Animas High students take look at genocide

How can people kill others in name of faith?
Animas High students take look at genocide
By Ann Butler Herald Staff Writer Article Last Updated: Friday, February 11, 2011 8:11pm

http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20110212/LIFESTYLE06/702129996/-1/Lifestyle06

Millions of people were killed in the 20th century in the name of faith, ethnicity or political belief. Even as genocide continues today in places such as Darfur and Uganda, people still ask why.

“We tend to see genocide as something that evil people do to innocent victims,” Lori Fisher, a teacher at Animas High School, said while discussing The Genocide Project, an assignment she gave to her sophomore humanities students.

“It’s more complex than that. Many people are capable of it in certain contexts. If people are feeling insecure, economically, politically, in their identity, it tills the field,” she said.

Animas High School, a charter school in its second year, provides project-based learning. In this project, students studied the genocides of the last century and created everything from multimedia projects to art and music to share what they had learned.

“It was a really emotional experience for me,” student Jenna Brooks said about her project on the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, when Serbs were responsible for the deaths of 200,000, the displacement of 2 million and the systemized rape of thousands of women and girls. After conducting research about the brutality, Jenna, a poet and lyricist, wrote a song as part of her exhibit, annotating individual lyrics and singing from the point of view of the victims.

“I realized how closed off America is from the world and how serious genocide is,” she said. “Thousands of people died (in Bosnia) just 16 years ago, and I didn’t know anything about it.”

Students examined genocides on four continents, including those in Armenia, Ukraine, Guatemala, Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. In one of the projects Fisher found most interesting, Jewish student Elliott Saslow and German exchange student Florian Hermann looked at the history of anti-Semitism and compared it to where anti-Semitism flourishes – or has been virtually eliminated – today.

Another project, about the Ukrainian genocide when Stalin killed more than 7 million people by creating an artificial famine with collectivization, was a multisensory experience with a loaf of bread wrapped in barbed wire while a bread machine working underneath projected the aroma of baking bread as quotes from Stalin were recited.

“The total number of deaths in Uganda could exceed Rwanda (an estimated 800,000),” said Carly Pierson, who did her project on the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Internally Displaced Persons camps in the African nation. “It’s not seen, not broadcasted, because it’s happening so slowly. I definitely don’t understand how people get violence like that out of the Ten Commandments.”

From propaganda to social psychology, students learned about how genocide happens. They studied the seven stages of genocide as explained by Gregory Stanton, director of the World Federalist Association Campaign to End Genocide. The stages are classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, identification, extermination and denial.

“It really makes me so mad, especially in the places where we see some of the seven signs genocide is happening, like in Uganda and Darfur, and no one is intervening,” Jenna said.

abutler@durango herald.com


STEVE LEWIS/Herald
Lori Fisher wanted students to do more than just learn about genocide when she assigned The Genocide Project to her sophomore class at Animas High School. She wanted them to educate others about it. From left, parents Maxine Christopher, Mark Crosby and Rhonda Crosby watch multimedia presentations on different instances of genocide. At right is a scene from sophomore Hank Stowers’ presentation “Imperialism in Ethiopia.”



Enlargephoto
STEVE LEWIS/Herald
Madlyn McClure, 13, left, and her mother, Maxine Christopher, watch a presentation on the genocide in Rwanda by Animas High School sophomore Lily Oswald.

Colorado education community braces for deep cuts in state funding

Colorado education community braces for deep cuts in state funding
By Tim Hoover
The Denver Post
POSTED: 02/13/2011 01:00:00 AM MST
UPDATED: 02/13/2011 03:56:00 PM MST


On Friday, Feb. 11, 2011, Clayton Early Learning preschoolers deliver political advice to Governor Hickenlooper in a book they made for him titled "If I Were Governor." (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)
School districts and public colleges are bracing for what are expected to be deep cuts in K-12 and higher education to be announced Tuesday as Gov. John Hickenlooper unveils his first set of budget recommendations.

Hickenlooper, a Democrat, will outline his recommendations for the 2011-12 budget at a meeting of the legislature's Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday. The new governor's recommendations are essentially revisions to the spending plan first proposed by then-Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, in November.

