August 26, 2005
Even aside from the facts that my wife teaches at a charter school and my younger daughter attended one, I'm interested in charter schools. For one reason, North Carolina currently has a statutory limit on the number of charter schools of 100, and there is intense debate on whether that limit should be raised.
Recent research by Robert Bifulco of the Univ. of Connecticut and Helen F. Ladd of Duke finds that students attending North Carolina charters make less academic progress than students attending regular public schools. They have summarized their research in a just-published article in Education Next. Thanks to Lindalyn Kakadelis, director of the North Carolina Education Alliance, I've been invited by Education Next to comment.
But I've been allotted just 400 words! 400 words for an academic like me is not even enough space to clear my throat. I've managed, with some loss of supporting detail, to produce a 402-word comment. I don't part easily with my sparkling prose, however, so I am also making the 1150+ word draft available here on my blog.