One of the most important challenges facing parents is how to get the best education for their child. Private school or public school? Conventional or charter? Many parents, including President Barack Obama, have become increasingly interested in the charter option.
The charter school movement has been growing. Across the country, more than 5,000 charter schools teach a million-and-a-half students. And more are on the way.
The Race to the Top education program offers more than $4 billion in federal grants to states that are willing to, among other things, lift the cap on the number of new charter schools in their state.
Here in California, the first charter school was opened in 1993. Today there are more than 800, with about 40 new schools opening each year.
But now there are concerns that what charters promise isn’t always what they produce. In East Palo Alto, families who have chosen to enroll their children in local charter schools have faced both success and failure. KALW's Education Reporter Nancy Mullane has the story.
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NANCY MULLANE: It’s the beginning of a school day near the end of the school year - and the mostly Latino students at EPACS, The East Palo Alto Charter School, are pumped up.
After screaming, “Everybody will attend college some day,” the students lined up by class perform a rolling call of the names of their teacher’s colleges.
It may just sound bombastic, but there’s method to EPACS' apparent madness. Ask P.E. teacher Steven Ashford:
STEVEN ASHFORD: Just to get the kids pumped up and get them excited for the school day.
MULLANE: Does it work?
ASHFORD: Yes, the teachers tell us, tell me. They like it a lot.
Ashford, who’s taught at the school for 10 years, demonstrates another way he likes to get the kids involved:
ASHFORD: Now, what we're gonna do real fast is, if you're sitting down in your seat, please stand up. I want you to dance. Jump up and down until this song ends. Are you ready? Are you ready? Here we go. Ms. Kling I saw that you bumped your head on the ceiling – you were jumping too high. Everybody have a blessed day at EPACS.
It’s not just cheerleading; book-learning does take place here, too. It is a school, after all, and an effective one. Since 2000, the school’s Academic Performance Index - a cumulative measure of test scores - has jumped more than 300 points to 842, making EPACS the highest scorer in the local Ravenswood School District. This year, principal Laura Ramirez says she hopes when she gets the STAR test results over the summer, the school hits an all-time high of 860 points.
LAURA RAMIREZ: We’ll wait and see, but I think they’re going to be fantastic.
Ramirez is in charge here, but she’s not the only administrator with a close eye on the school. Six years ago, EPACS joined the Aspire network of California charter schools. Aspire is a non-profit management organization based in Oakland that operates 25 charter schools throughout the state, educating some 7600 students.
CEO James Wilcox says Aspire operates like a private corporation. First, it helps get charter schools started.
JAMES WILCOX: It’s very expensive to buy all the desks, get the building, get the building ready. It’s very expensive to pull the team together, hire the teachers to get ready to open the school on the first day, because on the first day that’s when the state starts essentially paying us like they would pay the districts to run public schools.
Aspire provides support - for a price.
WILCOX: So think about a coach that’s going to come in and help a teacher really improve their instruction. Think about the person at the other end of the call when your paycheck is messed up and you really need to get something corrected, or the benefits person, or the person that’s paying the bills and keeping track of the books. None of our schools have to worry about those things.
Because Aspire handles them, schools pay for half of those administrative costs, Wilcox says, and private donors cover the other half.
WILCOX: And every year we close that gap more and more. And that’s our goal, is to not require philanthropy or fundraising from anyone and to have a system of schools that’s proving that you can have not one, not two but a whole system of schools that are performing at really high levels and doing it on public funding.
There are other ways in which aspire charter schools operate a little differently from other public schools. They have smaller class sizes, longer school days and a longer school year. Instead of the usual 181 days of instruction offered by most public schools, Aspire schools offer 190 days with a modified calendar and a shorter summer recess. And, Wilcox says, almost across the board, their students perform.
WILCOX: We’re in the top 10 percent of schools, at a minimum, compared to schools that are most like ours across the state.
But other charter schools are struggling. According to a report issued by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, just 17 percent of charter schools had academic gains that were better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent showed worse results, and nearly half demonstrated no significant difference at all.
The problem, according to the U.S. Department of Education, is that the very entities that authorize charter schools lack the capacity or willingness to oversee those schools and rarely invoke their authority to revoke or not renew a charter.
But in East Palo Alto, at another charter school, that’s exactly what just happened.
LARRY MOODY: You can’t allow an institution to experiment on your kids.
Larry Moody is Vice President of Ravenswood School District Board of Education, which, in April, decided not to renew the charter for kindergarten through 4th grade classes at a place calledStanford New Schools.
MOODY: There was stuff. There was things out there that you had to really take a very honest look at.
Stuff like the lowest language arts test results in the district, and questions about math scores, behavior management problems and teacher retention. The 5th grade and high school will remain open, but suspension of the lower grade charter means those students must transfer to other schools, and teachers will have to find other jobs.
MOODY: You have to move. You actually have to take your personal items out of that classroom or off that campus. But the tough piece is what happens to the students. Because many of the students have to contend with a lot of neglect and abandonment issues in their own home and then now they’re dealing with abandonment issues in their classroom, which oftentimes is a sanctuary.
Other charter schools in Ravenswood have suffered problems as well. Just two years ago, the district shut down Edison Ronald McNair Middle School because of poor performance. And last month, the district terminated a for-profit charter elementary, Edison Brentwood Academy, when the company running the school, Edison Learning Incorporated, said it couldn’t afford to stay open.
Even for charter schools that are apparently thriving like EPACS, funding is still a concern. For the third year in a row, Aspire hasn’t had the money to give its teachers bonuses, but it does have backing from significant financial players. This year the Gates Foundation and the Schwab Foundation helped the non-profit charter management organization secure $93 million in tax-exempt bonds for new facilities. This fall, Aspire will open five new schools in California bringing the total number of students in their charter schools to nearly 10,000. If East Palo Alto Charter School is an indication, those schools have a good chance of staying open. But if economics run against them, they may face the same struggles conventional public schools are facing today.
For Crosscurrents, I’m Nancy Mullane.
