Education Establishment

In case you missed it, Darrell Allison, president of PEFNC, spoke at the North Carolina General Assembly yesterday, in front of the Senate Committee on Education/Higher Education.

PEFNC supports legislation eliminating state charter school cap

Jobs and the economy.  We've heard those two words repeatedly over the past year, and most pundits believe the issues were critical for any political candidate in 2010.  But even though jobs and the economy were a focal point of the November general election, concerns about education were brimming quietly to the surface.

In the past eight months, there has been a good deal of debate about public charter schools in North Carolina. The debate has mostly focused on the arbitrary cap of 100 that was set in 1995, with charter advocates wanting to increase or eliminate the cap.

This week Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center released the 2010 Diplomas Count study on national graduation rates. The results for North Carolina were worse than reported to the U.S. Department of Education in recent years, and those figures were already bad.

In this editorial, The Charlotte Observer falls just short of applauding the state's eleventh hour legislative scheme to get Race to the Top funds, while criticizing charter schools for failing to become "incubators for innovation that traditional public schools could emulate to boost performance." 

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