Education Reform In The News -- Excerpt

CAPITAL PAINS: A PRINCIPAL'S FIGHT FOR A CHARTER SCHOOL RILES SUPERINTENDENT
--- A Washington Tug of War Over Aging Junior High Embodies a Wider Debate --- Big Chill Over Refrigerators 
By June Kronholz, Staff Reporter
The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2000

WASHINGTON -- Last spring, two-thirds of the parents and teachers at Paul Junior High voted to take their school out of the city's public-school system. In a certified ballot, they opted to convert the whole thing -- 709 students, the 1930s building, the books and equipment, the 7.5 acres of public land -- into a charter school.

        The ossified District of Columbia Public School system "wore us out," says Cecile Middleton, the very tiny, very formidable principal, "and we have all these plans."

        The school district quickly fought back, refusing to rent Mrs. Middleton the Paul building and then announcing plans to open a new science, technology and arts program at Paul for anyone who rebuffs the charter. "That's what charter schools are supposed to do, stimulate a lot of creativity. Aren't they?" says Arlene Ackerman, the elegant and, yes, very formidable superintendent.

        No one ever said the road to better schools was going to be smooth and easy, and even the U.S. Congress might get involved before Paul's future is settled. But the tussle over an old junior high school in inner-city Washington helps explain why charters are growing fast, why many districts are trying so hard to stop them, and why nothing is likely to get fixed very quickly in the meantime.

        Washington's schools are what policy makers mean when they talk about an education crisis. Three-quarters of the fourth-graders here can barely read, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the national test of academic skills. Just 5% of eighth-graders do eighth-grade work in math and science. Almost 40% of the youngsters who start high school drop out before they graduate. Black teenagers who do make it to 12th grade score an average 831 on the 1,600-point SAT exam, 185 points below the national average. And when Ms. Ackerman reported recently that 70,762 children were enrolled, it was the first time in years that the system had roused itself enough to even count its students.

        Paul Junior High, on Washington's northern tip, is a glimmer in that bleak picture. Half the eighth-graders in a school whose enrollment is largely African-American score below basic competency levels on city-wide math tests. But 80% read at grade level or better, and on both reading and math tests, Paul scores near the top of the city's 21 junior highs. When Mrs. Middleton arrived at Paul a decade ago, she found a school where 450 kids were enrolled, but no more than 290 ever showed up. Shop dominated the curriculum, and the teachers averaged 56 years old.

        "I wanted young teachers," she says. So, by encouraging transfers and retirements, she replaced the entire staff, and then set about shaking up the curriculum. Shop has given way to arts, drama and orchestra, with the Kennedy Center sending over artists-in-residence. Spanish is compulsory, and the school's big immigrant population is mainstreamed to learn English more quickly. Incoming seventh-graders take a summer-school math course to get them ready for algebra, and then a concentrated writing project. A free afterschool program features academics -- math, science and chess clubs. A "social- adjustment" room gets unruly kids out of the classroom, without relegating them to the streets. "Nobody's ashamed to be smart here," says Constance Chubb, Paul's technology coordinator.

        Paul's teachers say they voted to become a charter school because that regimen puts them far ahead of the rest of the district. "We can't stand still and wait for the district to catch up with us," says Bryan Lumpkins, Paul's business manager. But they also talk of their frustration with a district that controls spending, schedules repairs and hires and fires through a lethargic central office....

        Mrs. Middleton has been with the D.C. public schools for 40 years as an English teacher and as principal at one high school and two junior highs. She worried, she says, that the dysfunction in the school system was robbing Paul of valuable teaching time. "We only have the children for three years; we can't wait," she says.

        So in 1996, she and her teachers drafted a charter-school plan -- detailed down to how much they would spend on library books -- and set about collecting parent signatures in support. Under Washington's charter-school law, drafted by Congress but passed by the city council, a district school can become a charter after receiving approval of two-thirds of parents and teachers. Charter supporters interpret the law as allowing a new charter school the right to lease back its building.

        Washington schools didn't open on time in 1997 either, though, and when they did open three weeks late, Paul was closed for another three weeks because fire-code violations still hadn't been fixed. By the time Paul finally opened, the deadline for filing the charter-school petitions had passed. Mrs. Middleton tried again in 1998 and won preliminary approval from the city's charter-school board. But then an accounting firm, hired to certify the petition, found it short by 41 signatures-the result of confusion over whether two-thirds of the parents, or parents from two-thirds of the families, should sign. Mrs. Middleton withdrew the application.

        Last spring, Mrs. Middleton and her teachers started early, collected 511 signatures and won charter-board approval to open in fall 2000, provided they have a building. Mr. Lumpkins, the business manager, offered the school district $179,000 a year to rent Paul, with equipment rental to be decided. In a city that has lost half its enrollment in the past 30 years, that has dozens of empty school buildings and that is projected to lose another 15,000 students by 2009, "it shouldn't be a problem," he says.

        The Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that tracks the charter movement, says there are 1,700 charter schools in 31 states, and that most of those states allow public schools to convert to charters. Conversions account for 40% the charters in California, for example, and even entire districts there have converted to charter status.

