Charters
Yesterday (Thursday), charter school advocates held a bunch of news conferences throughout the state to lobby for a share of lottery proceeds. There wasn't one in Greensboro, but I managed a fairly local story out of this anyway.
The one thing that rang in my head as I listened to the charter school folks was they kept saying it must have been an oversight for them to be left out of the lottery bill.
I don't think so.
I talked to about five or six legislators yesterday, none of who could remember charter schools coming up very much.
And Sen. Tony Rand, one of the bill's architects, said pretty emphatically that charters weren't envisioned as direct beneficiaries of the lottery.
The political context here is that charters are a favorite topic for Republicans and it was Democrats who passed the lottery bill. (For those of you not from NC, Dems control both chambers of the General Assembly and a Dem is in the governor's office.) It isn't surprising, therefore, that charters weren't part of the lottery equation.
The silver lining for charters is this: if lottery dollars do drive up per-pupil spending in local school districts, charters will benefit anyway. That's because charter school funding is based on the amount per pupil their surrounding district spends.
The glass half-empty crowd will point out that there's bound to be some unusual shuffling of money surrounding the lottery. If that shuffling ends up decreasing the per-pupil calculation even while school funding goes up -- it sounds wacky but I don't doubt it's possible -- then charters would suffer.
For more on charter schools:
- Click here for the state DPI charter school page. (It's the right address but is behaving oddly this morning if you have problems.)
- The League of Charter Schools can be found here. They seem to be the parent group of the campaign for more lottery dollars.
- Mentioned in my story was the Guilford Preparatory Academy. It's one of four charters in Guilford County, three of which are in Greensboro. The other is in High Point.