Marin’s charter schools

BY STEVE MCNAMARA

On the charter roster, Marin has four active schools, plus one in Marin City whose charter was revoked and one that failed to win a charter from either the San Rafael district or the county schools office, but on appeal gained one from the state. Calls to the name on its application were not returned. The four active schools, in order of their founding:

PHOENIX ACADEMY, 1995
Phoenix uses classrooms at what was a parochial elementary school affiliated with the old Blessed Sacrament Church on North San Pedro Road west of the Jewish Community Center. It exists largely due to the devotion of two remarkably energetic women: county Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke and Phoenix founding teacher Clara MacNamee. Before Phoenix arose there was Sobriety High, a county-sponsored sober classroom championed by the two. Ten years ago Burke changed the organization to that of a charter school to provide more freedom. Five years ago the name was changed to Phoenix Academy. As MacNamee explains, “When a kid put on a job application that they had graduated from Sobriety High, well that raised questions.”

MacNamee is a wonder. She spent seven years teaching at San Quentin—“The first woman teacher behind bars”—and has spent 25 years working with addicted kids. She supposedly retired last year but she “could only stand it for two weeks.” Now she is back ostensibly working three hours a day, three days a week, but actually for much more than that. She and full-time teacher Mike Herrera deal with 25 canny, imaginative high school kids who thought they had outsmarted the system by diving into drugs or alcohol. They’re an exceedingly lively group, the not surprising product, says MacNamee, of “a drug-soaked society, where you can’t have a good time unless you get wasted.” With invincible support and firm rules plus required parental involvement and AA meetings, a heartening number of students head in the right direction. Just recently, a successful chef, a big guy who graduated some years ago, stopped by to give MacNamee a hug.

NOVATO CHARTER SCHOOL, 1996
This highly popular Waldorf-method K-8 school is chartered by the Novato Unified School District. It now occupies a developing campus of portables at the north end of Hamilton, having been squeezed out of the base’s Meadow Park Elementary School due to the district’s growing student population. Novato Charter’s long waiting list shrank when some parents feared leftover toxics at the new site, despite evidence to the contrary, and left. But there is again a waiting list of more than 200 and a nail-biting lottery system to get for free an education costing $12,000 or more at a private Waldorf school. Half the students are from Novato, the rest from as far away as Point Reyes Station, Petaluma and Sausalito.

The guiding powerhouse at Novato Charter is Director Rachael Bishop. She started two private Waldorf schools in Sonoma County before being called in by the Novato Charter’s founding parents—who had underestimated the need for an expert professional administrator. Novato Charter is a Waldorf-method school, combining Waldorf and current educational practices, not a full-on Waldorf school. The full-on version features founder Rudolph Steiner’s spiritual approach, called anthroposophy, and items such as third grade focus on the Old Testament. Both are no-nos in publicly funded education.

Steiner’s idea was “to meet the children where they are developmentally.” Students often move through the grades with the same teacher; they must screen out jarring influences exemplified today by electronic media; classes are taught using a block system, allowing deep focus, often on a theme such as California in the fourth grade and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the seventh. Bishop says there are 40 Waldorf-method charter schools in California and, “I don’t mean to brag, but we are the top one. We’re on a roll. I’m very happy not to be in the struggle part anymore.”

WILLOW CREEK ACADEMY, 2001
Facilities are a challenge for most charter schools, some of which occupy church basements or storefronts. Instead of having to scramble for a home, Willow Creek is lodged in the spiffy upper half of the Bayside School campus. The classrooms were to be a middle school when the handsome facilities were built 10 years ago. But the middle school wound up in Marin City. Instead, Willow Creek, chartered by the district, moved into the classrooms next to Bayside Elementary. Like many charter startups, Willow Creek adds a grade each year. It is now K-7 and will top out with an eighth grade next school year. Willow Creek has 105 students, the same as K-6 Bayside next door, with which there is delicate coexistence.

For half a century the Sausalito Marin City School District has struggled with having one foot in predominantly white Sausalito and the other in predominantly black Marin City. Many Sausalito parents who could afford to do so sent their kids to private schools, leaving the district with lots of money (two or three times as much per pupil as the rest of Marin), lots of problems (ranging from discipline to test scores) and lots of tension. Willow Creek was founded by Sausalito parents who wanted to re-establish publicly funded education as a core civic virtue rather than as a source of enduring dispute.