        Washington has lost a bigger percentage of its students to charters than anywhere else -- one in 11 kids is in one of the city's 31 charter schools -- and so perhaps is warier of them. Because funding depends partly on enrollment, Mrs. Ackerman expects to lose at least $30 million because of charters this year, or 5% of her budget. "The law didn't look at the rippling effects" on the district schools, she says. "Seventy thousand students are sort of sacrificed" for 7,000 charter students, she contends.

        In fact, charter proponents are looking at the ripples -- the very point, they say, is for charters to give district schools such a run for their money that they will be forced to improve. But Jeffrey Henig, director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at George Washington University here, says that D.C. schools may be too troubled to survive a stiff challenge. Charters may become so popular, and the flow of money out of the district budget may become so torrential, that the city could lose its ability to improve, he suggests.

        "We can bear the costs of competition when we're talking about a corner drugstore," says Prof. Henig, who counts himself a charter proponent. "But schools have social consequences."

        The D.C. school district first sent word to Paul that it couldn't lease the Paul building because the district needed it for special-education students. Then, in a November letter to parents, Mrs. Ackerman proposed a new program at Paul with "a cutting-edge curriculum." She promised details later, and included a survey asking parents to choose between the new program and the charter.

        Though opposition to charters is often fierce in the suburbs, where superintendents are proud of their well-performing schools, many cities -- Boston, Chicago and Cincinnati, among them -- often embrace charters because of their potential to help. Not so in Washington.

        Joseph Gauld runs two boarding schools in Connecticut, and decided to start a charter in Washington that emphasized character education. But after his Hyde Leadership Public Charter School opened this fall on the bottom two floors of a disused Washington school, Mrs. Ackerman announced plans to start a program for expelled teenagers on the third floor. "If you've got kids upstairs who are resistant or hostile to schools, they're going to infect your student body," says Mr. Gauld. (Mrs. Ackerman, who withdrew the plan, bristles at Mr. Gauld's characterization. "These all are our children," she says.)

        George Carruthers, who was chairman of Young Technocrats Math and Science Charter School, says his charter leased another disused district building, only to find that it had been stripped of plumbing lines, kitchen freezers and other equipment so heavy that only professional movers could have removed them. The charter failed because of weak management, he says, but the huge repair bill "was part of the downfall." (Mrs. Ackerman blames the looting on vandals, and not on the district.)

        "People in this town are desperate for better schools," says Robert Cain, who heads a local group called Friends of Charters in Urban Schools, "but the grand strategy of the system is to fight off the charter schools."

        Mrs. Ackerman, who had been a teacher and administrator in St. Louis and Seattle for 30 years, took over the D.C. schools after the last superintendent quit. She is credited with stabilizing them after years of chaos, and beginning the cumbersome turnaround. She says she proposed the technology program at Paul after some parents and others "asked me, 'What are you doing, giving away a school?' "

        Robert Childs, president of the Washington school board and pastor of a church near Paul, says he got the same questions, and began rallying opposition to the charter. Mrs. Middleton's charter-discussion group met in the Rev. Childs' church basement, and he sat on the committee that drafted Paul's academic plan. But now he asks: "Should you take a school away from the community?"

        Not all of Paul's teachers are fully comfortable with the charter either. Kathleen Gall, who teaches special education, glows when she talks about the charter. "It's nice to have an idea that lights your fire after 30 years in this business," she says. "To have someone say, 'It's your school, show us your stuff' -- that would be so neat." But she frets about undermining the very school system that she and her children attended. And Bryan Crumpton, a Paul health and gym teacher, insists the school district isn't as woeful as it seems. He points to the windows and gym floor, all new in the past decade. "It takes a little while, but things get done," he says.

        Mrs. Middleton is unruffled. Her charter will give preference to children from the neighborhood, she adds: "We wouldn't have done this if we didn't intend to stay a community school." And there are three other, underused junior high schools nearby for parents who don't like the charter plan.

        Robert Copeland, co-chairman of Paul's PTA and parent of a Paul seventh grader, insists there are few of those. "We're dead last," he says of the school district that he attended 30 years ago. "When you look at those numbers, you can only hang your head and say something's got to change." Adds Janice Cofer, whose son, Jacques, is a Paul ninth-grader: "Everybody's at the point where they want something better for their kids. The charter is somewhere to start."

        Unless they're allowed to rent the Paul building, though, Mrs. Middleton and her teachers say they will drop the charter idea. "I don't think the parents signed the petition expecting to move," says Kurt Becker, a Paul English teacher. Washington's city authorities could award them the lease. But because of Congress's funding authority over the city, and Republican support in Congress for trying something, anything, to jump-start Washington's schools, the decision might instead be made on Capitol Hill.

        Mrs. Ackerman now offers to divide Paul between her program and the charter, doubling the population of the school. The superintendent calls her offer "Solomon's approach. I thought, 'Let's share the building.' " Mrs. Middleton warns of disarray, though, if two principals try to run the same building. She points out that the district's own survey shows Paul at 97% of capacity already. And she offers to take on Mrs. Ackerman's program "as a sister school" if it locates somewhere nearby.

        But share Paul? Mrs. Middleton folds her hands in her lap, and answers very softly. "No," she says. "We won't."

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Link to related articles: 

• HELP CHARTER SCHOOLS FIND INEXPENSIVE HOMES, By Milton Shinberg, Washington Post Outlook Section, December 5, 1999
• THE RIPPLE EFFECT: Charter Schools Prove Positive Impact on Home Districts, July 15, 1999

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