Remember back when the most inflammatory debate in education policy was whether charter schools were a boon or a bane? It seems like such a simple era compared to the one we’ve just entered, in which the still-raging charter debate has acquired the ideologically fraught overlay of union reform.

Two entities, one brand new and one relatively new, are making themselves heard at the state Legislature this week. Both are there largely as a response to last year’s legislative session, which ended in a bitter stalemate that may have cost Minnesota hundreds of millions of federal education stimulus dollars.

I’m betting it’s a matter of seconds before the ed-policy Kremlinologists start trying to assign them to factions — maybe even sub-factions.

The brand-new player is MinnCAN, an offshoot of the 5-year-old ConnCAN, which promotes education reform in Connecticut. The group has money, a power-broker board and a strategy for engaging the community to put pressure on policymakers.

School Emergency in Effect
MinnCAN yesterday launched School Emergency in Effect, a campaign to persuade lawmakers to implement a statewide preschool ratings system, to create alternative mechanisms for licensing teachers and to build a barometer for measuring teacher effectiveness.

Minnesota’s lack of the last two was a major reason the state’s bid for a federal Race to the Top grant was rejected. Neither Gov. Tim Pawlenty nor the teachers union could be made to budge on a number of reforms, and with Education Minnesota’s endorsements and campaign spending at risk, DFL lawmakers didn’t exert themselves to broker a compromise.

Minnesota and Connecticut struggle with two of the worst academic achievement gaps in the country. When Connecticut’s first RTTT application was rejected for many of the same reasons as Minnesota’s, ConnCAN turned up the heat in part by spending $50,000 to air 30-second television ads statewide pressing lawmakers to make reforms in time for the second round of grants.

Teachers unions fired back, calling ConnCAN’s policy research “misleading” and charging its claims “don’t meet the smell test.” Although the reforms were ultimately enacted, Connecticut didn’t get an RTTT grant.

There was motion, however: New Haven ended up with a “groundbreaking” teacher contract that included union buy-in on virtually every reform U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ever dreamt of.

Changes after impasse
Last spring, as Minnesota lawmakers arrived at an impasse, the Minneapolis Foundation brought ConnCAN head Alex Johnson to the Twin Cities for one of its Minnesota Meetings. In December, Vallay Varro resigned from the St. Paul School Board to become MinnCAN’s executive director. Funders include the Minneapolis and St. Paul foundations and Medtronic.

Vallay Varro

Yesterday, the group fired its opening shot, releasing a damning report on the state of the state’s schools. It’s available here.

The relative newcomer is Charter School Partners (CSP), a Minneapolis organization that promotes quality by helping member schools identify and replicate practices that help close the achievement gap. Its director of business excellence, Brian Sweeney, will be at the Capitol tomorrow urging a state House of Representatives committee not to back off a major charter-law reform passed last year.

In August, I wrote about the sweeping 2009 overhaul of the Minnesota law governing charter school oversight. The gist: Starting in June, charter authorizers will be much more accountable for everything from the schools' test scores to the color of the ink in their checkbooks.

In that story’s comment thread, a number of charter-movement founders took me to task for supposedly failing to ferret out a stealth campaign by the Minnesota Department of Education to hand the state’s charter schools over to a conservative cabal that shared pedagogical views espoused by Cheri Pierson Yecke.

Yes — the same Cheri Pierson Yecke who, during her brief stint as Minnesota’s Education Commissioner under Pawlenty, proposed teaching intelligent design in science, and whose embarrassing ouster from the same job here by lawmakers has DFLers fretting that Gov. Mark Dayton’s choice for the job is destined for a hellish confirmation process.

Reform came after Legislative Auditor's report
Some august names appeared in that comment thread, and I don’t doubt that there are ideologues out there who would love to co-opt the process. But my reporting suggested lawmakers undertook the reform in response to a 2008 Legislative Auditor’s report that concluded that charters did not generally perform as well as mainline public schools and suffered from lax oversight.

As a result of the new law, many of the 51 organizations that now serve as the schools' legal sponsors are getting out of the business of chartering. About to be orphaned, dozens of schools are looking for a new authorizer. But the authorizers still in the game are proving choosy.

Schools that aren’t getting good results are struggling to find new overseers. So much so there’s a move afoot to persuade the legislature to put off implementing the 2009 reform for a year. CSP wants lawmakers to stand firm.

Last year, 15 of the 20 high-poverty schools with the highest scores on this year's standardized state tests — "beat the odds" schools — were charters. Meanwhile, 11 of the state's 26 so-called persistent underperformers are charters.

Options and innovation
Charters, Sweeney is expected to tell lawmakers, were intended to give families options and to drive innovation in education. They should be looking to figure out what fuels the odds-beaters — “superb leaders, excellent teachers and a data-driven focus,” he said — and closing the persistent underperformers.

Brian Sweeney

Many of the excellent teachers at the five odds-beating schools in CSP’s network come from Teach for America (TFA), which is, of course, the Mack Daddy of alternative teacher preparation programs and one of the golems from last year’s legislative stalemate.

“We’re introducing CSP as Charters 2.0,” Sweeney said yesterday. “We’re going to be blunt. I think what’s happened in the last week between Secretary Duncan scolding us a little bit for our lack of concern and with the launch of MinnCAN is our state of denial has been punctured.”

Charters 2.0? Sweeney had better hope some of those zealous young TFA recruits are also trained in the martial arts if he hopes to make it out of Farmington Republican Rep. Pat Garofalo’s Education Finance Committee hearing with life and limbs intact. 

The rest of us can just expect to end up feeling a touch nostalgic about those boon or bane days.