Head of school is Carol Cooper who, like the administrators of Marin’s other charter schools, has a remarkably strong educational background. Cooper has degrees from Oberlin, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley; worked 18 years in the Marin County schools office; took off five years to try her hand at the flower business (Hastings and Hastings in Mill Valley); and four years ago went back to what she loves most—education. Willow Creek has a strong academic focus that features project-based, interdisciplinary learning. About 80 percent of the diverse student body is from the Sausalito district.

MARIN SCHOOL OF
ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY, 2003
Three of Marin’s four charter schools are strictly local, one-off endeavors. Not MSAT. The game plan is for Envision Schools to grow beyond its current two operating high schools in Marin and San Francisco, adding four more in the Bay Area. One of the four, a second school in San Francisco, was just approved. Unlike Marin’s other three charter schools, Envision has a robust administrative staff geared up for expansion. The founders and high-energy top dogs at Envision are Daniel McLaughlin and Bob Lenz. McLaughlin has degrees from Yale and Harvard, taught junior high, worked on Bank of America educational programs and was at WestEd, the national educational research center. Lenz harvested awards as the driving force for educational reform at Drake High in San Anselmo. He founded Academy X at Drake, an acclaimed project-based program that prepares students for a wide range of leadership roles.

At MSAT, the words Arts and Technology are on the nameplate, and laptop Macs are as common as backpacks, but that’s misleading. The main focus is not to turn out artists or techies, but to get the students into good colleges. Of the four MSAT students interviewed for this article, only one saw arts or technology in his future. Students are encouraged to view a computer as a tool, not necessarily as a career. MSAT is located in the Miwok cluster of Indian Valley College, it being the principal sign of life (other than deer) on that bucolic, strangely vacant campus.

McLaughlin and Lenz bonded over their shared vision for schools unchained from bureaucratic regulation. “Creating good schools is not rocket science,” says McLaughlin. “There are plenty of good models out there. Kids were getting the shaft, particularly kids of color.” To get their project off the ground they won the lottery, as it were. Envision was one of five groups given $360,000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to replicate in Marin the New Technology High School the foundation had backed in Napa. Envision next received $3 million from Gates to beget five more schools, the second of which is the recently approved Metropolitan School of Arts and Technology, the second school in San Francisco. Envision Schools will have about 100 students per grade, with MSAT adding an 11th grade next year, the first San Francisco school adding a 10th and the new city school starting with ninth.

What’s the vision for them all? “Rigorous and relevant,” says McLaughlin. “Small and personalized. Accountability. I really love this and I think things are going really well. We’re making a difference.”

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Some similarities
Marin’s four charter schools are clearly different, but in three big ways they are quite alike:

1. Small size. Although student-teacher ratios at Marin charters are about average for California public schools, the charter schools themselves are relatively small, from 25 students at Phoenix Academy to 243 at Novato Charter. Every study since Roger Barker and Paul Gump’s groundbreaking work in 1964 (Big School, Small School) has agreed that small schools are superior to large ones in nearly all aspects: attendance, student involvement, academic achievement, the serving of minorities—the works. At Marin’s small charters the kids say they feel valued, there are no dismissive cliques and drug use is either a small problem or no problem at all.

2. Strong parent involvement. At Willow Creek Academy and Novato Charter School, parents must sign on the dotted line and pledge many volunteer hours of work. Parent involvement at MSAT and Phoenix Academy is less structured, but firmly expected. In the broader educational universe, a huge factor in any school’s success appears to be parent involvement. When Bill Honig was superintendent of Marin’s Reed School District, and before he became state superintendent, parent involvement was significant as he propelled Reed from a good district to a great one.

3. Rampant enthusiasm. Almost without exception, the charter kids love the teachers, the teachers love the kids, administrators are friends rather than scary figures and parents feel good, too. Sometimes kids don’t fit. But as four MSAT 10th graders explained, “Some kids aren’t here by choice…Their parents forced them, but they get weeded out…It’s usually mutual. At the end of last year there were kids who didn’t want to come back, so they were replaced and so the 10th grade class now is really just a great group.” The replacement process is a luxury not available at traditional public schools. Kids who don’t want to be there are usually forced to be there anyway.