they agree to, as in the case of the Race to the Top application.

“We’re very mindful of good-intentioned efforts to treat charters like every other district schools,” Murphy told me. “Charters are going to live or die by their results. That distinction is important and constantly gets blurred.”

“Charter schools absolutely should be doing evaluation systems,” he added. “But part of the freedom of being a charter is doing it the way you deem best. That’s part of being regulated by outcomes.”

Seated before an audience of people hoping to become charter school founders, Dirk Tillotson delivered a piece of advice: “You’ve got to be crazy to do this.”

It was early spring, and Tillotson, who founded a program to help mom-and-pop charter schools open, was offering this line as both a warning and a challenge. His audience didn’t hail from the KIPPs or Harlem Success Academies of the charter world and they didn’t have millionaires in their corners, which is why they’d come to him.

Charter schools were created as a way to test out new educational ideas, but the barriers to opening an experimental school are formidable. Some schools open as franchises of charter school networks, which often help principals through the application process by providing support and greasing political wheels as needed. Others find wealthy supporters who can pay for education consultants.

And yet a third class of charters exists: known as mom-and-pops or community charter schools, they’re typically opened by teachers or parents with few connections and big ambition. (more…)

Burned by Albany funding cuts, charter school advocates are turning to a political base that they’ve long left untapped: parents.

In mid-October, a dozen charter school administrators gathered in a conference room at the Times Square Marriott for a seminar on the role of parents in charter school advocacy. Kenneth Peterson, a director of strategic partnerships at the New York State Charter School Association told the group that the charter school movement has a secret problem: it has almost no grassroots parent advocacy.

New York State’s political climate had changed, Peterson explained. Last year, legislators froze the amount of money that charter schools receive for each student they teach, effectively cutting their budgets. A fragile majority of charter school supporters in the State Senate made it imperative for charter school advocates to win over individual senators, rather than relying on friendships with a few party leaders.

“Crisis has a way of galvanizing folks around the need to act,” said Jeff Maclin, vice president for school advocacy at the New York City Charter School Center. “I think the ‘freeze’ in education funds to public charter schools this year was a wake up call to schools to make sure something like this does not happen again.” (more…)

Charter schools will not have to pay union wages on construction projects, as New York’s Department of Labor had ordered them to do, a state appeals court ruled today.

The decision follows a tussle in which the state ordered that schools pay their janitors and construction workers union wages, causing an angry uproar among the schools’ leaders, who said the high wages would have been impossible for them to afford and could have jeopardized their ability to expand into new buildings.

The Department of Labor began asking charter schools to pay the union wage in September of 2007, but a group of charter schools in Albany and in the Bronx filed a lawsuit challenging the decision. A state supreme court upheld the decision last May, but the plaintiffs appealed, and this new decision overturns the supreme court’s.

Charter schools are publicly funded, but operate outside the regular Department of Education bureaucracy. The appeals court concluded that the schools are “inapplicable” to the law requiring that certain public entities that hold contracts with workers pay what is known as the “prevailing wage,” or the union wage.

Charter school supporters cheered the decision. “This is a victory for charter schools, which are under tremendous financial pressure to meet increasing expenses with less funding,” Bill Phillips, the president of the New York Charter Schools Association and a co-plaintiff in the case, said in a statement.