Charter schools

The dream was to shed bureaucracy and engage students through creative teaching. Has that happened elsewhere? What about in Marin?

BY STEVE MCNAMARA

Aaron Kalb, a 15-year-old 10th grader, loves his school in Novato: “I’ve never seen a principal smile so much…or talk to a student! At my old school they were locked in their office. They would call in students to be punished, yell at them and that was it.”

Just 3.8 miles east, across Highway 101 at Hamilton, eighth-grader Michael Carrillo, 14, loves his school, too: “You write your own textbooks. The teacher lectures and you take notes. Then you take the notes home and write a rough draft. You have to edit the rough draft into a nice final form with titles and borders. It’s harder, but you learn a lot more.”

Another 5.5 miles down the highway, off North San Pedro Road near the Civic Center, teachers Clara MacNamee and Mike Herrera work tough-love wonders with 25 high school students trying to kick drug and alcohol addictions.

And 10.8 miles further south in Sausalito, Carol Cooper heads a K-7 school that aims to “pull Sausalito people back into the public school system” with a strong academic focus, along with becoming the center of a community that has been split for years along racial and social lines.

These are Marin’s four charter schools, institutions supported by taxpayer dollars that operate under contracts, or charters, with either the school district in which they are located, the county schools office or the state. Marin’s four charters comprise about 560 students, or less than 2 percent of the county’s 28,506 K-12 public school kids. The four schools are quite different from traditional public schools, and quite different from each other.

Aaron Kalb attends the Marin School of Arts and Technology where silver Mac PowerBooks abound and book reports can take the form of PowerPoint presentations. Over at Michael Carrillo’s Novato Charter School, the Waldorf method decrees that students shun electronic media such as TV, movies, video games and computers until the fifth grade, and go easy on it thereafter. At cheerfully noisy Phoenix Academy, extracurricular activity includes AA meetings. Willow Creek Academy, unlike the other three schools, holds forth in handsome new quarters, left over when the public school district overbuilt for its needs.

The differences bespeak an underlying fact: Charter schools in America are a 17-year-old experiment in public education that provides plenty of contradictions, ironies and disputes. A sample:

• The idea of charter schools in the United States was moved forward in 1988 by the late Al Shanker, legendary president of the American Federation of Teachers. Today, opponents of charter schools include teachers’ unions, notably the AFT.

• Former California state Senator Gary Hart authored charter school enabling legislation in 1992. Hart, a public school teacher himself, wanted teachers to rise up and take charge of their existing schools, shucking the bureaucracies they complained about. Thirteen years later, less than a third of California’s charter schools are conversions of existing schools, and hardly any are run by teachers.

• A theme of early charter school backers was that innovation would flourish because brilliant, determined individuals would advance their ideas on a mom-and-pop scale, unburdened by bureaucracy and administrative overhead. By now the playing field is strongly tilted to favor management companies, both nonprofit and for-profit, with their multiple sites, rosters of administrators and ability to attract the big bucks that state regulations favor. Being smiled upon by Bill and Melinda Gates or Donald and Doris Fisher (Gap money) makes an ever-bigger difference.

• Nobody can agree whether charter schools do better or worse at educating students. Each side cites studies to support its position. The most famous citation, one disparaging charter schools, appeared in The New York Times last August, but turned out to have been worked up by the AFT and has since lost its luster.

• Among the most powerful supporters of charter schools is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Envision Schools, parent of the Marin School of Arts and Technology and its sister high schools in San Francisco, came to life with important early support from the Gates Foundation. Despite the Gates’s best efforts, charter schools are now outlawed in their home state of Washington. Teachers’ unions pushed ballot Measure 55 last fall that received 58 percent of the vote and junked the Legislature’s earlier approval of 45 charters.

WHETHER CHARTER SCHOOLS are the answer to California’s public school woes is an open question. What’s not in question are the woes themselves. Last month saw the release of a 216-page RAND report titled “California’s K-12 Public Schools. How Are They Doing?” The short answer: awful. We already know that American students lag behind many overseas students, particularly in math and science. So how does California compare to the rest of the U.S.? Awful. Since Proposition 13 slashed schools’ financial support in 1978, the state’s once-proud public education system has sunk to this:

Spending per pupil, once $400 above the national average, is now $600 below. The California ratio of 20 students per teacher is second worst in the nation and well worse than the national average of 16. Annual school construction spending per pupil is $890 below the national average. Both teacher salaries and education spending relative to personal income are below the national average. The result: On national tests in reading and math, California students are two rungs from the bottom, ahead of only those in Louisiana and Mississippi. So it’s little wonder that California parents, teachers and entrepreneurs, wanting something new, now operate 537 charter schools, about one-quarter of the nation’s total in 42 states.

