By Howard Blume
Howard Blume is a staff writer for LA Weekly.
July 27, 2003
It took a while, but the national rage over charter schools has finally
come to town, as contagious as patriotism or SARS. The Los Angeles Unified
School District, which once scorned charter schools, is suddenly approving
charter petitions right and left. In the last year, the school district has
approved 26 proposals for charter schools — 16 of these will open this year.
More are on the way. These schools will join the district's 36 existing charter
schools.
While these schools clearly have something to offer Los Angeles, they have
not been the panacea school-choice supporters claim them to be. As public
schools of choice that are exempt from many provisions of the state Education
Code, charter schools can take charge of academic programs, spending decisions
and hiring. They are championed as laboratories of reform and accountability.
But in fact, in California, charter schools have been a mixed bag. A recent
study by the Rand Corp. found "charter schools generally have comparable or
slightly lower test scores than conventional public schools after adjusting
for the ethnic and demographic characteristics of the students." Test scores
are never the entire story about a school, but it's worth noting that the
charter schools that are the most different — the ones without the standard
classroom-and-teacher setting — also have problems with scores. Compared with
conventional public schools, scores at these "nonclassroom-based" schools
are lower "across the board," according to the Rand findings.
Of the state's 407 charter schools, about 120 are nonclassroom-based, serving
a large proportion of independent-study students, many of them home schoolers.
These students receive instruction primarily from their parents, with varying
degrees of supervision from the charter school. Such schools include some
of the largest charter operations in the state. Home-school families like
the arrangement because they get free textbooks and other items, such as Internet
access, that they formerly had to pay for.
School districts and private operators also have done well from the arrangement.
For a while, some were making money as fast as they could pocket it. That's
because they received the same per-student subsidy from the state as did bricks-and-mortar
schools — except that they didn't have to pay for buildings or food service
or even classroom teachers. And while some of the home-school charter operators
have been reputable — even innovative — others appear to have been pure profiteers.
Some of the practices that made home-school charters so profitable have
now been banned by legislation. If a school has more than 20% non-classroom-based
students, its expenses are reviewed by the state, and the per-pupil allotment
can be lowered. And school districts can no longer collect huge commissions
on student-attendance revenue generated by charter schools. Charter schools,
for their part, are prohibited from charging tuition, as some did initially.
Such practices were not the sort of innovation that legislators had in mind
when they approved the charter schools act in 1992.
But even if Los Angeles embraces more traditional charter schools, it shouldn't
expect miracles. Until its recent 180-degree turn, most of L.A.'s charter
schools were charter in name only, and didn't really operate independently.
Seventeen of these schools reverted to "regular" status as of July 1.
A handful of L.A. charter schools have distinguished themselves, including
Vaughn Next Century Learning Center under Principal Yvonne Chan and Fenton
Avenue Charter School under its executive director, Joe Lucente. Chan turned
out to be a master manager and finagler of money, inaugurating a building
spree that allowed her to lower class size, offer a health clinic and other
social services, and extend both the school year and school day. But at the
same time, she was slow to embrace phonics instruction — she didn't have to,
unlike schools under direct district control. As recently as 1999 — after
more than five years as a charter school — her campus' test scores rated well
below average compared with similar schools. To her credit, Chan has since
turned that around, but a real accountability system could have shut her
down if anyone had taken that part of the charter paradigm seriously.
At Fenton Avenue, Lucente assembled an array of corporate donors, who put
his school at the forefront of computer technology. He had early success in
raising test scores, and, all in all, he's shown what an unchained leader
can achieve. Yet there is not a Joe Lucente to run every school. Nor are there
enough corporations to go around as sponsors.
Even with the explosion of new charters, these schools will serve but 27,000
of the school system's 747,000 students next year. For better or worse, the
people who will most affect the schools of Los Angeles are Supt. Roy Romer
and the seven-member Board of Education. Against all odds, they've made some
progress with their efforts to improve reading and math instruction and their
massive school-construction effort.
Romer himself is among the recent charter-school converts. One reason is
that he had hoped new charter schools could find their own campuses, eliminating
some of the district's overwhelming space crunch. But that may have been overly
optimistic. "Acquiring and funding school facilities has been a stumbling
block for many charter schools," the Rand study found. In addition, new state
regulations increase the obligation of local school districts to provide classroom
space for charter schools.
None of this is to suggest that charters can't play a valuable supporting
role. They can, for example, open more quickly than regular schools because
they are allowed to operate in existing buildings erected for other purposes.
The Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, for example, set up in a converted strip
mall. Good charter schools also can help to retain the interest and support
of middle-class families who might otherwise desert public schools. And they
can liberate particular talents (such as Chan and Lucente) or let talents
blossom sooner than the bureaucracy might have allowed. The well-regarded
Accelerated School was started by two teachers in their 20s. The promising
Los Angeles Leadership Academy was organized by a talented attorney who would
have been dismissed as "unqualified" to run a school in any other context.
But even successful "choice" schools have to be carefully evaluated for
their effect on the system at large. Some academics are concerned that schools
of choice remove talented students as well as involved, motivated families
from neighborhood schools. As a result, both the regular and charter campuses
could end up less diverse than before the charter school opened.
In Los Angeles, three traditional, comprehensive high schools with among
the highest proportion of Anglo students and the highest test scores pursued
charter status this year. The board approved independent charter status for
Palisades High School and a one-year charter for Granada Hills High. The third
school, El Camino Real, has postponed filing a petition for now. It's easy
to understand why a school community might want to escape the stifling autocracy
of L.A. Unified. But if these schools are able to capture more resources,
including more dollars, as a result of going charter, it's fair to ask at
whose expense these advantages will derive. Romer has expressed legitimate
reservations about these efforts.
One way or another, the genie is out of the bottle. Charter schools are
here to stay. It will take the utmost care, wisdom and monitoring to make
sure they prove a wholesale benefit.