A downward revision is likely, given a December revenue forecast that showed sluggish state revenues and the fact that Hickenlooper's administration wants to hold a higher portion of the state's general fund in reserve than Ritter's office did.

Multiple sources in the education community expect as much as a $400 million net reduction for K-12 education, which would be the largest single cut to public schools since the start of the recession. K-12 education took a $260 million cut — a 6 percent net reduction — in the current 2010-11 budget year that ends in June.

Henry Sobanet, Hickenlooper's budget director, said he could not discuss the details of the governor's budget revisions yet, saying only: "We have a billion-dollar issue, and next week begins the process of handling it."

The state faces at least a $1.1 billion shortfall in the 2011-12 budget year. In the spending plan Ritter recommended in November, he proposed a $43 million, or 0.8 percent, net increase for public schools for 2011-12.

That was a relatively meager increase for schools compared with what they've received over the past decade but still an improvement over the $260 million cut in the current year.

Now, even that small bit of light isn't coming, education officials say.

"We're bracing for what could be a cut that's equal to or greater than what we experienced this year," said Bruce Caughey, executive director of the Colorado Association of School Executives.

"At a minimum, there will be significant layoffs, and many people will lose their jobs as a result of the cut of the magnitude that's being discussed," Caughey said.

Savings unlikely elsewhere

Ritter's 2011-12 budget had proposed keeping state spending for higher education at the current year level of $555 million, but sources at the Capitol said Hickenlooper may propose a cut to higher education of around $50 million.

K-12 and higher education are expected to bear the brunt of any cuts Hickenlooper proposes for a few simple reasons. First, it is difficult to find big savings in other departments because 97 percent of the state's general fund is devoted to just five areas of the budget: K-12 education, health care for the poor, human services, prisons and higher education.

All other state departments account for only a few hundred million in spending from the state's roughly $7 billion general-fund expenditures.

K-12 education, with $3.2 billion in general-fund support, represents nearly 46 percent of the state's general-fund spending, the largest single expenditure. While K-12 funding traditionally had been viewed as protected by the state's Amendment 23 mandate for increased annual spending on schools, Ritter's office last year believed it had found a way to cut K-12 funding without violating the constitution.

That legal doctrine led to the $260 million cut.

"Everybody . . . scared"

Meanwhile, higher education has never had any such constitutional protection, so it has been vulnerable to continual cuts.

Prisons are governed by federal mandates on staffing and care for inmates, and lawmakers are loath to cut staffing to the point of threatening public safety.

Health care for the poor, primarily spending on Medicaid and the state's CHP+ plan for kids and pregnant women, is also governed by many federal mandates on how much can be cut. Also, the programs are heavily matched by federal funds, so cutting state spending even where it can be reduced means a corresponding loss in federal funds.

Finally, lawmakers and state officials generally have not touched human-services funding because they believe it aids the "most vulnerable" populations of people — such as the severely disabled — who cannot fend for themselves.

None of this is to say that Hickenlooper's budget recommendations won't touch areas of government besides K-12 and higher education. But the bulk of the cuts are expected to fall hardest on education.

Hickenlooper's office on Thursday gave a general briefing about the budget recommendations to lobbyists and other stakeholders for education groups and institutions.

The news was unsettling.

"Everybody in the room was scared," said one education lobbyist. "They (Hickenlooper's office) said you need to go back to your clients and say the cuts are going to be bad."

Tim Hoover: 303-954-1626 or thoover@denverpost.com



Read more: Colorado education community braces for deep cuts in state funding - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/legislature/ci_17375037#ixzz1DtTYAX8r

AHS Weekly Update- Week of February 14th, 2011

There is no school this Monday, February 14th. Please take a moment to review the following updates:

College Night
PAC Meeting
Upcoming Exhibition Events
Ospreys Online

College Night
Tuesday evening, February 15th from 5 to 6:30 PM, Animas High School will be hosting a second College Night for parents and families of the Class of 2013 who were unable to attend on February 3rd. Please join us to hear how Animas High School will be supporting and guiding our students through the college admissions process. It’s an exciting time for 10th graders as we prepare our college files, practice application and interview skills and get ready for college tours this May. Come hear how you can support AHS in preparing all our students for post secondary success!

