• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Charter Schools Lure Students Oakland District's Scrutiny Grows As Options Divert Resources

Posted on: Wednesday, 7 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By Alex Katz, STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND

WHEN the time came to enroll her daughter in kindergarten this year, Beth Deane entered the school district's lottery hoping to get her into a "good" school in another neighborhood.

That did not happen, so Deane did what a growing number of parents in Oakland and across the country are doing when they are not impressed with the neighborhood school -- she enrolled her daughter in a public charter school.

Deane's daughter now attends North Oakland Community Charter, a school that gives students more leeway to follow their own interests.

"Our daughter just comes home happy every day," Deane said. "It's quite an amazing little project they've got there."

Oakland has been fertile ground for the 12-year-old charter school movement.

Charters are public schools run independently by private organizations, usually nonprofits.

Supporters say charters can be more innovative than regular public schools and give them healthy competition. Plus, they allow parents to opt out if their neighborhood schools are not up to par.

But critics complain charters suck students and scarce resources away from the traditional city school system.

Oakland now has about 6,740 students attending 26 charter schools, seven of which opened this year.

Last week, two more charter school operators applied to Oakland schools State Administrator Randolph Ward for permission to open, bringing the total number of pendingcharter applications to eight, including two that want to focus on the science of space exploration.

Aside from one smaller city near San Diego, Oakland already has the state's highest percentage of students in charter schools, said Gary Larson, spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association.

Across the country, only a few other cities, such as Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., have a higher percentage of students in charters, Larson said.

"The reason is simple," Larson said. "It's because charter schools are working."

Charters tend to have smaller classes and more independence to come up with curricula that work for their students, supporters say.

On average, charters did slightly better than their traditional counterparts on test scores this year, Larson said.

Opponents say charter schools are being used to bust powerful teacher unions. Most charters in California, and all charters in Oakland, are nonunion. Some local union officials have contended charters are part of an attempt to "privatize" public education.

By all accounts, some Oakland charters are doing a good job. Others, not so good.

"The ones that exist now? There are some bad ones that should be closed," said Jorge Lopez, director of the Oakland Charter Academy, a middle school in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the city's most improved test scores this year.

Lopez said he has seen charter classrooms in chaos or without textbooks, and others where students are taught entirely in Spanish.

"There needs to be some quality review because some of these schools are crazy," Lopez said.

School board member Kerry Hamill said she is not persuaded by data on the performance of local charters.

"A lot of the academic programs in charters look very cookie- cutter," she said. "Two years after the board approves them you find the kids aren't doing any better, and it's no surprise."

State Administrator Ward said he has visited a number of local charters and has left "with varying degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction."

Ward said Oakland charters -- both the good and the bad -- are about to get more scrutiny.

The district hired an auditor last summer to comprehensively review individual charters. The company's first audit, of the University Preparatory Charter School in East Oakland, was recently finished. That audit isn't available yet.

Districts that grant charters to independent school operators are obligated by law to monitor the academic and financial progress of those schools and to ensure they are not breaking any laws.

The district can revoke charters after a lengthy process but cannot step in to fire individual principals or change school operations.

"As long as the school is operating within the law ... it's not in our authority to say, 'Gee, if it were my school I'd do it differently,' " said Liane Zimny, head of the district's charter school office.

The Oakland school board closed two problem-ridden charter schools about five years ago, and several schools have been warned to fix problems or face a similar fate, Zimny said.

Oakland teachers union President Ben Visnick said local charters have left regular public schools with fewer resources.

When the district converted Cox Elementary to a charter school this year to comply with mandates in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, it said goodbye to the $3.5 million that Cox's 685 students brought in from the state.

However, some of that money returned to the district in rent from the new charter school, Education for Change at Cox Elementary. The charter pays more than $300,000 a year to rent its campus in East Oakland, an official said.

Visnick has said charters can "cherry-pick" good students away from regular schools while refusing problem students or students in special-education classes.

"Charter schools are very much based on a free-market philosophy," Zimny said. "Parents are their customers. If the school's style or the school's results don't satisfy the parents, the parents are expected to leave the school, and the school will go out of business."

Source: Oakland Tribune

More News in this Category