The trouble with charter schools

California's 1992 Charter Schools Act, according to legislative intent, was supposed to improve learning, especially for students underserved by public schools; encourage innovative teaching methods; expand parental choice; and hold schools accountable for measurable pupil outcomes.

Unfortunately, the law has had little effect on public education. More than 900 charter schools now operate in California. Despite their growing numbers, there's been only glacial yearly improvement in statewide student test scores. The achievement gap separating students of color or low-income from white or wealthier classmates remains virtually unchanged.

The 17 charters in Escondido, San Marcos, Oceanside and Vista enroll 6,000 students, 9 percent of the area's public school enrollment. Half are enrolled at the three Classical Academies or at Guajome Park Academy.

Seventy-four percent of Classical Academy students and 40 percent of Guajome Park students are white, compared with 26 percent of the total enrollment in regular public schools in the four cities.

While 60 percent of the area's traditional public school students are economically disadvantaged, 13 to 21 percent of Classical Academies students are from low-income families, 42 percent of students attending Guajome Park.

The Charter Schools Act allows parents a choice of public schools at no extra cost. So why don't more low-income families choose charters?

Maybe it's because of the home schooling requirement of most North County charters. Low-income families are more likely to be single-parent homes or dependent on both parents working full time. Many parents also may lack the formal education or English language fluency required to home school their children.

Do North County's charter schools provide a measurably better education? Not when it comes to mathematics, particularly in algebra, the gateway course for preparing students for college and jobs that pay well.

The number of eighth-graders testing proficient in Algebra I on 2010 California Standards Tests ranges from 15 to 31 percent in the Classical Academies. It's just 27 percent at Guajome Park.

By comparison, in the San Marcos Unified School District it's 68 percent. In Vista, Escondido and Oceanside it's 60 percent, 52 percent and 41 percent respectively.

Only Escondido's Heritage Charter, at 75 percent, and Charter High School, at 55 percent, have higher algebra proficiency rates than the area's other public schools. Neither requires home schooling.

A 2009 Stanford University study found that reading and math gains of California charter school students were either mixed or no different from their peers in traditional public schools.

Which North County schools live up to the lofty goals of the Charter Schools Act? You’ll find the answer by comparing their student test scores by family income and ethnicity with those of similar students attending your local district’s other public schools.

A Tale of Two Cities

For San Diego's North County Times

Carlsbad City Council members nearly broke their arms patting themselves on the back after hearing a report on the results of the city's annual public opinion survey at its Feb. 8 meeting. The only council member to give credit where it was due ---- to city employees ---- was Ann Kulchin, who gushed, "This is your report card. As a parent I feel like I'd like to take you all out for an ice cream cone."

Councilman Packard confessed to having been one of the 1,000 residents whose opinions were sampled by telephone. After assuring the council he had identified himself to the caller, he crowed, "I did my very best to skew the numbers as high as I could."

The only slight sprinkle on the evening's parade of self-congratulations came from resident Diane Nygaard, representing the Preserve Calavera group, who reminded the council of the vote on Proposition C nine years ago to use city funds to acquire more open space. No additional natural lands have been acquired since the measure was passed.

Freshman council member Farrah Douglas made open-space acquisition a key part of her successful campaign last year. So it was disappointing to hear her only comment on the public opinion survey. She said it proved Carlsbad was another Lake Wobegon, an imaginary city where all the men are strong, all the women good looking and all the children above average.

Mayor Matt Hall promised to use the survey results to help Carlsbad continue to improve. It's hard to see room for improvement when 92 percent of those surveyed say they're already satisfied.

But if the council is serious about using survey results for city planning, it must look beyond the impressive overall approval rate. Survey responses by ZIP code reveal a tale of two cities, rather than a North County Lake Wobegon.

The lowest median household income of city residents, $59,000, as well as half the city's Latino population, can be found in the 92008 northwest quadrant. The highest median income, $84,000, and only 20 percent of Latinos, live in the 92009 southeast quadrant.