All students in the class of 2013 will attend this presentation on Tuesday during their advisory class. Questions about this event can be forwarded to the College Counseling Dept. via email at college@animashighschool.com


PAC Meeting

Our next PAC meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, February 17th at 6:00pm at AHS. The AHS Head of School will not be at this meeting so parents/families with questions or comments for Michael should schedule time with him during his next round of Office Hours on Monday, February 21st. Contact pac@animashighschool.com with questions or concerns.

Upcoming Exhibition Events

Animas High School Freshmen will be presenting the following exhibitions to the community on Thursday, February 24th at Animas High School.

The first exhibition event will be “Model U.N.” from 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Students will address issues of the Palestinian refugee crisis, and the recent provocations from North Korea. Students will make speeches, using parliamentary rules, haggling over resolutions, and writing amendments to solve these challenging world problems. It is a great chance to see some critical thinking in action and learn about these global issues.

Below, is a link to a sign-up sheet for the MUN gallery observers. It’s in a Google doc that anyone can edit. Those who want to attend can just click the link and sign their names on the form.
https://docs2.google.com/document/d/11PXzmlWXygT__0uYnETc19OpxF_s0Gidqg0VjeXbc10/edit?hl=en&authkey=CKO8yJEJ#

Contact john.fisher@animashighschool.com with questions about this event.

The second exhibition will feature two live performances of Shakespeare's “A Mid-Summer Night's Dream” through the art of shadow puppetry. Students will perform their 21st century variation of this classic piece of theater and literature. Show times are at 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Contact Jessica.mccallum@animashighschool.com with questions about this event

Ospreys Online

There’s been an awesome amount of AHS student work hitting the World Wide Web! Please take a moment to check out our most popular links:

Digital Portfolios- 9th Graders
http://www.animashighschool.com/OurPrograms/dp.php

Digital Portfolios-10th Graders
http://faculty.animashighschool.com/~rmcknight/purpleseries/purpleseries/digitalportfolios10th.html

AHS Link Program
http://www.wix.com/clauer/ahslink

AHS Robotics Team
http://pandemoniumrobotix.blogspot.com/

AHS Facebook Fan Page
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Animas-High-School/129694133734262

HOS Blog
www.animashighschool.blogspot.com

AHS Homepage
www.animashighschool.com

College Night-Back By Popular Demand!

AHS Weekly Update- Week of February 7th, 2011

A quick reminder that there is no school next Monday, February 14th. Please take a moment to review the following updates:

College Night
PAC Meeting/Update
Upcoming Exhibition Events
2011 Project Week

College Night
Back By Popular Demand! Tuesday evening, February 15th from 5 to 6:30 PM, Animas High School will be hosting a second College Night for parents and families of the
Class of 2013 who were unable to attend on February 3rd. Please join us to hear how Animas High School will be supporting and guiding our students through the college admissions process. It’s an exciting time for 10th graders as we prepare our college files, practice application and interview skills and get ready for college tours this May. Come hear how you can support AHS in preparing all our students for post secondary success!

Questions about this event can be forwarded to the College Counseling Dept. via email at college@animashighschool.com

PAC Meeting/Update
Did you see the Ospreys in Friday’s Snowdown Parade? We appreciate all of PAC’s efforts related to this year’s float. A special thank you to Randy and Kathy Black and Tamsin Rohrich . Their vision, direction and participation enabled AHS to have a super successful showing in the parade for the third year in a row! Thanks to all for a scary, good time!

Our next PAC meeting is scheduled for February 17th at 6:00pm at AHS. The AHS Head of School will not be at this meeting so parents/families with questions or comments for Michael should schedule time with him during his next round of Office Hours on Monday, February 21st. Contact pac@animashighschool.com with questions or concerns.

Upcoming Exhibition Events
Animas High School Freshmen will be presenting the following exhibitions to the community on Thursday, February 24th at Animas High School.