The path opened March 31, 1988, when Al Shanker spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on “Restructuring American Public Schools.” Before his death in 1997, Shanker, a brilliant leader with a wide-ranging intellect and devoted following, wrote more than 1,300 weekly columns of 800 words in the Sunday New York Times in space paid for by his union. He covered nearly every topic imaginable, including how to make French bread in a blender, but nothing matched the long-term impact of his speech and subsequent columns endorsing charter schools, an idea that traced back to New England educator Ray Budde.

The idea was to free groups of teachers from the bureaucrats, letting them “create their own destiny” with new approaches after they signed contracts (charters) with their local school board. Philadelphia explored the concept, then Minnesota, and in 1992 California passed charter school legislation. Present in the background was the dreaded “V” word—vouchers. Public school supporters saw charters as a way to battle voucher backers, who insisted that the public school system was too sclerotic to improve itself. Vouchers, they said, would introduce fresh air to education by allowing public funds to flow to private schools. The contrary argument was to support charter schools—they would loosen things up but keep public funds in public schools. This, for teachers unions, made it worthwhile to swallow a bitter pill: the fact that charter schoolteachers seldom join a union.

Former senator Hart of Santa Barbara had degrees from Stanford and Harvard, taught high school, was a reader of Shanker’s weekly column and as chair of the Senate Education Committee, heard constant complaints from teachers that they were hamstrung by administrators. “I wanted to get them out from under the regulatory burden, give them freedom to focus on education, give them a new lease on life. There would be three main criteria: Charter schools would get the same money as traditional public schools, there would be no connection with religion and no discrimination.”

Hart, a liberal Democrat, was accustomed to getting union support. Not this time. Teachers unions fought the legislation, which passed anyway. How has it turned out? Says Hart, who left the legislature in 1994: “Generally speaking, I’m pleased. It has put some pressure on traditional schools to improve. But I’m disappointed that more teachers, administrators and board members did not pursue charter schools. The teachers and teacher unions have dropped the ball. My idea was to take existing schools and have those in charge convert them to charter schools. It didn’t work out that way.”

Nor did Hart envision charter schools that provide only distance learning (“I don’t like that one”) or the growth of entrepreneurs who run many schools, as opposed to a single charter as a homegrown answer to a local problem.

The management companies arose from two needs: Running a school is not easy, and proliferating regulations pose new challenges.

SOME PARENTS AND teachers think that having enthusiasm and a room with desks is all that’s needed to create a good school. Bill Honig, former superintendent of Marin’s Reed School District and then state schools superintendent, disagrees. “Getting parents and teachers fired up is not enough. A lot of people who start charter schools think that if they just get separated from the bureaucracy they will be fine, but it’s more complicated than that. A charged-up group that gets involved sure helps. But you still need somebody who understands what a good education is. There’s a lot of hot air about this. There’s a lot of talk about creative exploration. But we don’t do this in medicine—do a lot of creative exploration on the body. We find out what works and that’s what we do. You have to have a system that is open to new ideas, but you also have to have some consistency. If you don’t pay attention to these instructional issues, you’ll have a weak charter school; no different than a weak traditional public school.”

If management groups are proliferating to provide structure, they are also responding to a growing bureaucratic thicket. Says Hart: “Every time a charter school stumbles there are more regulations. I think it’s unfortunate. With all the reporting and regulations, charter schools are moving toward becoming bogged down in the same bureaucracy as traditional schools. Some new regulations may be necessary but they seem to be in response to pressure from the public school establishment. That’s just what we were trying to get away from. It’s a function of the way the legislature works. When something bad happens there’s a big cry for legislation to prevent it from ever happening again. Taken individually, each of these laws makes sense. But taken together you get 6,000 pieces of legislation, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

“Maybe it’s time for a new charter schools law. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that to maintain vitality you have to have a revolution every 20 years. Maybe it’s time for that.”

Kerry Mazzoni, former Novato school board member, termed-out chair of the Assembly Education Committee and former state Secretary of Education, sees storm clouds ahead. As a consultant she has a Southern California charter school group as a client and she supports the movement. But she says that charter association officials envision moving from 2.5 to 10 percent of the state’s public schools by the year 2014, and if that happens the drain on traditional school finances will be dramatic, prompting administrators and teachers unions to take the gloves off. As Carol Cooper of Willow Creek Academy notes, “You’re in competition with the person that’s feeding you.”

