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Back to School 2001: Charter schools prove a 'mixed bag'
Sunday, September 02, 2001 By Carmen J. Lee, Post-Gazette Education Writer
Urban League of Pittsburgh Charter School officials would like the school's student body to look more like the integrated East End neighborhoods around the school.
They've advertised for students in local media and on the Internet. They've sent out brochures to nearby homes.
Though the school has never tried to position itself as a charter school for black children only, that's what has happened.
"With all of that, [non-African American students] just don't come," said Janet Bell, chief administrative officer of the Urban League school. "They don't choose to come."
A Western Michigan University study released early this year found that 80 percent of Pennsylvania's charter school students are nonwhite. Nationally, that figure is close to 52 percent.
And the Western Michigan study and others have found less-than-stellar test scores among youngsters at a number of charter schools.
Such results run counter to initial predictions of what critics call "creaming," in which only students from affluent areas choose to enroll. That phenomenon accompanied the openings of charter schools across the country.
Now, as they survey the charter school landscape, critics complain that the schools have failed to live up to their promises of achievement and innovation while spurring integration.
Charter school supporters counter that the schools are no worse than traditional public schools with their mix of good, bad and mediocre. They insist that charter schools provide educational choices to families, particularly for low-income, urban youngsters whose options had been limited.
"Middle- and upper-class families have always had choices. They move to better school districts or place their children in private school," said Pearl Kane, associate professor in the organization and leadership department at Columbia University's Teachers College.
"They haven't been as attracted to charters because their students are doing reasonably well in school, and they're unlikely to take them out for something too experimental.
"But for parents who are more discontented, they're willing to take advantage of the opportunities charter schools offer because they now have choices they didn't have before."
Also, because many charter schools across the country opened in urban areas, including a number of Pennsylvania's 78 charter schools, their students are more likely to be minority and/or lower income, Kane and other experts said.
Of the four existing charter schools in Pittsburgh, three -- Urban League, Manchester Academic and Northside Urban Pathways -- have predominantly black student enrollments with many of the students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of low family income.
At the fourth, Career Connections Charter School in Lawrenceville, the student population is about 65 percent white, 30 percent black and 5 percent Asian. But here, too, the majority of the youngsters, about 70 percent, come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, director of education and career development Joseph Yavorka said.
He and the Urban League school's Bell said local families chose their schools because they believe they offer their children the safe atmosphere, smaller classes, individual attention and unique educational programs they weren't finding in regular public schools.
"We're not getting the creme de la creme. Eighty percent were below grade level," Yavorka said. "We taught them the value of education."
Meanwhile, student performance at Pittsburgh charter schools has been mediocre. (Career Connections and the Urban League charter schools did not have students in the grade levels who were given the state exams in 2000, so they could not be compared with other city schools.)
The results for Northside Urban Pathways were about average, with state math scores the third-highest among city high schools but reading results falling in the middle. Manchester Academic, on the other hand, had among the city's worst elementary results on the state tests.
Officials at all the schools, however, cite scores from national standardized tests showing significant improvement or exceptional performance among some or many of their youngsters.
The Western Michigan study's findings that Pennsylvania's regular public schools outperformed charter schools on state tests appeared to bolster the contention of critics that charter schools aren't raising academic standards.
"If these charters were regular public schools, or if they were treated as a single school district, they would qualify for the education empowerment list," Patsy Tallarico, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, told the state Senate Education Committee after the Western Michigan study was released this spring.
He was referring to the designation for failing school districts under the state's empowerment act. Such districts must improve within three years or face a state takeover.
"Charter schools are a failure," said Albert Fondy, president of the Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania federations of teachers. "They just have a lot problems, particularly with stability. ... They may have appeal because people feel they're safe and they offer after-school custodial care. But that doesn't mean they're educationally superior."
The Ridge administration has countered that Pennsylvania charter schools' performance results were due to their attracting a number of low-performing students who wanted to improve their education. State education officials also pointed to the large gains some charter school youngsters have made on state and national exams.
Federal education officials maintain that despite the proliferation of studies on charter schools, there are none that offer any comprehensive or conclusive findings about academic performance.
"By its very nature, the charter school movement is dynamic and growing," said Lindsay Kozberg, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education. "Charter schools offer an alternative and not all alternatives are going to be perfect. A lot of children arrive at the schools with challenges based on their backgrounds."
Gregory Henschel, a senior policy analyst with the federal education department, said a charter school performance study the department is working on for release later this year would avoid making generalizations about the schools.
Instead of spending millions of dollars to look at all the country's more than 2,000 charter schools or a large representative sample, federal officials are examining charter schools that did well and those that didn't. Then, they'll determine what should or shouldn't be done to ensure that charters are successful.
Still, groups such as the National Education Association and the National School Boards Association say that in the nearly 10 years since the first charter schools opened, they've seen enough to believe that charter schools haven't proved they're better than regular public schools, despite their popularity with some families and despite the flaws of traditional school systems.
"I don't think anybody in education would say our public schools are serving minority children as well as they should and it's not surprising that some minority parents have turned to charter schools," said Deanna Duby, an NEA senior policy analyst. "But parent satisfaction doesn't always reflect whether a school is doing a good job. ... Do they have good teachers and enough resources? Are we monitoring them? Are we making them accountable?"
Paul Houston, executive director for the American Association of School Administrators, agreed that improved monitoring of charter schools was needed.
"Sometimes it takes awhile for parents to realize what they've gotten into," Houston said. "I think charter schools are going to be around and they're going to have their ups and downs. But they bear watching, and some states ought to re-examine their laws so they can tighten up on things that have been causing problems."
Tomorrow: Quaker Valley School District takes the first steps toward all digital, all the time.
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