The first exhibition event will be “Model U.N.” from 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Students will address issues of the Palestinian refugee crisis, and the recent provocations from North Korea. Students will make speeches, using parliamentary rules, haggling over resolutions, and writing amendments to solve these challenging world problems. It is a great chance to see some critical thinking in action and learn about these global issues. Contact john.fisher@animashighschool.com with questions about this event.

The second exhibition will feature two live performances of Shakespeare's “A Mid-Summer Night's Dream” through the art of shadow puppetry. Students will perform their 21st century variation of this classic piece of theater and literature. Show times are at 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Contact Jessica.mccallum@animashighschool.com with questions about this event

2011 Project Week
Over the next ten days, faculty will be meeting with their Project Week teams. Students will review expectations and logistics for the week with their teacher/project leaders. Please check-in with your student to make sure they are clear with the plan for project week. (FYI- Project week will take place Feb. 28th to March 4th and student participation is mandatory)

What's Wrong with the CREDO Report?

In the blog post below,http://animashighschool.blogspot.com/2011/02/across-us-charter-school-movement-grows.html the article uses an often cited study to represent a counter argument to the success of the Charter School movement. Specifically:

A 2009 study by Stanford University found that only 17 percent of charter schools performed significantly better than traditional public schools while 37 percent performed worse and 46 percent showed no big difference.


As I find myself speaking publically about AHS and the greater Charter School movement, it's important to understand how the CREDO report is used by critics to counter charter school success. Below, I've posted two very credible and accurate assessments of the Stanford study.

First, is a link to Nelson Smith's report CREDO Reconsidered. I had the good fortune of taking a class from Mr. Smith this past fall at Harvard and he went into great detail concerning the flaws in the CREDO team's research techniques. You can read his summary here:

http://www.publiccharters.org/files/publications/CREDO%20Reconsidered%20-%20final.pdf

Second, is a report from www.edreform.com which offers additional context and information about the shortcomings of the CREDO report.

I wanted to make sure that these resources are available for anyone trying to find credibilitiy in CREDO. Enjoy!
---------------------------------------------------------------

See this report at:http://www.edreform.com/_upload/No_More_Waiting_Charter_Schools.pdf


www.edreform.com October 2010

FACT-CHECKING CHARTER SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT
Why some are saying only 1 in 5 charter schools perform, and why it’s wrong

Throughout the media in recent months, a statistic is often repeated that suggests charter school achievement is “mixed” and that only 1 in 5 charter schools actually perform well. This started in June 2009, when The New York Times published a report on a study by a small research center out at
Stanford University, whose press releases for each of the 15 states studied said that charter schools usually did no better or worse than traditional public schools.


It’s been repeated by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The problem is that it’s not even remotely true.
The source of this new conventional wisdom about charters is the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). Their report is flawed in several ways:

• It was not a national study but a study of only15 states. Forty states plus DC have charter school laws.

• It deployed a method of comparing students in charters to “virtual twins” in traditional public schools. These children are composites of what the researchers believe the student in a traditional public school would look like, not what they DO look like.

• The study did not account for any variation in grade levels of schools. Some charters run from K-3, starting a new grade each year; others start at 3 and go to 8 and so on. The number of years a student was in a charter is completely ignored.

• The researchers ignored the gold standards of research that requires apples to apples comparisons. That means that the achievement of a student that is already in a charter but would have gone to the precise neighborhood school of the student to whom he is compared in the traditional public school.

• The researchers ignored variations in state test rigor, reporting and data, and made comparisons of students regardless of state boundaries.

• The study accounted for poverty using federal free and reduced lunch program data, which the federal research bureau that collects that data has admitted is deeply flawed, as most charters do not participate fully in the free and reduced lunch program for a variety of welldocumented reasons. That does not mean they do not feed students; it means they prefernot to comply with US Department of Agriculture paperwork and regulations that are
costly and often negate the funds they’d receive.

