(V)ery few charters enroll and retain equal numbers of at-risk students as traditional public schools in the communities in which they are situated - children with serious disabilities, those who receive free lunch, and/or recent immigrants and English-language learners.
The result is that our traditional public schools are increasingly concentrated with the highest need students with fewer resources to educate them. In New York City alone, charter schools are diverting more than $1.7 billion from the public schools, as well as taking up more space in a system where more than 550,000 students attend overcrowded schools and more than 300,000 students are crammed into classes of 30 or more.
PAA Kentucky affiliate hard at work!
Here's an encouraging report from our affiliate Save Our Schools KY:
We brought a group of parents, teachers and students to the capitol during the most recent legislative session in Kentucky, and a reporter from KET followed us around and filed this fun story covering our event.
Unfortunately, we were not successful in stopping the state's first charter school bill, but we do think our group raised a number of concerns that slowed the bill and has set the stage for some challenges in the near future.