At Cirrus Academy in Macon, Georgia, Superintendent Dr. Gail Fowler noticed that In School Suspensions (ISS) were not working. Dr. Fowler says of ISS, “it was punitive, regardless of what you were suspended for”. Cirrus Academy’s innovative alternative to in school suspensions is Eagles Bridge Academy, a holistic extension of the work being done...
Prioritizing diversity as a core value of a charter school tends to improve behavioral and academic outcomes for students, according to a new study from a team at Teachers College with Columbia University headed by Professor Priscilla Wohlstetter. “Moving the Needle on Desegregation: Performance Outcomes and Implementation Lessons from...
“That’ll never happen!” While we all may have said that at one point in our lives, we are probably saying it less in the past two years. Large-scale tropical storms, disease outbreaks, fires and significant weather damage are among the emergency events that can have a material adverse impact on the finances and operations of a charter school...
Traditional public school policies are failing in the face of new technology. Snapchat and other social media apps are pressing into the grey area of where public school oversight ends. Traditionally, it has been easy for schools to distinguish off-campus behavior from on-campus behavior. But what happens when a student makes a post off-campus...
If you are a charter school bond investor having nightmares that COVID would take a toll on charter school enrollment, you are in for a good night’s sleep. In a review of enrollment trends, the School Improvement Partnership (SIP) Database confirms an enrollment increase of over 10% from 2018 through 2020 at all North Carolina charter schools. A...
When former Minnesota State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge traveled the tumultuous journey to pass the first charter school law in the nation on June 4, 1991, the issue of charter school facilities was rarely mentioned in any debate. “Legislators assumed that charter schools would have access to existing school facilities or other buildings,” she...
According to the School Improvement Partnership Database, Pennsylvania’s free-standing charter schools with high-yield municipal bonds outstanding average over 126 Days Cash on Hand for FY 2020 – an increase of 12.5% from FY 2018. This level of liquidity is almost three times the level required by financial covenants which tend to be in...
School Improvement Partnership: Social Bond Questionnaire Is the percentage of economically disadvantaged students enrolled in your charter school above 60%? Is the academic growth of those students higher than that of such students enrolled in the host district? Does your charter school have a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color)...
CHARTER SCHOOL BONDS: THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS I think I’ll take a moment, celebrate my age The ending of an era, and the turning of a page Now it’s time to focus in on where I go from here Lord, have mercy on my next 30 years Tim McGraw, “My Next Thirty Years” Thirty years ago, Minnesota became the first state to authorize charter...
The doughnut economy sounds like a nice treat to have with a morning coffee but it is actually a serious rebuttal to the growth-centered economies of the present day. In 1934, the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) – the sum of consumption, investment, government spending, and exports minus imports – was created to compare the...