Why are fewer 92008 residents of the Village/downtown (83%) satisfied with city services than those in Calavera/Calavera Hills, Aviara and La Costa/La Costa Canyon/La Costa Oaks (93 to 97 percent)?

Why do residents living in both 92008 and 92009 lead the other ZIP codes in giving the city's "sense of community" a "low" rating (92008: 13 percent; 92009: 16 percent; 92010: 6 percent; 92011: 9 percent)?

Carlsbad can take pride in its remarkable public satisfaction rate overall. But only when the approval rate and sense of community are more equally shared across all neighborhoods, regardless of income and ethnicity, will city officials really have something to crow about.

Teacher Unions Don't Cause Schools to Fail

For San Diego's North County Times

The steady drumbeat of criticism leveled at public employee unions has become both tiresome and troubling. Tiresome because of the mindless cliches: Public worker jobs are "cushy," their paychecks "fat," their pensions "bloated," and their bonuses "hefty." Teachers are said to be greedy and self-serving, caring more about their own job security, pay and benefits than student learning. It's troubling because the overblown rhetoric makes it harder for people of good will to work together on common problems.

We can't blame unions for the greed, stupidity and shortsightedness that led to our financial woes. Mortgage industry executives, government regulators and our elected leaders had the power to prevent the meltdown.
Comparing North County city budgets and school test scores, it's hard to understand why unions get such a bad rap.

Carlsbad prospers, while Oceanside, Vista and Escondido face cuts to public services. All have strong public employee unions that are now under assault by city officials, either for threatening future prosperity, in Carlsbad's case, or for not bailing out the budgets of the other three. If unions are the problem, you have to wonder why Carlsbad has been left unscathed.

While several schools in Vista and Escondido are threatened with state sanctions because of low test scores, Carlsbad, San Dieguito and Poway schools face none. If unions are spreading an epidemic of failing schools, why are some schools immune?

Unions are blamed for denying administrators the right to lay off teachers based on merit rather than seniority. Good teaching is assumed to be easily recognized, and that experience cannot be trusted as a reliable measure.

Teaching success, like student learning, can be assessed in multiple ways. It's not possible to rank teachers precisely on their effectiveness. When budget shortfalls require layoffs, administrators could take into account the cost of retaining experienced, highly paid teachers, regardless of their effectiveness. Speaking from personal experience, I know I was a far better teacher in my fifth year than my first.

My beef with administrators arises when they hire and award tenure to ineffective teachers, removing students from their classrooms when parents complain. That's an administrative failure, not a matter of union obstruction.

I've never been a union member, but having worked with unions as a state university administrator, I learned that complaints about their obstructiveness were often related to a manager's failure to treat staff members fairly and openly when making tough personnel decisions.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently convened a meeting of school officials and union leaders from across the country to consider how management and labor can develop strong partnerships to improve student learning.

A good start would be to stop the name-calling.

Charter School Test Scores Tell Real Story

Is competition the key to improving our public schools? If a business doesn't deliver on its promises, shoppers go elsewhere. If they don't return, it closes its doors.

That's how No Child Left Behind was designed. In education's survival of the fittest, schools with chronically low test scores face sanctions ranging from allowing parents to take their children elsewhere to closure.

Our 10-year obsession with test scores has resulted only in glacial-speed improvement. All students were supposed to be at grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014. At California's annual rate of test score increases, white students will be fully proficient by 2025, Latinos and blacks by 2030.

Competition among schools has been promoted on this newspaper's opinion page. A recent editorial cartoon depicted an elephant named "Vista School District," emitting a cowardly "Eeek!" as it perches on a chair opposite a teacher pointing to the words "Charter success" written on a Classical Academies blackboard.

If pictures are worth a thousand words, this one needed another three hundred. Its companion editorial criticized Vista school administrators for resisting an Escondido charter school's plan to set up shop in their district.

