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Home > About MAPSA
Unity in A Bold Mission & A Practical Vision
A Bold Mission
MAPSA's Mission Statement articulates in a phrase what MAPSA is about. It describes the role MAPSA is positioned to assume in its work to fulfill the vision and mission.
MAPSA's mission is to provide leadership to advance quality and promote choice in education. MAPSA serves this purpose through its support of a strong community of chartered public schools and their supporters, committed to offering every Michigan child an opportunity to learn.
Children, Choice and Charters
A Practical Vision
Excellence and Opportunity: Quality Education for Every Michigan Child
Five years from now, the laws, policies and practices that determine Michigan's education environment will support children, choice, and charters, demonstrating the influence of MAPSA and its members, and that Michigan's charters have improved educational opportunities for all of Michigan's children.
Three Strategic Directions...
Promote Choice
Promote choice by creating positive public perception and support for charters.
- Ignite the expansion of a "choice in education" regional grassroots infrastructure in Michigan to better educate and recruit advocates for charter schools. By 2008 this will produce a database network of 500,000 citizens who believe in public school choice and the mobilization of 75,000 charter school parents, teachers and board members.
- Tell the charter story through a comprehensive and aggressive public awareness campaign.
- Unify professional charter and non-charter networks in Michigan, fortifying our constituents: board members, teachers and supporters outside the industry.
Provide Leadership
MAPSA will provide leadership to maximize charter market share by initiating education policy change and expanded charter opportunities.
- Identify, train and support people and organizations to open new charter schools at the rate of thirty new schools per year. Increase enrollment for a total market share of 20% of the traditional district in targeted regions, maximizing opportunities available under current law.
- Activate new efforts that will enhance the existing charter school law and will lift the legislatively imposed cap on university chartered schools, which will assure the continued strong growth of charter opportunities in Michigan for years to come. At the same time we will protect the current strength of Michigan charter schools from negative legislative action.
- With allied organizations, and efforts, expand, strengthen and educate an education choice majority of members in the Michigan House and Senate. The goal is an indisputably strong, bipartisan, education choice legislative majority.
Advance Quality
To provide quality educational choices for Michigan families, through the strengthening of MAPSA's services and organizational capacity to better assist new and current charter schools in providing successful academic environments.
- The governing board of MAPSA continues its strong commitment to school quality, a commitment to children. The following resolution was adopted and distributed by the Board in a press conference. The statement continues to be the bedrock of Michigan's charter movement:
We the Board of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, wholeheartedly endorse rigorous, public accountability for Michigan's public schools as measured by student performance.
By the spring of 2005, through the work of a representative taskforce, MAPSA will further develop benchmarks and measurements for identifying quality standards and results for charter schools in Michigan
- By 2008 all Michigan charter schools will demonstrate growth in year to year achievement, that out paces traditional public schools in reading and math measures. By 2008 two thirds of Michigan charter schools, opened for 3 or more years, will demonstrate, in reading and math, an increasing percentage of students moving from lower levels of state proficiency to higher levels of state proficiency with an ultimate goal of all students reaching the highest levels of proficiency before they leave their school.
- Provide bold, statewide leadership in advancing new educational strategies with a focus on special education and technology that will trigger expanded interest in public school options and advance the academic success of all students in all public schools.
- Enhance MAPSA's board of directors creating powerful new leadership energy. MAPSA will also expand leadership opportunities with new state and regional councils that can bolster, influence and stimulate the charter movement in communities throughout Michigan.
- Increase MAPSA's capacity for impact through the development of sustainable funding streams totaling over $1,800,000 annually by 2008 and increasing MAPSA staff to assure the implementation of these plans and provide sustainable capacity into the future.
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