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It's hard to grade charter schools Education 2000: Reforming Schools for a New Century Saturday, September 02, 2000 By Carmen J. Lee, Post-Gazette Education Writer
Denise Mund has heard it all before.
The complaints about charter schools draining money from school districts.
The worries of charter school operators who can't find buildings for their schools, and when they do, can barely pay the rent.
The tension between school district officials who resent having to deal with charter schools and charter school organizers who don't want anyone standing in the way of their dreams.
But as a charter schools consultant for the Colorado Department of Education, Mund also has seen charter schools outpace comparable traditional public schools academically.
She's seen good relations between charter schools and local school districts lead to an exchange of ideas about curriculum and teacher training.
And since Colorado's charter school law passed in 1993, she's seen charter schools become such an accepted part of the state's educational landscape that some of the complaints -- which are familiar ones in Pennsylvania -- are starting to fade into the background.
"Our charter schools quite frankly are meeting the needs of the citizens, whether it's by providing choice or academic achievement," Mund said. "The schools have been successful."
Pennsylvania is just beginning its fourth year with charter schools -- a little too soon for experts to make judgment calls. Even in states where charter schools have become a staple of education, the reviews are far from definitive.
Part One: The high stakes of assessment testing
Part Three: Technology closes distance between teacher and student
Part Four: Is it safe home alone after school?
But no one can argue that charter schools continue to grow in popularity.
Nationally, more than 2,000 are expected to open this fall, up from about 1,687 during the past school year, according to the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit education reform advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Pennsylvania is expected to have about 65 charter schools this school year, compared to 47 last fall. Those numbers also represent a jump from 11,388 charter school students last year to 20,000 to 22,000 for the 2000-01 school year.
The numbers would be even higher, but some charters have been rejected by their local school boards. The state's Charter Appeal Board has heard about 20 appeals and has upheld about half.
Probably the most volatile issue with charter schools, at least in Pennsylvania, is the question of funding and the burden that can place on local districts.
Charter schools can receive federal start-up grants based on their enrollments, and many seek additional funds from foundations. But they are largely supported by the budgets of their local school districts, which must allocate the same amount to educate charter school students as they do for youngsters attending traditional public schools.
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia school officials have complained that charter schools were an added drain on their already financially strapped districts. Their primary argument has been that they are unable to reduce costs by cutting staff or other expenses even though some students are attending charter schools.
Their complaints received a boost when Wilkinsburg school officials blamed the cost of Thurgood Marshall Charter School for a 21-mill property tax increase the board approved in June. The increase brought the district's rate to 147.5 mills, highest in Allegheny County.
But charter school operators and advocates have pointed out that districts such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Wilkinsburg had financial problems before charter schools opened in their districts.
Some states such as Massachusetts are trying to address funding problems by phasing in the cost of charter schools to districts, said Bruno Manno, a senior fellow at the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation and co-author of the book "Charter Schools in Action."
Massachusetts, for example, requires districts initially to provide only a portion of their per-pupil allocations to charter schools while the state provides the rest, Manno said.
Over time, the districts have to give the charter schools the full allocation for each student. Phasing it in gives the districts time to adjust.
In Colorado, state officials recently changed the funding formula for charter schools to cover more of the costs.
Before July, the state provided charter schools with 80 to 100 percent of the state per-pupil allocation, Mund said. The schools then had to negotiate with their districts for remaining costs.
Under the new formula, Colorado covers 95 percent of each charter school's program including per-pupil, facilities and liability costs, Mund said.
The remaining 5 percent goes to the local school districts to cover administrative expenses, which often include the salary of a charter school liaison.
Schools evaluated
Pennsylvania charter schools are reviewed annually by their local school districts and must submit yearly reports to the districts and the state on goals, action plans and test scores.
Providing an added accountability check for state, district and charter school officials is Western Michigan University's Evaluation Center, which has a contract with the state to study Pennsylvania's charter schools.
Some charter school administrators and advocates object to city school officials' decision to conduct renewal evaluations of the city's first three charter schools -- Manchester Academic, Northside Urban Pathways and the Urban League of Pittsburgh -- in the next few months rather than later in the school year.
