Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
CHARTING A NEW COURSE; ACROSS THE NATION, CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE
THRIVING. WHY NOT HERE?
By Bruno V. Manno
The Washington Post, August 31, 1997
The D.C. Public Charter School Board, established by Congress last year, has issued a thoughtful request for proposals from the public for new independent public schools in the District, schools that would offer students, teachers and parents the opportunity to escape immediately from the management and teaching problems that plague too many of the District's public schools.
"We hope," the board declared, to trigger "the development of public charter schools where students are challenged to achieve at higher levels and actually do so and where the hopes of parents and communities are met."
In 24 pages, the board lays out demanding but exciting criteria for the creation of new schools and opens the way for the kind of inspired thinking and inventiveness that I have seen in new charter schools from Massachusetts to California. After visiting more than 50 such schools in 10 states, my colleagues from the Hudson Institute and I concluded that charter schools may be the most vibrant force in American education today. Perhaps what we learned can inspire D.C. residents to respond to the Charter Board's request for applications and make the board's first batch of schools in September 1998 the beginning of a sorely needed new era in public education for the District.
The District already has two charter schools, with two more set to open in the coming year. These were approved by the elected, and now largely powerless, school board. The six-member Charter School Board, an entirely different entity, was created to make sure that the city's dysfunctional education bureaucracy, while formally committed to offering charters, would not stifle the creation of independent schools in the District. People who want to start new schools in the District can now seek charters from either board.
The charter concept, now adopted in law by 29 states, is an innovation designed to improve public education. Charter schools are open to all students; paid for with tax dollars; accountable to public authorities for the results of student learning; and subject to basic health, safety and non-discrimination requirements. But the people running these schools are free to choose their own teachers, curriculum, teaching styles and classroom policies.
The District's embryonic charter schools illustrate the diverse possibilities of this approach. The Marcus Garvey School, which opened last year, offers an Afrocentric curriculum. The Options School, also in its second year, enrolls children in grades five through seven who are at risk of dropping out of school. The Children's Studio School, offering an arts curriculum for kids ages 3 to 11, will open this fall. Next Step, a school for pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers, run by the Latin American Youth Center on Columbia Road, is scheduled to open early in 1998.
Of course, charter schools are not immune to human frailties, slipshod planning, unanticipated crises and reversals of fortune. The Marcus Garvey School in Northeast Washington is best known for a racially-charged altercation last winter between staff members and a Washington Times reporter. Earlier this month, principal Mary Anigbo and two staff members were convicted of assaulting a police officer in the incident. The elected school board has decided to let her stay on as principal at Garvey. The incident and that decision reflect poorly on Anigbo and the board, not on the charter school concept. Why shouldn't District parents who want to send their kids to an Afrocentric school that meets educational standards be able to do so?
The charter concept is not a panacea but it is simple and sound: School choices can be provided to families under the umbrella of public education without being run by centralized government bureaucracies. As a California charter school principal told me, "The charter-school approach offered us a way to get the monkeys of the state and the district, with all their rules and regulations and bureaucracy, off our backs."
The genius of the charter concept is that it demands academic results, unlike many conventional district schools where teachers and administrators often spend as much time and energy conforming to bureaucratic requirements as they do on boosting pupil achievement.
There will be about 700 charter schools operating in at least 20 states this fall, with upwards of 170,000 youngsters in attendance -- more than the student population of Rhode Island.
Contrary to the early charge of opponents, charter schools aren't havens for the fortunate or the "best and brightest" students. According to U.S. Department of Education data, half of U.S. charter school students belong to minority groups, versus one-third in conventional public schools.
Charter schools have unleashed the imagination of at least three groups of people: educators, parents and outside organizations, all of whom want to do things differently, all of whom who are frustrated by the bureaucracy of conventional schools.
City on a Hill Charter School in Boston was founded by two public school teachers, Sarah Kass and Ann Connolly-Tolkoff, both of whom had worked in the Chelsea, Mass., district. They had reached the point where, as Kass told me, "I was banging my head against the wall. The time had come to try something different. The charter law gave us the freedom to start from scratch and do what we had often talked about doing."
City on a Hill opened as a grade 9 and 10 school with 65 students, half of them African American. The school is located in a large YMCA near Northeastern University and has partnerships with several nearby cultural institutions: the Huntington Theater, the Boston Ballet and the Boston Symphony. It has a core curriculum, a focus on civic education -- and a waiting list. In 1996, it added grade 11 and increased its enrollment to 100 students. It plans to gradually expand to grades seven through 12, with a total enrollment of about 225.
