Barriers to Success

The hue and cry from the federal, state and local levels is for growing and replication of ‘high-quality’ charter schools.  Often this debate gets obfuscated by who is defining ‘high quality’ (standardized test results) and yet further muddied when people want to attribute causation to how charters are able to achieve ‘high quality’ (i.e. ‘creaming’, etc.)

In a recent press release noting the over 158,000 students on waiting lists for charter schools in California, CCSA president and CEO Jed Wallace shared, “We want to ensure every student in the state of California gets the education he or she deserves”.

If we want to create the adequate, safe space for these 158,000 students - and the other estimated 547,800 we are currently serving – by supporting the replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools, then this is only rhetoric if we are not answering the prime challenge to sustainability for these schools; adequate, long term, sustainable and reasonably priced facilities.

A comprehensive commitment is needed on the federal, state, and local level.  “While a stellar building provides no guarantee that a school will be a success, having adequate facilities that at least meet the needs of an academic program without robbing the budget can go a long way toward creating an environment conducive to learning.” (National Association of Charter Authorizers)

Currently lease incentive funds exist in California for schools serving the most disadvantaged through at least two separate programs and these do help these schools offset facilities cost. The funds in these programs aren’t for all charter schools and they don’t cover the significant costs in total for those who are eligible.  Additionally, prop 39 is a vehicle for facilities and offers by districts or counties sometimes mean the charter is offered an adequate facility; but there is no universal quality, no universal cost structure and the agreements are most often year to year which doesn’t support long term planning and sustainability – both stalwarts of high quality charter schools.

If we are all truly committed to creating high-quality charter schools, we must recognize facilities as a challenge or barrier to this commitment and we must seek real answers.

Deep Conversations... Reinventing the System

“if we truly care about preparing kids for life and work success – we need schools to be different.” Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant)

McLeod goes on to say, 

          “Essentially, we now have the ability to learn about whatever we want, from whomever we want, whenever and wherever we want, and we also can contribute to this learning environment for the benefit of others. The possibilities for learning and teaching in this information space are both amazing and nearly limitless, but right now this learning often is disconnected from our formal education institutions.” (McLeod) 

This disconnect exists in traditional public schools and charters.

The pen and paper linear and traditional world is fast transforming into one that is hyper-connected, digital, online, mobile and complex.  It is incumbent on public education – traditional and charter – to balance our assessment driven system with the need to reinvent the education system as we know it.  This starts with deep conversations across our schools, organizations and communities.

The challenge is to how to plant the seed for these deep conversations and then use the outcomes for changing the paradigm in our schools and organizations.

Every Year The Puzzle Shifts

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, California continues to outpace the rest of the nation in charter school enrollment and growth. Wednesday’s report states that 87 new charter schools opened in California this school year, more than in any other state.  This brings the total of California charter schools to 1,184 which is nearly double that of Florida and Arizona, the states with the next highest number of charters.

 Charter schools are independently run public schools often started by community groups that operate under agreements with local or state education agencies giving them more latitude in staffing and course decisions. “The charter school alliance estimates that California’s charter schools are serving 547,800 students this year. That’s almost twice as many as in Florida, the state with the next largest charter school enrollment.” (1)

One of the biggest challenges involved is the annual scrambling for facilities to house charter school students.  California voters approved measures intended to ensure that charter school students share equally in school facilities. For Districts this can be a real challenge of competing concerns and needs involving precious resources; how to serve students in District schools and simultaneously meet the needs of District students in charter schools.  Sometimes shuttered or closed campuses can be used, but these have grown scarcer as has affordable and appropriate private market space.

Districts are required to make an offer in April for the coming school year.  Charter schools are often provided information in April, per state timeline requirements, which may mean moving or significant changes in space or costs.  These challenges significantly impact sustainability, planning, enrollment and ultimately and primarily it hurts our children.

Every year the puzzle shifts.

Not all arrangements are problematic and not all Districts move and constrain charters on an annual basis.  In some areas charters and Districts have agreed to collaborate in the best interest of all students … charter and traditional …. and the hope is that as we continue the charter journey this will become the norm.

1.        http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/02/11/california-continues-to-lead-nation-in-charter-school-growth/

Innovations and Charters: SAVA Recording and Photography

Chartered Waters ... Jumping Back In ....

It's been a good long time since I've posted on this blog - but I'm recommitting and jumping back in.

Below you will find a link/post for an update on a great CTE program that is doing amazing work creating options for students - this one is a new Recording and Photography studio to incorporate hands on learning and inspire with rigor and relevance!

I think this and other schools creating vocational options that inspire our youth are transformational ... what do you think?

SAVA Photography: Updates

A Bold New Future ...

I'm a charter school operator
and
I'm an avid ACSA supporter and am on the state board.
It's weird to live in both worlds ...
I am proud of both worlds
and it really is time for these worlds to align.
Charter schools are public schools.
ACSA's mission is to support public school and especially school administrators.
I'd like to see more charter school leaders at ACSA - I'm writing from the 2013 Leadership Summit and there is so much here - I am learning so much and wish all charter school leaders were here and we could learn together.

Parent Trigger (Repost HechingerEd.blog)

This piece is courtesy of The Hechinger Report's HechingerEd blog.

