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Nearly nine months after Albany passed legislation requiring all charter schools in New York City to form parent groups, the city does not yet know exactly how many city charters are in compliance with the law.

Speaking to a meeting of the New York Charter Parents Association on January 20, the director of the Department of Education’s charter school office, Recy Dunn, told parents that the city was just beginning to monitor schools’ compliance.

“I don’t have the answer on how many charters currently have PTAs,” Dunn said. “Would I like to find out? Absolutely.”

In September, the DOE directed all city charter schools to launch parent groups by October to comply with the law, and report back to the city with their progress by that time. City officials said today that many of the schools did not respond to that directive and that they had not since followed up with many of the schools.

Officials said that going forward they would check if schools have parent groups when they make their annual site visits to each school they authorized. They’re also including the question on a survey that it sends to each school in the city.

“We’ve informed charters of the legal requirement and asked them to confirm that they have a parents association,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “We’re now in the process of following up with them, and expect that they’ll all make the necessary arrangements.” (more…)

For the first time, the Department of Education’s charter school office is forcing all New York City charters to start parent associations.

The change is a direct result of the new charter cap legislation that Albany passed in May. In addition to doubling the number of charters allowed to open, the legislature amended state education law to say that charter schools located in New York City must establish parent or parent-teacher associations.

What remained unclear over the summer was whether the new provision would be enforced by the city, or by each school’s individual authorizer.

Today, the acting director of the city’s charter school office, Aaron Listhaus, sent a memo to leaders of all of the city’s charter schools — regardless of who authorized them or when — instructing them to start forming parent organizations if they have not done so already.

Listhaus gave the schools an October 1 deadline to check in with his office on their progress starting a parent group. Charter school authorizers have never before had to track whether their schools have parent groups. Hard numbers about how many schools will be affected by the change were not available today. But Listhaus and a spokeswoman from the New York City Charter School Center estimated that a majority of city charter schools currently do have parent organizations.

The full memo from Listhaus to charter school leaders is below: (more…)

Image from the DOE's Parent Link Web site

First it was principals, then it was teachers, and now parents are next in line to gain access to ARIS, the Department of Education’s data warehouse.

Each school will give parents passwords to log into the Parent Link section of ARIS sometime “between now and the end of the school year,” according to DOE spokesman Andy Jacob. Once logged in, parents will be able to monitor their child’s test scores.

The department is planning to hold a press conference tomorrow to debut Parent Link, ARIS’s previously missing puzzle piece, Jacob said. But the site is already up and running, and it appears that at least one school has given parents their usernames and temporary passwords: A commenter on Insideschools reports having received a password to access Parent Link — and finding that some of the information there was incorrect. (more…)