Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
CHARTER SCHOOLS SET LOFTY GOALS
By Peter Morcombe
Chapel Hill Herald, July 20, 1997
There are more than 500 charter schools around the country. These independent public schools follow an amazing range of approaches such as Montessori, International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, Edison Project, Learning Tree, YouthBuild, Sabis International, Coalition of Essential Schools, Paideia, Calvert and many, many more.
In spite of the variety, these schools have much in common. They have student waiting lists, dedicated parent volunteers, dozens of applicants for every faculty position, and small class sizes -- all this in spite of much poorer buildings than "regular" public schools. Charter schools often lack important facilities such as sports fields, gymnasiums, libraries, media centers, science labs, assembly halls and cafeterias. Some operate in old warehouses.
The North Carolina Legislature enacted one of the strongest charter-school laws in the country last June. Thirty-six schools have been approved across the state. Four of these schools will be in Orange County. The School in the Community (high school) and the Village School (K through sixth grade) will be in Chapel Hill. Two other schools will be in Hillsborough, The Orange County Charter School opening this fall and The Odyssey School (elementary) in the fall of 1999.
'Core Knowledge'
I am a member of FREE, a nonprofit corporation that is setting up the Village and Orange County charter schools. These will be "Core Knowledge" schools, following the lead of two Durham magnet schools, the Holt and R.N. Harris elementaries. More than 30 well-qualified principals have applied for the two positions that are open. Nancy Adams, who has strong ties with Chapel Hill and our district schools will be the principal of the Village School located in Cedar Falls, near East Chapel Hill High School. We are still interviewing applicants for the principal's job at the Orange County Charter School.
More than 250 applications have been received for our 21 faculty slots. Why this tremendous interest? Our founding members are not rich, famous or blessed with charisma. The lure of starting new public schools free of red tape is very powerful and hard to resist!
Applications from students simply poured in. Within six weeks of our charters being granted, 213 student applications had been accepted. At this point, our plans for acquiring buildings fell apart and it looked as if only one school could open this year. With one school we could accommodate 163 students at most. Suddenly, we faced the prospect of telling parents that the place we had promised was no longer available. We decided to stop recruiting and to adopt a low profile in the local media. Even so, the student applications continued to roll in, although at a slower pace. Just when we were ready to give up on the Orange County Charter School, a near ideal building was made available to us in Hillsborough, so now we are resuming our efforts to recruit students and staff.
Professional benefits
Press reports have suggested that charter schools will not be able to match the benefits available to teachers in the "regular" public schools. On the contrary, FREE has a professional benefits package, superior to the state package in every respect.
We offer a 403(b) pension plan that accumulates funds twice as fast as the equivalent state plan. FREE provides "top of the line" health insurance with minimal pre-payments and deductibles, plus an excellent network of providers in the area. FREE will pay for dental coverage, long-term disability insurance, life insurance and child care. We aim to provide a benefits package that few in industry or government enjoy.
FREE's priorities for allocating resources put teaching at the top and administrators at the bottom. While our administrators are part-time, unpaid amateurs, our schools will be run by full-time salaried professionals, mostly qualified teachers. This is how it is in private schools. FREE aims to create schools that fit communities, with higher academic goals than "regular" public schools. We believe that small schools work better than big ones:
Where the control of education is taken out of the hands of the family and the community, and schooling gets further and further away from the people who have a direct stake in it, the quality suffers. It is that which accounts in the largest part, for the deplorable state of American education today.
Kilpatrick Sale ("Human Scale," Page 127)
While our administrators are unpaid amateurs, we are creating new public schools in five months and without the benefit of school construction bonds. This is a task that takes full-time, paid administrators four years to accomplish. District public schools are already overcrowded and about 270 more students will have to be accommodated this fall. Local charter schools will absorb almost half of this growth. In future years we aim to set up new purpose-built community schools, so that no more trailers will be needed in the district.
Our district administrators say that class sizes in the "regular" public schools will increase due to funding "lost" to charter schools. This is contrary to what has happened elsewhere. Even though charter schools get less money per student than "regular" schools, they tend to have smaller class sizes, because hiring teachers is their top priority when allocating resources. Once charter schools are operating in Chapel Hill, the district schools will be forced to compete by hiring more teachers and class sizes will therefore decline.
Peggy Richmond, in a recent study at the Chapel Hill schools, once again highlighted the huge achievement gap between minority and other students entering ninth grade. This means that much of the damage to minority students is being done in the lower grades. FREE strongly endorses this finding. We will not consider our schools a success until our minority students perform above the district average. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools currently rank No. 1 in North Carolina, so this is no small endeavor.
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Peter Morcombe lives in Carrboro.