The Illinois House moved to set a three-year moratorium on virtual charter schools after some suburban districts rejected them.
I wonder if the representatives understand that the quality of cyber charters is low, test scores are low, graduation rates are low. And the quality of education is poor.
But the companies make big profits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A new tide? Is common sense making a comeback?
Nah,… They’re in the process of gutting public service pensions, teachers being major players in that arena. Authorizing virtual charters while they are making years of pension stealing legal would look really bad. They need a little credibility.
My two kids are grade school students in one of these school districts, u46, the second largest in Illinois. I’m delighted that the House is considering this moratorium on online charter schools and hope this move will lead to further considerations of charter schools generally.
If I understand correctly, the Illinois State Charter School Commission (which is not publicly elected) can hear appeals from charter school proposers whose proposals were rejected by the school districts and override the school districts’ rejection (a great rationale to implement the moratorium imo). It’d be great if the House considers the offensiveness of this authority in conjunction with their moratorium.
The Illinois State Charter School Commission should not supercede local control of school districts.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15673-public-schools-private-agendas-parent-revolution
Carrie, it SHOULD not, but go to Tim Furman’s School Tech Connect blog–3/22/13-“Some Questions About the Concept Charter,” and that’s EXACTLY what they did; they overturned District 299’s (CPS, if you can believe it!) denial and approved the charter. And–if I have this right–the charter school will be located within several blocks of a school–that CPS is CLOSING!
So, don’t plan the celebrations yet, George.
Another great win. Is the pendulum starting to swing back? Last night in L.A. I was watching the news to see what happened at Feinsteins office on the protest and to my amazement there was a high quality T.V. ad for virtual schools. Watch out everyone. There is so much money in this expect a full on assault. They are not spending this amount of money for nothing.