Today, the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project released a new report with a dire message to the Biden Administration and parents across the country: If the Department of Education’s proposed regulations on charter schools are adopted as drafted , it will be difficult — if not impossible — for charter schools to qualify for federal start-up grants under the Department’s Charter School Program (“CSP”). As a result, thousands of children and families will be denied high-quality, innovative education options. The report, “A Bureaucratic Plan to Disempower Parents,” is authored by Will Marshall, President of PPI, and Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project.
“The proposed rules, if adopted, will inevitably stall the growth of charter and other autonomous, innovative public schools desired by communities with urgent academic needs,” write Marshall and Pankovits. “We urge the White House to intervene to stop the Department of Education’s bureaucratic attack on the federal CSP and, by extension, on parents who wish to choose the public schools that best fit their children’s needs. This is not the time for progressives to defend the educational status quo and turn their back on Black and Hispanic and low-income parents who have long been shortchanged by our legacy school system. Instead, President Biden and the Democrats should pick up where Presidents Clinton and Obama left off, by championing public school innovation and modernization,” they continue.
The CSP is a hallmark of the Clinton Administration. It has been supported by every administration since, with the Obama Administration greatly expanding its innovation school improvement goals. Created in 1994, the CSP provides federal funding to state education agencies (SE) and nonprofit education organizations to encourage the development and continuous refinement of new models for public schools. CSP start-up grants have been a critical catalyst of America’s public school choice movement. More than half of today’s charter schools have received a grant. This has made high-quality public schools available to millions of low-income and minority families whose children are too often consigned to low-performing schools. Nationwide, charter schools are in high demand, often with long waiting lists. Public charter school enrollment increased by nearly a quarter of a million students during the pandemic.
Read the report here:
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children. The project is co-led by Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
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Media Contact: Aaron White; awhite@ppionline.org