The three-year charters for those schools expire next year. "What good is the third year if you don't include it in the analysis?" asked Innocenzo "Chenzie" Grignano, director of Duquesne University's Charter School Project.
The contract for the city district's fourth charter school, Career Connections, doesn't end until 2002.
"There needs to be a process for including data from the last year of a charter, especially if you have a three-year charter," said Grignano. "The most significant developments could occur in the second and third year."
Phil Parr, the city district's new chief of staff whose responsibilities include overseeing the evaluation of charter schools, said the board has to make its renewal decisions early enough for charter school parents to know whether their children will have schools to attend next year.
The first statewide report on charter schools by Western Michigan's Evaluation Center was released this spring.
It included opinions from students, parents and teachers who were surveyed, but no state assessment test statistics. A second report that will include information about academic performance is expected this fall.
The schools have results of their own standardized tests, but because they take different ones, it's difficult to draw firm conclusions about students' progress.
For example, Manchester Academic on the North Side gave the Iowa Test of Basic Skills last school year and Thurgood Marshall gave the Standford Achievement Test. At both schools, younger pupils compared well with national averages, but the results declined for students in the higher grades.
At Career Connections in Lawrenceville, which had only ninth grade in the 1999-2000 school year, pretest and posttest results on the Metropolitan Achievement Test for individual students revealed significant academic improvement for many over the year; but in a number of cases the students were still performing below grade level.
Northside Urban Pathways students showed improved performance from the first year of the school to the past school year on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
And at the Urban League of Pittsburgh Charter School, students not enrolled in special education in grades one through four compared well with the national average in most cases on the TerraNova Multiple Assessments Test.
Those mixed results are typical in charter schools around the country.
Gary Miron, the principal lead researcher on the Western Michigan study of Pennsylvania's charter schools, maintains that so far, the body of research on charter schools does not show them as outperforming traditional public schools, though there are school-by-school cases of charters excelling.
Manno and officials with the Center for Education Reform have a different perspective and highlight the anecdoctal evidence of charter schools doing as well as or better than comparable regular public schools, particularly in states such as Colorado and California.
"It's easier for charter schools to have a clear sense of mission and a great deal of freedom to do what they need to do to make sure students achieve," Manno said.
Other states such as Arizona have charter schools with academic records ranging from very good to very bad, he added. He pointed out that Arizona has more than 300 charter schools, the most in the country, so more of a range is to be expected.
Information barrier
Besides giving families more educational choices, charter schools were touted as being laboratories from which traditional schools could learn and competition to spur other schools to do better.
It's unclear whether that's happening nationally or in Pennsylvania.
At a recent state education committee hearing on charter schools, former state Rep. Ron Cowell asserted that the state has no mechanism for determining whether charter schools have innovative programs or for collecting and disseminating information about such programs.
Large districts such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia might be able to collect that information on their own, said Cowell, president of the Education Policy and Leadership Center in Harrisburg. But smaller, poorer ones such as Wilkinsburg might not have the means.
Some charter schools have nontraditional methods of grading themselves or their students. At Northside Urban Pathways, no letter grades are used.
Youngsters' performance is judged by portfolios they must maintain and projects called exhibits they have to complete, revising them again and again until they meet standards.
Nationally and in Pennsylvania, educators and researchers cite only a few examples of educational programs that are truly unique. They include cyberschools, which allow students to take courses online and use other distance learning technology.
Otherwise, educators and researchers agree that many charter schools take educational programs that are already known and use them to a degree that traditional public schools can't, won't or must slowly phase in.
"There are some program innovations, but for the most part it's not a question of what [charter schools] are doing, but how they're doing it," said Dave DeSchryver of the Center for Education Reform.
"There's more rigor, more of a buy-in by staff, more of a dynamic atmosphere. They know that kids don't have to stay, so there's more of an urgency and a buy-in with a charter school."
At Career Connections Charter School, students are introduced early to the search for meaningful employment.
Sophomores Jaison Scott, 15, and Ryan Danowski, 14, said last year at Career Connections, they learned how to conduct themselves in job interviews and complete applications.
"They teach us how it is in the real world," Ryan said. "They will help you with your goals as you try to succeed."
Tomorrow: A look into the classroom of the future.
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