On the question of test scores, Mazzoni says that comparisons are almost useless because the testing system is not yet where it needs to be. It would be meaningful to measure the progress of a group of third-grade students as they progressed over the course of a school year. But in California and most other states a group of third graders is measured against a completely different group of third graders the following year, irrespective of differences between the groups. “I’m all about outcomes,” says Mazzoni, “and my sense is that there are very good charter schools and very good non-charter schools. It’s not an argument that I care to get into.”

The picture in Marin today is unusual in that, so far, there is either support or neutrality from traditional school officials and unions, two sources of growing opposition statewide and nationally. County Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke, a person of breathtaking enthusiasm for all things educational, extends the feeling to Marin’s charters. She believes public school districts should aim to meet the needs of students within the traditional framework, but if they can’t do it, go charter! “You want to have options for kids that are public school options. There isn’t just one way to provide an education. Take MSAT. It’s vibrant; it’s a good school! The best thing public schools can do is get in front of that thing and take credit for it. It’s our school!”

According to Bob Keeble, services consultant for 24 nearby chapters of the California Teachers Association, “Charters are not a hot issue locally. People seem pretty happy with traditional public schools.” Even Leslie Schwarze, president of the Novato Unified School District, has warm words: “I’m very open to the idea of choices and options. We’ve always had good relations with the Novato Charter School.” Of course it drives Schwarze and other Novato school people nuts that, due to the craziness of state funding formulas, they must by law provide more money per pupil to MSAT students than they do for their own high school students. But she bears no grudge: “They understand what happened and so do we. It’s the system that has to be changed.”

There may be a war brewing in California between traditional public school backers and the charter school movement, but Marin does not hear a battle cry. Instead it hears 10th grader Aaron Kalb at MSAT: “The [school] administration says we’re going to trust the students a little bit to make decisions about their own education. And because the students feel trusted they behave maturely and make good decisions. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Marin's Chater Schools

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Skimming the cream
Opponents of charter schools often raise the specter of “creaming.” By this they mean that charter schools skim off the cream of motivated students and involved parents, leaving traditional public schools to deal with the tough cases. Although California’s 537 charter schools with some 180,000 students represent only 2.5 percent of the school population, the creaming argument is often made. Here is the response from three public school figures:

Paul Koehler, director of the Policy Center for WestEd, a national educational resource agency headquartered in San Francisco, former superintendent of a 35-school unified school district near Phoenix and in 1999, Arizona’s Superintendent of the Year: “There’s no evidence of creaming; there just isn’t. There are some charter schools that look like publicly funded private schools. They are just great and parents are lined up around the block to get their kids admitted. If these schools are pushing the traditional schools to do better, what’s wrong with that? If a traditional school is losing students to a charter school and the traditional school has to improve itself, that’s a positive outcome.”

Kerry Mazzoni, former state Secretary of Education, former assemblywoman and chair of the Assembly Education Committee, former member of the board of the Novato Unified School District and currently a consultant whose clients include a Southern California charter school organization: “I’m not so concerned about creaming. It’s a very proactive and positive thing for a parent to choose a school for a child. All parents should be engaged at that level. Parents of color, low-income parents, parents of children with learning difficulties—why shouldn’t engaged parents be able to choose the best school for their children?”

Bill Honig, former superintendent of Marin’s Reed School District and former state Superintendent of Public Instruction: “Creaming? Hey, more power to them. They’ve created something good. We need more of that sort of thing. If a parent wants to put their kid in what they think is a better group, let them do it. The total sum of quality will be better. It’s not a zero sum game. To the extent that you are vulnerable to skimming, you will try to do a better job. And creating little centers of energy is a good idea.”—Steve McNamara

Drill and kill
A phrase that pops up repeatedly—as an object of scorn—at Marin’s charter schools is “drill and kill.” With testing the linchpin of current U.S. educational policy, the result has been a tremendous push to pump up student scores no matter what. This is true at some quite successful chains of charter schools. But not in Marin. As Carol Cooper of Willow Creek Academy says, “It’s ridiculous to give tests to second graders. They can barely hold a pencil!” In Marin the buzzwords are “project-based” and “interdisciplinary” learning, never drill and kill.
—Steve McNamara