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Numbers Show Charter Demand

“Demand for top N.J. charter schools exceeds available seats”
by Tom Moran
Star-Ledger
January 15, 2012

The dreaded night came on Thursday this year. The grim weather — a chilly drizzle as night fell — seemed fitting for what was sure to be a grim evening.

This was lottery night at Learning Community Charter School in Jersey City. The K-8 school had 30 openings to fill.

The problem: Roughly 1,000 families applied to fill them. Hundreds of them streamed into the auditorium to watch the process live, even though results soon would be posted online.

On stage, a volunteer pulled orange tickets out of a wire basket, one by one, after spinning it to assure the audience that this was indeed random. Nearly all of them were destined to go home disappointed.

An immigrant from Haiti found his number was deep on the waiting list and his shoulders sagged. “I’ll move, probably to Linden,” he said.

A Muslim woman, covered head to toe in black garb, shook her head as she prepared to leave, defeated. “I don’t like the regular schools,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

And Bernadette Schery, a nursing student, said she came because she hopes that her 4-year-old son, Sebastian, will become a doctor someday. And since more than half the graduates from this school are later admitted to elite magnet schools and private schools, she was taking a shot.

She didn’t make it, either. “I was surprised there were only eight seats for pre-K,” she said. “That really blew my mind.”

New Jersey has 80 charter schools today and, if Gov. Chris Christie gets his way, dozens more will open in the next few years.

That worries some people. They say conventional schools might suffer if charters lure away too many ambitious families. They say some charters find underhanded ways to enroll kids who are wealthier and smarter than the average. And they cite statistics showing that charter schools can fail, too.

“We have a large number of persistently low-performing charter schools,” said Bruce Baker, an associate professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. “We have to be honest about that.”

Grant them all of that. But the flip side is places such as the Learning Community, which spends roughly 60 percent as much as a conventional school in Jersey City, and achieves much better results.

You can see that in the test scores, where kids in this working class West Side neighborhood are beating the state average on reading and math, and leaving the city average way behind. And you can see it in the number of graduates moving on to elite high schools.

But the most convincing evidence was the people’s verdict on Thursday night. Families of every race and creed streamed into that auditorium, voting with their feet.

Schery, the nursing student, sat on a fold-out chair in the back row with her husband, Frank Reyes, and their two young sons.

Reyes also has a sixth-grader in a conventional Jersey City school and is frustrated that his repeated attempts to engage his teachers have been rebuffed.

“I asked his four teachers for their e-mail addresses to stay in touch and only one would give it to me,” he said. “If the public schools are losing active parents, it’s their own fault.”

Both parents worry about violence in the regular school system, and for good reason.

Last year, Jersey City schools reported 148 acts of violence, 55 of them involving weapons. Add to that the fights that aren’t reported and the weapons that aren’t found.

“That’s a huge concern,” Schery said. “You have fights all the time.”

Still, the main reason they want their boy to enroll is that they want him to step higher than they have.

“When I am studying to be a nurse, my son keeps saying ‘I want to be a doctor, Mommy,’ ” she said. “When we go to the doctor, he actually enjoys it and asks how everything works.”

A charter school, though receiving less money, has some built-in advantages. The most important one is probably the ability to hire its own staff, rather than take whatever the central bureaucracy sends.

“I make all the hiring decisions, with the help of the teachers,” said Janet Ciarrocca, the principal. “We are smaller, and I have more freedom on curriculum, as well.”

So are charters the answer? Sadly, there are no magic wands in education reform. Some charters are awful and, while the state closed down two of them this year, that’s probably not enough.

And yes, some undoubtedly game the system to filter out the toughest cases. That needs to change, too.

But when you look at the long waiting lists for the good charter schools in several cities, it is hard to argue with Christie’s call for more. The thirst for something better is profound and it hasn’t been met.

“It’s heartbreaking, every year,” Ciarrocca said.

“We work hard to make the process fair, but every parent has a story about why they want their child to have a good education.”

And if we don’t honor that in America, then we really have lost our way.