The cartoon suggests charter schools are better than other public schools. The editorial says students should be allowed to vote with their feet to find better schools. Neither compared the test scores held sacred as quality indicators by the California Department of Education.

Here's what they left out.

Seventy-seven percent of the Escondido charter school's students are white; one is an English Language Learner. In the Vista school district, 30 percent of grade-schoolers are white, 30 percent are English Language Learners.

Here's a small sample of the 2010 California Standards test scores report, comparing the charter school's predominantly white enrollment with the 5,000 white students enrolled in Vista's elementary schools.
In eighth-grade English language arts, 76 percent of charter school students were proficient at or above grade level, compared to 81 percent of the comparable Vista subgroup.

In mathematics, 31 percent of Classical Academy eighth-graders were proficient in Algebra I, compared to 72 percent of white Vista students.

National studies have shown that charter school test scores are generally no better than those of other public schools.

California's academic performance indicator for Escondido's Classical Academy ranks it above 80 percent of other California schools. But it ranks above only 20 percent of schools with similar student populations.
The Classical Academy's ability to attract students is evidently unrelated to competitive test scores, which is the only way we measure a school's success under No Child Left Behind.

RICHARD RIEHL is a Carlsbad resident. Contact him at fogcutter1@yahoo.com.

Carlsbad Going Back to the Future?

As neighboring cities in North County struggle with budget cuts and fee increases for public services, Carlsbad’s city council members spent the lion’s share of their January 25th meeting listening to a proposal to set aside $4 million to redevelop its downtown.

Gary Nessim, Vice President of the Carlsbad Village Association, laid out a plan that would create a pedestrian promenade the entire length of Grand Avenue, from City Hall to the beach. Mayor Matt Hall and Councilmember Mark Packard excused themselves from the discussion since they both own property in the area to be developed.

The presentation reminded me of my seven years in the Midwest. My wife and I, both west coasters in our early years, relished our afternoon drives on weekends in search of small towns that flourished many years ago. Each had a town square, dominated by a City Hall protected by a couple of Civil War era cannons, and surrounded by a drugstore, a department store, some specialty shops, a restaurant and a gas station. They’re sad scenes today. Boarded up windows replace bustling streets as their main feature.

The words “back to the future” came to mind as Nessim described a future Grand Promenade, linking City Hall to the heart of the downtown district, creating a bustling central gathering place for residents and visitors alike.

Grand Avenue would be reduced to two lanes of traffic, bordered by two bike lanes, and no curbside parking. Several multi-level parking garages, above and below ground, would provide an ample supply of downtown parking.

A 53-foot wide pedestrian walkway would feature outdoor art shows, access to the farmer’s market, sidewalk dining and major city events, like car shows, that would no longer require closing other city streets.
Nessim observed that recent development plans for downtown have consisted entirely of residential townhomes. He warned that if the downtown becomes primarily residential town homes with very little retail/commercial you’ll never get the bustling downtown that attracts visitors as well as locals. He pointed to downtown Santa Monica as a glimpse of what Carlsbad’s Grand Promenade could be.

Downtown businesses like the idea, according to Nessim. He’s spoken with all of them on Grand Avenue and estimated 95 percent of them have expressed support for it.

When Nessim suggested the project could be completed in a year, but that the approval process might take five years, Mayor Pro-Tem Anne Kulchin quipped, “Gary, I don’t think even God could do it in a year.”
The council listened politely to the presentation. Kulchin said she liked the plan and “we should talk with some more people about it,” before we simply thank Nessim and say goodbye. When Mayor Hall returned to his seat he said he’d been listening to the presentation “from afar,” declared it a great presentation and “a lot to stretch your mind around.”

The Carlsbad Village Association is asking that $4 million be put into the capital improvement budget to move ahead with the plan and to appoint a Village Planning and Study Group to coordinate plans with all stakeholders.

The council gave lip service support to the vision for downtown redevelopment but took no action. Here’s hoping it will soon appear as an action item on the council’s meeting agenda. I don’t think we want boarded up shop windows to be Carlsbad’s only legacy of smart growth.