The Center for Education Reform – Charter Achievement October 2010

Following is evidence to support these high level points:

1. CREDO’s results rely on the invention of fake children in conventional public schools for the purposes of gauging the learning gains by students in charter schools. Instead of comparing real students who attend charter schools to real students who attend conventional public schools, CREDO has merged demographic data to create so-called “virtual twins.” This is a highly subjective and easily manipulated way to gauge the effectiveness of a school.

• The study’s authors have admitted that it is easier to “generalize” about a charter school by creating so-called virtual twins, while admitting that head-to-head studies (referred to as “Lottery Studies,”) are superior to their approach. According to respected researcher Caroline Hoxby of Stanford, Harvard, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, “the CREDO study does not have data on charter schools’ admissions lotteries, so it does not use a randomization-based method of evaluation. Randomization is the ‘gold standard’ method of evaluating charter schools’ effects on student achievement because it effectively
eliminates all forms of selection bias so long as (i) randomized admissions lotteries were used and (ii) a sufficient number of students participated in them.”

• There is no such thing as a virtual student or virtual student achievement. Reports that attempt to virtually replicate a demographic profile of a charter school student by ethnicity, age, socio-economic status and match these averages with one or more conventional public school students can be easily manipulated by selecting certain types of data and eliminating others. Hoxby explains that the CREDO study, “matches each charter school
student to a group of students in traditional public schools. A charter school student can potentially be matched to a group that contains many students… Thereafter, the study treats these group averages as though they were students,” themselves.

• To successfully use the “virtual twin” methodology, students currently in a charter school had to have been previously enrolled in a conventional public school long enough to have a profile, and their attendance would have to be linked to state test data. CREDO did not do this. Twins were not created with state test data. Instead, they were created by scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — which provides snapshots of
state performance and is not to be used to develop “virtual twins” or gauge individual school performance.

• Even if the process were completed accurately, it is statistically impossible to come even close to a “virtual twin” for 20 to 25 percent of charter school students.

2. CREDO’s report does not take into account the higher percentage of charter elementary and middle schools, leading to inaccurately weighted aggregate data. In addition, CREDO’s analysis only looks at three years of a student’s education. The study’s failure to look at students over a
longer period of time leads to unrealistic outcomes and a flawed picture of the impact of charter schools.

• CREDO’s assertion that charter elementary and middle school students are positively impacted compared to their peers in conventional public schools, but negatively impacted in high schools and “multi-level” schools, is misleading because high schools make up sucha small number of charters, thus skewing CREDO’s overall data.

• In reality, 56 percent of charters serve elementary and middle school grades, or K-8, while only 22 percent of charters are high schools, or serving grades 9-12. Most charter schools are not classified as they are “multi-level” schools.

• Research has shown that whenever a child switches schools, whether elementary to middle, or a traditional public to a charter, there tends to be a drop in the student’s academic achievement level. This recovers after two or three years.

• In reality, long-term studies demonstrate strong growth for students who stay in charter schools. For example, on average, a student in New York City who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eighth would close about 86 percent of the achievement gap in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English. In Washington, D.C., high school graduation rate for DC charter schools is 24 percentage points higher
than at conventional public high schools.

3. CREDO’s study has been discredited by the nation’s leading charter school achievement researcher, Caroline Hoxby, for not following the “gold standard” of charter school research.

• According to Hoxby, whose work was also published by Stanford University and the National Bureau of Economic Research:

A recent study…by CREDO…contains a statistical mistake that causes a biased estimate of how charter schools affect achievement. Essentially, the achievement of charter school students is measured with much more error than the achievement of the controls, which are not individual students but are group averages of students in the traditional public schools. [This] forces the
estimated effect of charter schools to be biased, and the bias is negative…the CREDO study also violates four rules for the empirically sound use of matching methods to evaluate other charter schools’ effects.

4. CREDO's analysis does not account for the great variances in charter laws from state to state or how those laws may differ from paper to practice.
• The report suggests a negative correlation between student achievement and multiple authorizers. In fact, such charter authorizers vary greatly in law and practice, as CER’s 2010 study and scorecard demonstrate. There is clear evidence that charters students succeed in states with a number of meaningful, independent and highly accountable authorizers who compete for chartering.