Another educator-initiated institution is the Fenton Avenue Charter School in Los Angeles. Originally a traditional public school, its teachers and administrators won a fight to secede from the city's Unified School District and operate independently. It is open year-round, providing education to 1,300 students with a teaching staff of 63. The enrollment is 75 percent Hispanic, and nearly all the students are poor.
The school's new autonomy has enabled the school's teachers and administrators to gain control of almost its entire $7 million budget. Class size was reduced from 30 to 20 in grades K through three and to 25 in grades four through six. After-school and Saturday programs were added. The school obtained accident insurance for the kids and long-term disability for the employees. Fenton has also created an on-site broadcasting studio (the first ever for a California elementary school), developed its own primary phonics instruction program (in both Spanish and English), and boosted pupil test scores more than 20 percent in two years.
The charter concept is also appealing to parents who seek something different and better for their children and have not found satisfaction in their school systems, yet in many cases cannot afford private schools.
One example of a parent-initiated start-up is the Oakland (formerly Jingletown) Charter Academy in Oakland, Calif. Parents in that community whose children attended Lazear Elementary wanted their children to be able to go on to a middle school that was safe from the drugs and violence they saw in other local schools. They approached Clementina Duron, then principal of Lazear, to help them start a charter school. As Jorge Aguilar, a parent, told me during a visit to the school, "We began to think we could do better for our kids than the district was doing. Sure as hell we couldn't do any worse. . . . If we go belly up, at least we tried."
After intense union and board opposition, the grades seven-through-nine school was finally created, with Duron as its principal. Eighty-five percent of its students are Latino. The parents were so pleased with the results that they are now pushing to add a 10th grade.
The third group of charter founders are outsiders who, for various reasons, want to start or operate schools of their own. Some are non-profit organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, some are profit-seeking small businesses or large corporations, some multiservice community groups like the Urban League. All are taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the charter law to put their ideas into practice.
Livingston Technical Academy in Lowell, Mich., is one such school. Started by a group of individuals representing various manufacturing firms in the community, it provides 11th- and 12th-grade students with hands-on technical skills and experience. It is one of several "trade academy" charter schools that received start-up grants from Michigan Gov. John Engler's Jobs Commission. Operating on the campus of a local college, the school is viewed by many as doing what vocational programs should have been doing all along -- providing a full eight-hour day of integrated academics and occupational skills combined with 10 weeks a year of apprenticeship training.
The Charter School of San Diego, which opened in 1994, targets urban youth who are not succeeding in conventional classrooms. Sponsored by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce in partnership with Labor's Community Service Organization, a group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, it now operates at 20 sites around the city. With an enrollment of 850 students, 67 percent of whom are minorities, it has gained nearly total control of its $2.3 million budget. The school has a year-round instructional calendar, spans the equivalent of grades six-12 (though students are not broken into traditional grade levels). Its instructional methods consist mainly of small group work, seminars, workshops and tutorials. Support services are also offered, including health, counseling and job placement. An external evaluation by the San Diego school district accountability division comments, ". . . the school has been successful in reversing the downward spiral of failure in student achievement."
What has emerged across the charter-school landscape looks nothing like a one-size-fits-all charter model. There are also "virtual" charter schools that do all their educating on-line. Indeed, there are places where two very different kinds of charter schools operate within a few blocks of each other.
Surveys show that both teachers and families choose these schools for educational reasons: high academic standards; small classes; a focus on teaching and learning; educational philosophies that are closer to their own; and innovative approaches to instruction. Many accomplish what they do with less money than conventional district schools.
Unlike other education reform proposals (such as school vouchers), charter schools are not identified with any particular political ideology. They enjoy bipartisan support among elected officials at the local, state and national level and have won over parents of all political persuasions. They offer exciting choices for their students, welcome professional opportunities for their teachers, educational progress for their communities, and a genuinely promising reform development for the states and the nation. They are helping the nation to reinvent American education. And they can help the District do the same.
###
Bruno Manno is senior fellow in the Washington office of the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute. Along with Chester E. Finn Jr., Louann A. Bierlein and Gregg Vanourek, he co-authored two national studies of the U.S. charter school movement.