Charter Schools: A Tale of Two States

This from WFPL:

The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan has been making noise lately about charter schools — and he’s announced he wants to see more of them. Duncan’s enthusiasm is encouraging those in the charter school movement nationwide, but the appeal of these schools in this region is mixed...

Indiana Democrats have proposed halting charters for new schools. It’s part of the debate on the state budget now being drafted in Indianapolis. Critics supporting that move are citing last week’s study from a Stanford University research center that found students at charters didn’t perform any better than those at public schools.

But there are really no heated debates about charters in Kentucky, which is one of 10 states with no charter schools...

Even in Indiana’s most of the 50 charter schools are in Indianapolis and Gary, while the charter school movement has never taken hold in Kentucky. But people in Frankfort were listening to Arne Duncan’s speech this week, including Education Cabinet Secretary Helen Mountjoy. Ask her about charter schools, and she lists Kentucky’s efforts on education reform.

“We certainly feel that we have an alternative that is meeting many of the same things,” Mountjoy says, “particularly in the areas of autonomy and being able to make decisions at the school level, in managing a budget, in hiring staff, in choosing instructional materials, and on and on.”

Those facets of the state’s education system grew after the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA, was enacted to reduce economic disparity between schools.

But it’s not clear if those and recent efforts to improve education will be enough to satisfy Arne Duncan to give any of the $5 billion in federal grants to Kentucky — even though Gov. Steve Beshear met with him earlier this month to extol Kentucky efforts.