A recent interview in Education Week highlights some charter school policy issues to watch for this year.
Todd Ziebarth, the senior vice president of state advocacy for the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools gives us a guide to 2014 charter school policy.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Q. What policy trends do you expect to see in the charter sector this upcoming year?
A. Funding and facilities is one, authorizing and accountability has been and will continue to be a policy trend. I think we counted about seven states in the 2014 session that took steps to impact charter authorizing and accountability.
I do think that set of anti-charter bills that came up in Illinois will continue to come up. One in particular which is the whole issue of full-time virtual charter schools. That is often an issue of debate in new charter laws. The question is: Will this [law] allow full-time virtual charters and will they be for-profit?
Of all the issues in the charter space, that one seems to be the most problematic for folks. It combines full-time virtual education with another challenging issue which is for-profit providers. For some people, full- time virtual education is a problem; for others, for-profits, is a problem. But the bigger question is are full-time virtual models a good fit in the charter space?
There’s a lot of heat around that issue, and my guess is that will continue to be one of the more problematic issues.
The entire article is available at Education Week.
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