RALEIGH — Charter school boosters said Tuesday that North Carolina may fall short in reaching for $4.3 billion in federal “Race to the Top” education grants because the state hasn’t shown enough of a commitment to help the alternative schools succeed.
President Obama has highlighted charter schools as a way to fix problems in public schools. His administration made creating an environment for charter schools to succeed a significant element of how it will score grant applications filed by more than 30 states before Tuesday’s deadline.
North Carolina has limited the number of charter schools to no more than 100 since they began in 1996. And the state received poor marks from a national charter school advocacy group evaluating state laws that are supposed to help the schools thrive.
Charter schools receive public funds but are run by private boards and open to all students. Administrators don’t have to follow all the regulations imposed on traditional public schools.
Lawmakers and governors in other states worked as the deadline approached to try to expand the use of charter schools, Massachusetts passed a law while New York leaders Tuesday couldn’t reach an agreement. North Carolina chose to do nothing, said Darrell Allison with Parents for Educational Freedom, which advocates for education options for North Carolina students.
“We as leaders are very, very concerned,” Allison said at a news conference at the Legislative Building. “In a state that has a cap on public charter schools approaching 15 years, we are concerned that we have not done enough.”
But Gov. Beverly Perdue is confident the state will be very competitive with its proposal sent over the weekend to Washington, spokeswoman Chrissy Pearson said Tuesday.
The plan, seeking $469.5 million over four years, focuses upon developing innovative methods to measure how students succeed and train teachers and administrators, Perdue wrote to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Grant winners will be announced in April. Not all states will win.
“I believe North Carolina has developed an aggressive plan that holds every school accountable for every child’s success,” Perdue wrote.
In North Carolina, the 100-charter cap was approved to give lawmakers and policymakers time to determine whether the charter schools improved student performance. New charter schools can open only if old ones shut down.
But lawmakers and some educators have been cool to raising the cap, pointing to studies showing charter school students don’t necessarily perform markedly better than those in traditional classrooms. Charter advocates have argued the studies are deficient, highlight local success stories and point out charter schools often teach a disproportionate number of low-performing and at-risk students.
Perdue and others successfully petitioned Duncan’s office to change the grant rules to allow states to promote other innovative schools in their application in addition to charters.
But the Obama administration’s remains very interested in charter schools in its scoring system, which will grade applications on a 500-point scale, said Todd Ziebarth, vice president of policy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
A state can receive up to 40 points for showing it is creating successful conditions for “high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools.” Thirty-two of the 40 involve charter schools, Ziebarth said.
The alliance ranked North Carolina 32nd among the 40 states with charter school laws, saying the state’s rules lack enough accountability and fail to ensure adequate funding for the schools.
Ziebarth urged the U.S. Education Department to return North Carolina’s Race to the Top application to the state, which he hopes would cause Perdue and lawmakers to improve their charter school laws. North Carolina could apply later for a second round of grants.
“The charter community stands ready to work with the state in improving those policies,” he said.
