Charters, districts air conflicts
Rent subsidies are potential solution
The ability to get a suitable facility in a predictable time frame continues to pose the biggest obstacle to the growth of charter schools in California and an impediment to their high achievement. For many school districts, the requirement to provide those facilities can be a big headache.
Proposition 39, passed in 2000, implemented in 2003 and clarified by regulations two years ago, was supposed to solve charters’ buildings problems. It requires that districts provide charter schools with facilities serving all students from the district that are “reasonably equivalent” to other district schools.
But conflicts remain, and there has been more lawsuits over Prop 39 than over all other charter-related legal issues combined, says Eric Premack, founder and director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento.
On Tuesday, continuing a dialogue that developed earlier this year, Santa Clara County Office of Education trustees brought charter school leaders and district administrators together to share one another’s dilemmas and search for common ground on Prop 39.
Some of the talk may have been Pollyannish. The power is asymmetrical; districts are in control. Anti-charter trustees and superintendents will continue to use Prop 39 to harass and ward off charter schools. But assuming there is good will – or at least a commitment to follow state law – there may be creative approaches and actions at the state level that can work for both districts and charters.
- Negotiating long-term leases. Districts are obligated to offer facilities annually. But the process is time-consuming for districts and unsettling for charters, which don’t know with certainty where they’ll be located. Some districts have intentionally sent charters from pillar to post.
Districts’ space needs do change, and they need flexibility. But both sides can benefit from nailing down a long-term lease with future limits on enrollment. And high-performing charters merit stability. KIPP Heartwood Academy, one of 21 California schools honored this year as a federal Blue Ribbon school, has been operating for years on a year to year basis in Alum Rock Union in San Jose. It deserves better treatment. So do other charters. (Correction: Late last year, Alum Rock granted KIPP Heartwood a 4-year lease; the charter school, which has a long wait list, had requested a 30-year lease. It is planning to open a second middle school in San Jose in the fall of 2012.
- Settling terms earlier. The time frame for negotiating facilities was tightened two years ago. But the process of negotiating doesn’t start until November, and districts don’t have to make a final offer of space until April. That’s late for parents who are considering where to send their children. The entire process should be moved up at least two months.
- Mandating mediation. Charters still unhappy over the facilities they’ve been offered can seek non-binding mediation. But, with districts having so much control, the process should be required and be made binding.
- Prorating bond proceeds to charters. San Jose Unified, Los Angeles Unified, to an extent, and a few other districts have set aside a portion of construction bonds proportionate to the percentage of charter school students in the district. But most districts exclude charters from parcel taxes and bond measures. The Legislature should require them to set aside bond proceeds. And districts should apply bond proceeds to empty land so that charters can build on those sites.
- Including charters in long-term planning for facilities.
Working through conflicts
There are many sources of tension between charters and districts over facilities. Some charters overproject how much space and how many students they will serve. Some districts want to rent out as many unused buildings as they can, and, with cuts in revenue, who can blame them? But they still have an obligation to provide free space to charters serving district students. They can, however, charge charter schools for facilities for out-of-district students. Charter schools will have to get used to paying rent for that portion of their student body.
Co-locating charters and district schools at the same site can result in problems and clashes in culture. One solution, even in tough times, is for the state Legislature to increase lease subsidies to districts that don’t pursue Prop 39 requests. Under SB 740, passed a few years ago, the state pays up to $750 per student for lease payments to charter schools serving at least 70 percent low-income students. The state has allocated only $15 million; if it boosted the payments, more charters could take advantage and find facilities away from districts. Palo Alto-based Rocketship Education has used the program creatively to build its own schools, leasing them from a separate non-profit that owns the land and builds schools.
Sometimes conflicts and mistrust from the charter application and appeals process, can spill over to a facilities request. If both sides could put aside their animosity and forthrightly comply with voters’ will in passing Prop 39, children would be better served.
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“The power is asymmetrical” in more than one way.
A lot of charter schools in Santa Clara County are chartered by the County…. yet attached to a local district when it comes to attendance, monies and facilities. That’s a good recipe for conflict right there.
I also results in a host of public accountability issues when it comes to sharing district facilities, local bonds or local parcel tax proceeds with entities that don’t answer to the local community. (In addition, most charter school boards are not elected but simply co-opted without even a residence requirement.)
Maybe the law and the rules ought to be changed; so that as a result of a successful appeal to the County (or the State), a local charter school is automatically chartered by the local district rather than by the County?
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Ah, vigorous competition (EC 47601(g)).
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I really suspect that giving parents more power to create educational choices for their children and scrapping high stakes testing for teachers would provide the incentives needed to work out these types of problems.
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John, you state this flatly as God’s received wisdom, and it needs to be qualified as your opinion — and challenged:
“The power is asymmetrical; districts are in control. Anti-charter trustees and superintendents will continue to use Prop 39 to harass and ward off charter schools.”
In reality, as you know, if a district BOE turns down a charter proposal, and the would-be charter operator takes the proposal to the county BOE, the county may or may not approve. (Caveat: Here in San Francisco, the district and the county BOE are one and the same, but I believe this is unique in California.)
But then — if the proposal goes to the state Board of Ed, that board is stacked with charter advocates, and would reject only an obviously disastrous proposal. That almost-guaranteed SBOE approval means the charter can open within the geographical boundaries of a school district even if the district BOE (and the citizenry) oppose it. And if the charter woos away district students, the state funding goes with them.
So how is it that, you say, the district “is in control”?
In addition, as I keep pointing out in my broken-record-like way, outside forces such as newspaper editorial boards (while they still exist) continually beat up on school boards and, yes, harass them to approve charters against their better judgment. School board members, who are regular human beings like you and me, ARE susceptible to that kind of pressure.
