True North

I caught this item last week: Minnesota gets high marks for its laws on charter schools:

According to an annual report card published by the Center for Education Reform, Minnesota has the strongest charter school laws of any state. Minnesota gets credit for, among other things:

• Giving charters legal and fiscal independence;
• Not imposing a cap on the number of charters;
• Allowing a variety of organizations to approve and oversee charters (in addition, of course, to the state department of education).

Of course, that “lack of a cap” is over the DFL’s dead body; last session, they tried to cap the number of charter schools; the GOP (and six brave DFLers) voted against the cap, barely beating it back.

Despite the fact that the national charter school movement started in Minnesota, charter schools still face opposition from vested interests. In the Winter 2008 edition of Education Next, Ember Reichgott Junge describes how her support of charter schools was one factor in her loss to Keith Ellison in the Fifth District primary.

I’m not quite sure how to read that; Junge was an incredibly weak candidate - and while Ellison represents a party that hates charter schools (they are an affront to the teachers’ union and institutional education), inner city parents sick of the diluted, agenda-driven education they’re getting from the public system are running like mad for the charters; Minneapolis’ district has lost an immense share of its students; one in eight of Saint Paul’s students have left for charter schools.

Hence the cap, that failed last year - and, we can be sure, other attempts to kill off this experiment.

Cross-posted & comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.