• The states reported to have significant learning gains are in fact, states which have earned an average "C" grade for the strength of their law, based on CER's 2009 charter law analysis.


5. CREDO claims that charter schools lead to lower performance among Black and Hispanic students but higher achievement gains for low-income students. This is flawed, because most of the low-income students served by public charter schools are minorities. CREDO’s failure to recognize this overlap leads to skewed results.

• CREDO relies solely on federal free and reduced lunch program data in its analysis of poverty vs. ethnicity. In reality, the National Center for Education Statistics’ former commissioner, Mark Schneider, has joined with leading experts to call lunch program data a “poor proxy for poverty.” Moreover, the 2010 Annual Survey of America’s Charter Schools found that 39 percent of charter schools do not even participate in the free and reduced lunch program because it is an onerous process.

• In reality, 50 percent of students in charter schools are deemed at-risk and 50 percent of children in charter schools are nonwhite. Further, 40 percent or more of charter schools serve student populations that are over 60 percent minority, at-risk or low income. Charters in urban areas, such as New York City, Detroit, or Washington, DC, serve student populations that are nearly 100 percent minority or at-risk.

CHARTER TRUTHS

Individuals seeking verifiable charter school research need to know that there are reports with much more credibility, and much more reliability, than the one produced by CREDO. For example, the following data points indicate the success and achievement of charter schools nationwide.

Student and School Achievement

• By the end of eighth grade, a charter student would be scoring 30 points higher in math than if he remained in a traditional public school, according to Hoxby.

• In Colorado, 85 percent of charter elementary schools made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), compared to 73 percent of conventional elementary schools. Eighty-one percent of charter middle schools also made AYP, compared to only 49 percent of conventional middle schools.

• In New Orleans, the number of fourth grade students who met or exceeded grade level in English rose from 44 percent in 2005 to 59 percent in 2009. Eight graders who met or exceeded grade level increased from 26 percent to 42 percent of students.

• Eighty-one percent of all charter schools in Georgia made AYP compared to 79 percent of traditional public schools.

• At SUNY-authorized schools in New York, charter students are performing better than their non-charter peers. Eighty percent of students in grades three through eight scored at or above proficiency in ELA in SUNY schools, compared with 77 percent of all public school students. In math, 92 percent of students scored at or above proficiency compared with 86 percent of all public school students.

• California's school Academic Performance Index (API) is calculated from student test scores on a scale of 1 to 1,000. Analyzing the growth of school's API scores from 2004 -2007, it shows that 17 percent of charter schools have had significant growth, over 50 points, compared to only 6 percent of traditional public schools. In Los Angeles, charter schools had a 2008 median API score of 728 as compared to a median API score of 663 for conventional public middle schools.

Charter School Accountability

• Since the beginning of the charter school movement, only 13 percent of charter schools (657 of the 5,250 schools ever created) have ever closed their doors.

• Of the charter schools that have closed, only 14 percent closed because of academic reasons. This means that charters have a significant rate of success despite being held to much higher standards than conventional public schools.

Charter School Demand

• 65 percent of charter schools have waiting lists, an increase of 6 percent over 2009.

• Parental demand for charter schools surged by 21 percent in 2010.

• In some areas of the country, such as North Carolina, no new charters may open unless one closes. It is estimated that the waiting list for all charter schools combined in Texas is currently over 40,000 students. Cities are also constricted by caps; Boston, Massachusetts has over 8,000 students on waiting lists because of the numerous restrictions on charter
growth.

The Center for Education Reform
910 Seventeenth Street, NW • Suite 1100 • Washington, DC 20006
800-521-2118 • 301-986-8088
www.edreform.com

Across U.S., Charter School Movement Grows

Photo by: MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP
Charter schools are growing most rapidly in urban districts, such as the Berkeley Maynard Academy in Oakland, Calif., with struggling schools and large numbers of poor, minority students.

