Are there charter preschools

Log into your account. Forgot your password? Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Recover your password. Get help. Education Next. Latest Issue. There are some charter schools for preschool-aged children. They may be an option for you. Charter schools are a type of public school that offer non-traditional education programs.

They serve children of different ages, backgrounds, and interests. There are some charter schools in Texas for preschool-aged children. Search for a charter school in your area. Although they do not have to follow all state education laws, charter schools must follow federal laws for public education and special education. For example, they must have a contact person who helps locate, identify, and evaluate children who have disabilities.

This growth is far from accidental. At the same time, demand for good charter schools has swelled, as the best of them have notched remarkable success on measures of student achievement. Moreover, it is low-income students who have reaped the greatest benefits from the growth of these two reforms: Most state pre-K programs target children in poverty, in hopes of narrowing the achievement gap, and research shows that charters produce the strongest results for disadvantaged youth.

Yet recent research also suggests that neither high-quality charter schools nor pre-K alone may sufficiently level the playing field between children in poverty and their middle-class peers over the long term.

This point raises an intriguing question: What happens if we combine high-performing charter schools with high-quality pre-K education? Could the combination of these two reforms produce a result better than the sum of its parts? This is not an abstract question.

In most of the 38 states that do have both charters and pre-K, there is at least one charter school serving preschoolers. Charter schools that offer preschool programs afford us the opportunity to examine the challenges they face, the aspirations they hold, and the ways in which they are serving young children.

To date, charter pre-K programs have received little attention. In , we undertook the first national study of state policies related to pre-K and charter schools.

We found that nine states prohibit charter schools from serving pre-K students. Even in states where charters can offer pre-K, they often face substantial barriers to doing so. Inadequate funding for public pre-K programs makes it challenging for charters to offer high-quality pre-K programming. Over the past year, to better understand how these barriers play out on the ground and how charter schools serve preschoolers, we visited charter pre-K programs in several states.

We learned that policy barriers create real challenges, even when charter schools manage to overcome them. Charter schools in California and New York face funding challenges and intrusive quality standards that limit their autonomy. In contrast, Washington, D. Despite the challenges faced in most areas of the country, some charter schools offer high-quality pre-K programs that adapt the best assets of their distinctive models and cultures to meet the unique needs of young children and prepare them well for kindergarten.

Their success stories offer lessons for both policymakers interested in expanding access to quality early learning, and for charter-school educators seeking to serve preschoolers. Richmond College Prep sits in a gritty postindustrial urban neighborhood in Oakland known as the Iron Triangle. Ten years later, it is one of the highest-performing charter schools in the city, serving 48 preschoolers and students from transitional kindergarten through 6th grade.

Down the coast in Los Angeles, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, a high-performing charter-management organization founded in , serves 3, students on eight campuses, including preschoolers in a state-of-the-art early-childhood campus. Thus, Camino Nuevo opened its early childhood center in In theory, charter schools in California can get financial support for their early learning services through two funding streams: the California State Preschool Program CSPP for low-income three- and four-year-olds, and a state fund for transitional kindergarten for all four-year-olds born between September and December who miss the cutoff date for kindergarten.

When the school opens a full-day preschool program, however, those eligibility rules will apply, said Marvin Hoffman, the founder of the school. Hoffman said. Some preschools at charter schools receive child-care subsides for children of low-income families, and others are paid for through parent fees.

The Santa Rosa Charter School, for example, is a parent cooperative. Parents pay nominal fees to enroll their children in the preschool and work at the school to cut costs. And, in at least one case, a charter school is getting federal Head Start funding for preschoolers. The 1, pupil school will be able to use those three primary sources of funding to offer a full-day program for families that need it. In the District of Columbia, funding for preschoolers and older students flows through the same formula.

Standing shoulder to shoulder one day recently, preschoolers at Fenton Avenue Charter School in Los Angeles declare what they want to do with their time outside. Focosi says before she lets them dart off. The same freedom and flexibility can extend to curriculum matters, said Ola Bailey, a preschool teacher at Meridian Charter School in Washington.

But educators in charter preschools point to more advantages than just breathing room from bureaucracy. Administrators have found, for instance, that having a preschool program on site can also help older students.

Teachers in charter preschool programs say they appreciate feeling connected to the rest of the teachers in the school. In contrast, even children who attend preschool programs based in a regular public school often have to go to a different school when they start kindergarten.

And some schools require parents to re-enroll their children every year. As a result, the Michigan Early Elementary Center, for example, expanded its program when children who had been in the center since infancy were being denied spaces in kindergarten.

While charter preschools remain unusual, some educators involved in them are getting requests to speak to statewide groups about their experiences. To some of them, that suggests that preschool programs are helping charter schools fill a role that is one of their major reasons for being: to develop approaches that regular public schools may emulate. Funding for this story was provided in part by the Ford Foundation, which helps underwrite coverage of the changing definition of public schooling.

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