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 Starlee Coleman -- Charter Schools Now making a difference in Texas:
 

• The primary elections are officially behind us. 71% of the candidates Charter Schools Now PAC supported went on to win their primary elections. That's a solid win rate and our exit polling is showing us that our campaign strategy continues to be effective in motivating the charter community to vote for pro-charter candidates. But, we did have a couple heartbreakers, too. If you weren't able to attend the debrief session this week and want details, let me know.
• I know I have previously written about the importance of the primary elections for us. Because most legislative districts are drawn to greatly favor one party over the other, the primaries are almost the whole game. If we want to improve the bipartisan, pro-charter vote count in the State Legislature and State Board of Education, we have to win primary elections. There will be a small number of competitive general election races this fall, but by and large, we know what the legislative landscape looks like.    
• After this primary election cycle, we are estimating that our bipartisan vote count in the State House has increased from 72 to 91! The pro-charter vote count in the State Senate will remain a strong 21. We’ve picked up one vote on the SBOE, and will be at 7. These election gains put us in a strong position to continue to win for public charters in Austin; including on the big ask we’re going to make to increase charter school facilities funding.
• The new official numbers are out from TEA and the funding gap between charters and ISDs – which is driven entirely by facilities funding – continues to grow. It was $1300 during this school year that just wrapped and is projected to be $1700 next school year. That’s an unacceptable position to put charter schools in and lawmakers need to fix it. It’s one thing to ask charters to be scrappy, and another entirely to create a structural disadvantage that makes it so they simply can’t compete – especially with a private school choice program coming – and that’s where we are headed. Our efforts to inform lawmakers about this structural imbalance are underway and we’ll be giving you lots of opportunities to help over the next several months.
• At the end of June, the State Board of Education will consider five new charter school applications. We’ve been underwater on our vote count at the SBOE for years (but making progress on our slow march back to a pro-charter majority with each election cycle) and that makes the approval of new charters tenuous every single year. With the election dynamics this year, we expect it will be even more difficult than normal. I’ll circle back once the votes are over to let you know what happened.