     A small group of parents in Adelanto, Calif., became the first in the nation Thursday to choose a charter operator to take over their neighborhood school through the controversial "parent trigger" law.
     On a 50 to 3 vote, parents who voted chose LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy as the charter operator to take over the embattled Desert Trails Elementary School, which has been at the center of a bitter battle for the past nine months.
     California's Parent Empowerment Act of 2010, known as the parent trigger law, enables parents representing more than 50 percent of students to sign a petition to force major reforms on a low-performing school, from firing the principal and half the staff to a charter conversion.
     At Desert Trails, more than 600 students and 286 parents signed a petition last year seeking a charter conversion. Accounting for parents who had since left the school, 180 were eligible to vote. Parents who did not sign the petition were not eligible.
     Some parents who fiercely oppose the conversion have vowed to pull their children out of the school next fall.
    "I want nothing to do with the people behind it," said parent Maggie Flamenco.
    The choice was between LaVerne Elementary, which has run a K-8 charter school in Hesperia, Calif., since 2008 and focuses on a classical curriculum with an emphasis on Latin, and the Lewis Center for Educational Research, which runs a K-12 charter school in Apple Valley, Calif., with a focus on science and project-based learning.
     Doreen Diaz, the lead parent organizer for the conversion, said she preferred LaVerne Elementary because it has outperformed Desert Trails on test scores even though it has similar demographics. LaVerne Elementary scored a 911 on California's 1,000-point Academic Performance Index last year, compared to Desert Trails' score of a 699.
     She also liked that LaVerne Elementary's proposal included a more formalized structure for parent involvement. LaVerne Elementary promised to create a parent board comprised of parents, a staff member, the principal, assistant principal and other school representatives. The proposal stated that the parent board would serve as a liaison between school administration and parents.
     "That's a level of power the district has refused to give to parents," said Gabe Rose, deputy director of Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles nonprofit bankrolling the parent union.
     The parent union did not allow parents who hadn't signed the petition to cast a ballot because they had already outlined the process in writing when they campaigned last winter, Rose said.
     California regulations state that the petitioners should select and solicit the operator, he said.
     "We're bound by the promise we gave to the community about the process," Rose said. "We would have loved to be able to open it up to more."
     The next step is for LaVerne Elementary to formally submit its charter proposal to the school district. Charter schools are independently run and publicly financed and overseen by an agency. In California, that agency is typically the local school district's governing board. The Adelanto School District must approve the charter proposal if it deems it meets the state's requirements, including a sound fiscal plan and appropriate curriculum. All current students at the school and their siblings would be guaranteed spots.
     Parents first started organizing the Desert Trails Parent Union in June 2011, and the union first filed its petition to convert the school into a charter school on Jan. 12. Several battles with the district over verifying signatures ensued, and the parent union ultimately won a key victory in court last week.
     In the meantime, momentum for parent trigger legislation throughout the nation has been building. Well-funded advocacy groups like Parent Revolution and StudentsFirst are now using the new movie "Won't Back Down" to rally more support.
     By the end of this winter, Parent Revolution anticipates that additional parent groups in the Los Angeles or greater California area will be going public with their own pushes to invoke parent trigger, Rose said.
_______________***_______________
My thoughts and I welcome yours as well -  is that parent trigger legislation, in California and the nation, is another way to catalyze change ... and for parents the significant time it is taking for the system to change itself is leaving their children behind.

School Choice Distorted by Gary Houchens (reposted from the ASCD web page)

March 05, 2012 (reposted from ASCD Community Blog)


I'm writing to express my dismay at the decision to publish James Harvey's article "Privatization: A Drain on Public Schools" (Educational Leadership, December 2011/January 2012) with no counterpoint commentary. Harvey's article is short on meaningful data and long on rhetoric that distorts the position of school choice advocates, promoting fear and misinformation instead of thoughtful debate and discussion.

The first failure of Harvey's argument is his suggestion that, because education is a public good, school choice options like charters and vouchers must be bad. But Harvey makes no effort to explain why the only way to deliver public goods is through government-run schools. This is like saying that because health is a public good, only government-run hospitals can provide it.

As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Cleveland voucher program was constitutional because the money provided for educational vouchers followed the student. The public good of education can be provided with government support; that doesn't mean that only government agents can deliver the service. Just as veterans may use the G.I. Bill to pay for tuition at private colleges and patients may use Medicare or Medicaid at private hospitals, education is indeed a public good that does not require a state-run monopoly for schools.

Harvey cites data suggesting that achievement of students in charter schools and voucher programs isn't consistently higher than their counterparts in traditional public schools. But school choice advocates do not suggest that every charter or private school will naturally do a better job. Like every entrepreneurial enterprise, some will succeed, and others will fail. The difference is that if families are dissatisfied with the education their child receives in a charter or private school, they may exercise the option to enroll elsewhere. Poor families without school choice options have no such opportunity, and if their local public school is failing, their children must fail with it.

The most disheartening aspect of Harvey's article was his characterization of school choice advocates as libertarians obsessed with private property (and, we may infer, devoid of interest in human beings—as if those two things are mutually exclusive), or perhaps worse. Harvey equates choice advocates with the ruthless Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Such comparisons are not only inaccurate (choice advocates do not believe vouchers and charters are a quick fix that will cure all of education's ills), but also inflammatory, misleading, and unfair.

Harvey's article distorts the message of school choice proponents and derails the chances of a meaningful public debate over the topic.

Note: Gary Houchens is associate professor in the Department of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research at the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

My thought and I welcome yours as well - is that these artificial attempts to draw the picture of school choice in absolutes are not helpful.  Many traditional public schools are doing great work for students; some are not - the results are mixed for traditional public schools and they are mixed for charter schools. As a person who got into education to do great things for kids - with no political agenda and no desire to hurt 'the system' .... I am deeply offended to be compared to Mao Zedong.