Charter School Session: Performance, Perspective, and Passion

Charter schools are “the strongest wave of educational reform in the United States” and they’re not going away, one of the nation’s premier charter school researchers told a conference at Marquette University Law School this week. So what can be done to make the overall results of the movement more positive?

At the conference, titled “Charter Schools: Assessing the Present, Looking to the Future,” Margaret (Macke) Raymond, director of the Center for Research in Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, outlined policy implications of research she has led that includes data from 30 states.

“State policy matters a lot and there are specific policy variables that will get you a fair amount,” Raymond said. For example, authorizers of charter schools need to play their role well if they are to foster high performing charter schools while keeping weak operations from ever opening or closing them down if they are getting poor results. Having multiple local authorizers of charter schools (which Milwaukee has) and having a cap on the number of charter schools (which Milwaukee and Wisconsin do not have) leads to poorer results, Raymond said.

Charter schools are publicly-funded schools that operate to a large degree in independent and self-governing ways, freed from some of the rules and constraints put on conventional public schools. A little over two decades old, the charter movement has grown rapidly, with more than two million students in such schools nationwide. In Wisconsin, there are more than 200 charter schools. Authorizers, most often public school boards but sometimes other government agencies or even private non-profits, give a charter school permission to operate and at the end of a contract period, usually five years, have the power to withdraw that permission based on performance.

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Some Agreement, Lots of Division in New Law School Poll Results

“Our old friend, polarization” – that was the phrase Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, used at one point in describing the results of a fresh round of polling released Tuesday. It was the first poll since shortly before the November elections.

This was the first time in 15 rounds of the Law School Poll, starting in early 2012, that there were no “horse race” election questions involved. The questions this time were focused on issues such as regulating some aspects of gun control, education funding and school choice, how to pay for road construction, and residency rules for government employees.

There were some issues where opinion was strongly in favor of one position. For example, background checks for all gun purchasers were strongly supported by both Republicans and Democrats and people living in every part of the state.

But on many issues, Wisconsin remains sharply, and sometimes close to evenly, divided.

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Important Points Won Even as ACA Case Was Lost, Paul Clement Says

Paul Clement’s arguments did not carry the day when it came to the outcome a year ago of the historic United States Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the federal Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. But his arguments were supported by a majority of the justices on important points that will have an impact for years to come in Congress and in the judicial system, Clement said in delivering the Hallows Lecture 2013 in the Appellate Courtroom of Marquette University Law School’s Eckstein Hall this week.

Clement, formerly solicitor general of the United States, has argued 65 cases before the Supreme Court. He was the lead attorney in presenting arguments to the Court on behalf of 26 states that challenged the health care law. The Court heard a remarkable six hours of arguments focused on several major aspects of the challenge.

“The challenge for the challengers was to run the table to the tune of going 15 for 15” on legal points involved in the case, Clement said. “The good news is the challengers went 14 for 15. The bad news, from the perspective of my clients, is that 14 out 15 isn’t good enough. . . . Getting a really satisfying opinion from four justices still counts as a loss.”

The question at the heart of the case was whether there would continue to be a meaningful limit on the power of the federal government to impose laws such as the Affordable Care Act on the states, Clement said. He said, “I do think in some respects, the single most important takeaway from the decision was there were not five votes to say that there really is no meaningful judicial review of federalism constraints on Congress. There are constraints—again, the power is very substantial, very broad in the wake of the New Deal precedents of the Court, but it remains a limited power.”

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