The NEA just adopted a policy that lays out three criteria charter schools must meet to provide students with the support and learning environments they deserve: (1) charter schools should only be authorized by a local and democratically accountable authorizing entity; (2) there must be empirical assessment of how a new charter school will serve to improve the local public system before any charter enters a community; and (3) charter schools must comply with the same safeguards and standards that apply to neighborhood public schools such as “open meetings and public records laws, prohibitions against for-profit operations or profiteering, and the same civil rights, employment, labor, health and safety laws and staff qualification and certification requirements.”