Research on colleges flawed

For San Diego's North County Times

At a time of year when high school seniors and their parents are stressed out over whether they'll get into their first-choice college and whether they can afford it if they do, a story by Associated Press writer Eric Gorski about how little students learn in college is extraordinarily ill-timed and irresponsible.

It's especially unfortunate the article landed on the front page of the North County Times ("Study finds that students learn little in college," Jan. 19) with a 2008 file photo of Cal State San Marcos students, as if the story were about them.

Full disclosure: I spent the last seven years of my 30-year career in higher education as an admissions and records administrator at CSUSM.

The article reported findings of a research study, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. It followed 2,300 undergraduates at 24 unnamed colleges and universities and found that 45 percent of them showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their second year, 36 percent by the end of their fourth year.

That means half of undergraduates showed significant improvement after two years and nearly two-thirds after their senior year. Of course, the headline, "Most students learn a lot in college," wouldn't appear anywhere near the front page.

Among other findings the researchers found appalling were that half the students did not take a course requiring 20 pages of writing their prior semester and a third did not take a course requiring 40 pages of reading per week. Which means half took a course requiring at least 20 pages of writing and two-thirds a course requiring at least 40 pages of reading per week. At Cal State San Marcos every student must write at least 2,500 words in every course.

The researchers found that those attending more selective schools majoring in traditional arts and sciences majors posted the greatest learning gains. That finding should come as no surprise. The authors earned their undergraduate degrees at Tufts University and Mount Holyoke College.

They blame students who seek easy courses and don't study, as well as a college culture that values research over good teaching. Those were the same complaints I heard when I graduated from high school a half-century ago.

What high school graduates and their parents need to hear about is the research revealing college choice does not determine your success in life, and that the more education you have the more money you'll earn over a lifetime. College degrees are worth a million dollars more than a high school diploma.

Test scores don't tell the whole story

For San Diego's North County Times

Last August, we learned that California students scored a two-percentage-point increase in grade level proficiency in mathematics and English on the California Standards Tests (STARS). Now, 52 percent of our kids are proficient in English, 48 percent in math.

At the average rate of improvement over the last seven years, all students should be proficient by about 2025. The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was to raise all children to proficiency by the 2013-14 school year. The gap separating students by ethnicity has barely budged.

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek recently compared the test scores of students worldwide who are most likely to get the best jobs in the future. As reported by the Atlantic's Amanda Ripley ("Your Child Left Behind," Dec. 2010), U.S. 15-year-olds lag far behind their peers in about 30 other countries in advanced level proficiency in mathematics. California's 4.6 percent falls short of the 6 percent national average, as well that of 34 other states.

While State Superintendent Jack O'Connell boasts of annual two to three-point test score increases, the fact that more than half of California students are unable to reach grade level in math after seven years of No Child Left Behind is alarming in the world's increasingly competitive job market.

A closer look at the August 2010 STARS results raises even more concerns about the ability of our local students to compete for jobs requiring increasingly stronger technical skills.

Algebra is a gateway subject, not only for success in college, but for occupations that may not require a college degree but call for abstract reasoning skills beyond basic arithmetic for jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

A small sample of North County school district scores shows the usual: The haves do better than the have-nots. But even in Carlsbad, with a median household income of $101,000, only 48 percent of students are proficient in Algebra I. In Vista and Oceanside, with household incomes of $68,000 and $69,000, just 35 and 36 percent are at grade level or higher.

Hanushek points to Massachusetts, the state with the highest scores, as an example of how reform has led to improvement. Meaningful outcomes are demanded from everyone in the school building ---- students, teachers and administrators.

The Stanford economist acknowledges the common "diversity excuse" for poor academic performance. "All these immigrants are dragging us down," they say, "but our kids are doing fine." People will find it quite shocking, according to Hanushek, that "even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive."

That should be a wake-up call for all of us, regardless of our ethnicity or family income.