Dive Brief:

• The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has updated its model law for the first time since 2009, adding recommendations around discipline policies, performance standards and safeguards for maintaining high quality among virtual charter schools, specifically, as well as brick-and-mortar schools.
• According to its report about the model law, updates include setting a minimum standard of performance for charter school authorizers’ portfolios of schools, requiring prospective charter school leaders to include student codes of conduct, and plans for disciplinary sanctions in their applications.
• The new model law also creates a whole section for full-time virtual charter schools, including an authorizing structure; student enrollment criteria; policies for performance-based growth, accountability, and funding; and modified funding levels tied to actual costs of running virtual schools.

Dive Insight:

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has become an active critic of full-time virtual schools and their poor average student performance. As the public takes sides in the debate over whether charter schools are good or bad for communities, the alliance has made clear it is committed to high-quality charter schools, not charter schools for the sake of the independent model. Some charter schools have proven incredibly effective, giving their students opportunities that otherwise might not have been possible. It is important to get past ideology and recognize that many other charter schools have failed, leaving students no better off than they would have been in their neighborhood schools — and perhaps even worse off.

Seven states do not have any charter school laws and seven more have very weak ones, according to the NAPCS. Michigan has been accused of allowing too many parties to authorize charter schools, resulting in oversupply. In Massachusetts, voters will decide in November whether to lift a controversial charter school cap. Twenty-five years after the nation’s first charter, there is still much to figure out.