Across U.S., Charter School Movement Grows

By Terence Chea Associated Press

OAKLAND, Calif. – As cash-strapped school districts lay off teachers and close campuses, publicly funded charter schools are flourishing and altering the landscape of public education.
Despite a painful economic downturn, the charter school movement is expanding rapidly across the country with support from the Obama administration, wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and

Oprah Winfrey, and the highly publicized documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

Charter schools typically receive a mixture of public and private money and operate free of many regulations that govern traditional public schools in exchange for achieving promised results.

Nationwide, less than 4 percent of public school students are enrolled in charters, but that number is expected to rise significantly because of increased financial and political support.
More than a dozen states loosened restrictions on charters during the last year for a chance to win a share of the federal $4.3 billion Race to the Top school reform competition.

The number of charter schools grew by 6.7 percent to 4,936 in 2009-2010 and is projected to increase by 7.5 percent in the current school year, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The 2010-11 growth is expected to be dramatic in states such as Florida with a 12 percent increase, Illinois with a 14 percent rise and New York with a 20 percent jump, according to the association’s projections.

“Families that have options are increasingly choosing charter schools over traditional schools,” said Peter Groff, who heads the national association.

California saw a 15 percent increase, with 115 new campuses despite budget woes that led to mass teacher layoffs and shuttered traditional schools, according to the California Charter School Association.

Many charter schools are boosting the academic achievement of disadvantaged students, but critics say charters siphon students and resources away from traditional public schools, result in greater racial segregation, block access to certain groups of students and operate without proper oversight.

“What we’re seeing basically is an effort to impose deregulation and the free market into education,” said Diane Ravich, an education historian at New York University. “The fascination with charters among philanthropists and Wall Street has diverted the attention away from tackling the hard problems of public education.”

Charter schools are growing most rapidly in urban districts with struggling schools and large numbers of poor, minority students. In 16 districts, more than one in five public school students attend charters, with 36 percent in Detroit, 38 percent in Washington, D.C., and 61 percent in New Orleans, according to the national alliance.

Much of the growth is being driven by charter management organizations that have received multimillion-dollar grants from the Obama administration and foundations funded by philanthropists such as Gates, Charles Schwab, Eli Broad and Reed Hastings.
San Francisco-based KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, plans to double its national network of schools to 200 during the next decade.

Aspire Public Schools, California’s largest charter school operator with 30 campuses, plans to open as many as 45 new campus over the next decade, said CEO James Willcox.

The Oakland-based nonprofit, which offers kindergarten through high school, was recently named one of the world’s 20 most improved schools systems – one of only three in the U.S. – by the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. after producing impressive results on standardized tests.
Aspire officials say nearly all of its students are accepted at four-year colleges, and most are their first in their families to attend. They attribute that high rate to smaller schools and class sizes, a longer school day and school year, and its relentless “College for Certain” culture.

“Our entire program from kindergarten all the way through high school is geared toward getting youngsters to go to college and get a college degree,” Willcox said.
At ERES Academy, an Aspire K-8 school in Oakland, every classroom is named after a college and students eat in University Hall.

Jorge Lopez, a senior at California College Preparatory Academy in Berkeley, said he didn’t think college was possible for him before he came to the Aspire-run high school. He’s now poised to be the first in his family to get a college education.

“Upon coming here I found out that college is where you want to be at,” said Lopez, 17. “My parents tell me it’s an honor that I’m leading the family, that I’m being an example for them.”
But not all charter schools produce strong academic results.

A 2009 study by Stanford University found that only 17 percent of charter schools performed significantly better than traditional public schools while 37 percent performed worse and 46 percent showed no big difference.

A 2010 study by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project found that charter schools tend to be more racially segregated than traditional schools.
“Charter schools are publicly funded schools, and we need to make sure students of all backgrounds have access to them,” said study co-author Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Oakland Unified School District has seen a major expansion of charters during the last decade, when it spent years under state control because of financial mismanagement. The district is now home to more than 30 charter schools.
Betty Olson-Jones, head of the Oakland teachers union, complains many charters recruit top students and get rid of poor performers, boosting the schools’ test scores and saddling traditional schools with a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, behavior problems and poor English language skills.
“You end up with schools that are filled with kids that are really struggling,” Olson-Jones said.