How much of this sounds familiar to you?
Charter schools would be given free rein if a proposal from Republicans in North Carolina’s state Senate is passed. Under the plan, oversight of charters would be taken from the state’s board of education and given to a charter school board with nine of 11 voting members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders and with nothing in the law to prevent members of the new board from having conflicts of interest. And that’s not all:
The charters would no longer be required to assure that at least half the teachers are certified.
Charter schools would no longer be required by law to conduct criminal background checks of their staff.Local control would also be slashed, with, for instance, local school boards required to rent buildings to charter schools for just $1 a year unless they could show that they absolutely didn’t have the space or couldn’t afford to make the lease. Requirements on charter schools to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the local population would be weakened, and since the charters don’t provide transportation to school, many low-income students would also be effectively excluded.
The new oversight board is in Sen. Dan Patrick’s SB2, and there had been a requirement that ISDs sell unused facilities to charters for $1 in the original bill; it has since been replaced by a requirement that charters get right of first refusal on such buildings. I have not heard that any of the rest of this stuff in Sen. Patrick’s bill, but perhaps we ought to keep an eye out, just in case. If nothing else, the fact that similar bills are being pushed elsewhere, likely with the backing of usual suspect ALEC, puts the crocodile tears of Patrick and other supporters of this legislation in a new light.