School Advocates Rally at White House Against Biden’s ‘Attack’ on Charter Schools
Categories: US Education News
Charter school advocates from across the country – mostly Black and Hispanic school leaders, teachers, students and parents – descended on the Education Department and the White House on Wednesday morning to deliver a message to the Biden administration and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona: “Back off.”At issue is a proposed regulation for the federal Charter Schools Program, a long-standing grant that provides start-up funding for new charter schools and helps already established charters expand. For the past five years, the program has been level-funded at $440 million – less than 1% of all federal spending on K-12 education. For charter school leaders and advocates, the proposal is the latest in what they see as an increasingly hostile effort by Democrats – and the Biden administration, in particular – to prevent the sector from expanding. They argue the proposed regulations are too onerous, would prevent new applicants from applying and established charters from expanding, especially those in urban school districts where enrollment in K-12 schools is plummeting.“Charter schools are under attack,” says Miriam Raccah, executive director of the Bronx Charter School for the Arts, which operates an elementary and middle school with hopes to launch a high school in the coming years. “The proposed changes to the charter school program will make it more difficult for schools like mine to get the funding they need to open and expand. After two years of pandemic disruptions to education, school leaders are scrambling to help students recoup months of academic setbacks – an average of four to eight months of setbacks in math and reading for white students compared to an average of six to 12 months for students of color, according to one analysis from McKinsey & Company. And for those who were already behind before the pandemic, achievement gaps widened, with students from low-income families and students of color falling even further behind as white students and students from middle- and high-income families have almost entirely rebounded from academic losses they incurred. “Talk to your members of Congress,” Rees said to the crowd before some of them headed to the Capitol to meet with their congressional representatives. “They work for you. They need to know that they’re in office because of each and every one of you.”The Education Department received 26,550 comments on the proposed regulations and is in the process of reviewing them before making a final decision next month.