Support better guardrails for the federal Charter Schools Program. Comment by Monday, April 18!

CALL to ACTION: Common-sense guardrails have been proposed for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). Please submit a comment in support of the proposed changes by this Monday, April 18, the end of the comment period. If adopted, the new rules could help lead to powerful improvements in the CSP. The US Department of Education needs to hear from public school advocates in support of these changes.
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Sign a Petition

Write Your Own Comments

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How many of us have had a charter school open up in our community with lots of big promises and shiny advertising? How many school districts have to make cuts as families and funds leave? (Case in point: Indianapolis Public Schools is looking to close buildings after years of charter schools siphoning students from the district.)

When students and families leave the public school system, communities fracture. Our public schools are sites that bring us together, from disparate political beliefs, religions, incomes, and racial backgrounds. In them, students learn to respect and interact with people different than themselves. Sports, theater, and musical performances bring together families from many walks of life to celebrate our children and our future. The loss of any one family or a group of families tears at this fabric, and it also reduces the collective commitment to maintaining resources and programs that are a source of community pride. It reduces the need to listen to many voices, to reconcile visions that are in tension with each other, and to engage in the hard work of democracy.

In the last decade--specifically, the 2010-11 to 2019-20 school years--Indiana has diverted more than $2.28 billion in tuition support to funding charter schools, which are privately run even though the statute calls them public. That's desperately needed money that leaves the public school system and enters an environment with hazy oversight, no accountability through elected boards, and a record of frequent school closures that interrupt children's relationships and education. Hands down, the most lurid example so far is the Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy scandal, in which the virtual charter schools fraudulently claimed to be educating students who were not enrolled in any classes, at great expense to taxpayers; our attorney general is currently suing the schools' representatives for $154 million.

The proposed rules for the federal Charter Schools Program would not shut down charters and would not reduce the money available to charters; rather, they would affect who is eligible to receive CSP grants and what the process of applying would involve. Two of the most meaningful changes are:

1. Charters would need to perform a community impact analysis and describe the steps that they have taken or will take to ensure that they will not hamper or delay existing desegregation efforts and to ensure that they would not increase racial or socioeconomic segregation or isolation in the surrounding public schools.
2. For-profits, and charters with nonprofit boards that outsource "full or substantial control" of their schools to for-profits, would not be eligible for CSP grants. 

From our state group, the Indiana Coalition for Public Education:

Why this is important:

• USDOE disperses $440 million of your tax dollars every year to start new charter schools or expand existing ones.
• This is our opportunity to put guardrails around how organizations qualify to receive this money and how they must be accountable.
• This is our opportunity to minimize fraud and waste.
• The charter lobby is fighting these changes tooth and nail with a campaign of disinformation urging the charter community to write comments to kill the new regulations.

What we need you to do:

• Submit your own comments. We have instructions and proposed comments you can easily adapt to submit your comment to the federal comment form. (Thank you to the Network for Public Education for providing the content we adapted for Indiana.) 
• If you represent an advocacy group, submit comments on behalf of your group.
• Sign the NPE petition.

Don't have time to write a personalized comment? Send a letter through the NEA site. This will take about 30 seconds.

Comments must be received on or before this Monday, April 18.  Your comment can have a big impact. Please act now. 

P.S. The original deadline for comments was April 13, but the comment window was extended.