Being regular human beings like you and me, school board members would also (I submit) tend to be positively inclined toward charter schools if they had reason to believe that charter schools were beneficial to their district. Let’s say that a school board has approved a charter called, hypothetically, “Edison Charter Academy.” If Edison Charter Academy were a success and had a positive impact on its students and on the school district, school board members of sincerity and good will would be inclined to cheer Edison Charter Academy and support its continued existence, wouldn’t they? But what about school board members who lack sincerity and good will but rather care only about their own interests? Well, wouldn’t they happily take credit for their smart decision in approving Edison Charter Academy, and bask in the glory, and probably look for more Edison Charter Schools to approve, so they could take still more credit?
The script that hostile school boards want to get rid of successful charter schools never has held water.
In other words, it actually doesn’t make sense, if you think it through, to assume that school boards are itching to “harass” charter schools because of their own biases or other unsavory motives. Editorial boards and other charter cheerleaders have mindlessly and unquestioningly promoted that view for years, but it really does a disservice to everyone — including students — to continue to be mindless and unquestioning about it.
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Caroline: Your analogy of the broken record is apt, because you cling to an outdated analog — and ill-informed — view of charter schools. Come to San Jose, and I will take you on a tour of effective, high-achieving charter schools that local school boards — San Jose Unified, Alum Rock, East Side Union — rejected, despite valid and often impressive charter proposals, for reasons that had nothing to do with the charter law. Districts didn’t like the competition or feared a financial impact (legitimate concern but not a valid reason for denial), or worried about getting grief from the local teachers union. Or we can go to Oakland and Los Angeles, where there is a slew of high-performing charter schools with long wait lists.
Thank goodness there is an appeals process through the county and the State Board of Education. Otherwise, parents would be stuck with no alternatives. You are right that charter advocates are on the State Board, including President Ted Mitchell, who is CEO of the philanthropy NewSchools Venture Fund, which underwrites charters nationwide; Ben Austin, executive director of the Los Angeles Parents Union; and Yvonne Chan, principal of the charter school Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Los Angeles. But you then wrongly assume that they rubber-stamp charter proposals on appeal. You don’t need to convince them that lousy charter schools hurt the reputation of good charter schools and harm kids. Here are the facts from a State Board of Education agenda: “Since 1992, 75 charter petition appeals have been submitted to the SBE for consideration. Of these 75, the SBE approved 32 petitions, 28 petitions were withdrawn by the petitioners prior to formal consideration by the SBE, the SBE denied 11 petitions, the SBE did not take formal action on 3 petitions, and 1 petition is before the SBE at the September 2010 meeting.” The approval rate was 42 percent. In many cases, petitioners knew their charter proposal would be denied and withdrew it.
I’ll stand by my assertion that many districts play games with Prop 39; it’s not my opinion. It’s based on observation, interviews and following litigation decided on behalf of charter schools.
I’m not saying that districts don’t have serious problems in parceling out space. But they have the keys to the buildings, and some districts — how else to put it — jerk charter schools around.
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The county (or the state)’’s role should be just like an appeals court. It should settle the dispute (in this case, accept or reject the charter school) and gets both parties to abide by its ruling; end of story.
I simply don’t get why a county would ever get in the business of chartering schools themselves; it doesn’t provide the funding, doesn’t raise any funds for facilities and takes financial oversight away from the local community (voters and taxpayers).
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You were the one who referred to me as a broken record in response to a previous post. I refer to it to forestall repeated disparagement.
You certainly have every right to disagree with me, and there are plenty of names you could credibly call me (though it’s not very gentlemanly or professional to call anyone names) — but I truly don’t think you can call me ill-informed. I’ve been following charter schools closely for many years, albeit just as an unpaid amateur volunteer mommy. I’m the one who researched and blogged about attrition at California KIPP schools when the entire local and national education press had “forgotten” to look up those statistics — Jay Mathews cited my research in the Post and in his book about KIPP. (The SRI International study that resoundingly confirmed my findings was released a while later and had obviously been under way while I was doing my research.)
Of course there are high-achieving charter schools, and there are complexities. For example, take the state-chartered, stellar, top-achieving Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz. It’s famously a Mexican-free zone in a heavily Latino district. Its test scores are fabulous; yet as I understand it, the district’s issue with the proposal was the segregationist nature of the school, and it’s impossible to dispute that the district was correct about that.
Oakland has a few super-high-performing charter schools, but they are chartered by Oakland Unified, so those aren’t really valid examples. As I’ve posted, Jerry Brown’s two charter schools, which are state-chartered, have struggled badly and would have collapsed long ago if it weren’t for his dogged support and relentless fund-raising for them.
Charter school battles with public schools over space are not limited to California. I follow charter issues nationally as part of being so ill-informed, and so I know it’s an explosive issue in New York City.
You say you’ll stand by your assertion that “many districts play games with Prop 39.” My response is that that wasn’t your original assertion. What you said and what I disputed was that “districts are in control.”
Your view that “many districts play games” absolutely IS your opinion, even though it is it based on “observation, interviews and following litigation decided on behalf of charter schools.” In rebuttal, my opinion is that most school board members are trying to do the best job possible in setting policy for their school districts, sometimes under extreme pressure from charter operators and their demands for facilities. Why is your opinion “not… opinion” and mine “ill-informed”? If yours were really so well-founded, you wouldn’t need to disparage opposing views in such a disrespectful manner.
The issue here is that Educated Guess is promoting pro-charter, pro-education “reform” propaganda, and you simply can’t then turn around and claim that you’re just stating fact. It’s fine to have an opinionated blog, but it’s not honest or ethical to pretend that it’s impartial.
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