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Throughout
the
United States,
3,000 public charter schools have been created and
are operated by parents, teachers, and community
leaders. Free
many bureaucratic regulations, teachers can focus
on education, particularly the education of
at-risk students.
Evidence from around the country demonstrates that most
such schools work for the kids they are targeted
to help. Some
schools do not, and those schools should be
terminated.
But in Virginia,
only five charter schools exist.
Hamstrung by a law written to preserve
school system control, charter schools here are
less likely to be innovative and less likely to
operate the way other charters do.
As a consequence, they are more likely to
be terminated – even when they succeed in
educating children.
Take the
Blue
Ridge
Technical
Academy:
Housed in a leased building shared with a
consortium of more than a half-dozen
Shenandoah
Valley
colleges, it recently received its “Death
Notice” when the Roanoke City School Board cut
its budget.
With a higher percentage of minority and low-income
students than the city school system,
Blue
Ridge
Academy
exceeds the school division’s test scores in
Math, History and English, falling short only in
Science. Juniors must complete a 20-hour
“shadowing” program with a local business in
their career choice; seniors complete a 120-hour
internship. Offerings
include not only the “core subjects,” but also
education and training in both the technical and
health career fields. And small and personalized classes offer
hope for students who otherwise might well have
dropped
out.
A school like this normally would be considered a gem worth
saving and, in fact, its charter was renewed just
last fall.
So why is
Roanoke
pulling the rug out from under these students?
The simple reason is money. Instruction
and the cost of the leased classroom space costs
more than $8,000 per student at the 96-student
school. While
the school division claims instructional costs at
their traditional high schools are only $4,000 per
student, that figure seems belied by what is
reported to the state Department of Education:
$7,048 per student for instruction and
operations and maintenance.
Blue
Ridge
Technical
Academy
falls short by at least $100,000 a year.
And now that the school’s federal funding
has run out, the school is about to join the other
three Virginia charters that went out of business.
(Coincidentally, all of them closed after federal
funds ended, raising the very real question of
whether school divisions created charters just as
a grab for federal money.)
The
real problem is the way Virginia
treats charter schools.
In other states real charters
schools are given the flexibility to thrive and
are viewed as innovative educational entities; in
Virginia they are most often viewed as “just another
school” operated by the local school division.
In
a real charter school, the school would
seek out private funds from Day One. Blue
Ridge
Academy
did not. A real
charter school would build a strong parent group
from the beginning. Blue Ridge
did not until this year. A real charter school aggressively
markets for new students to fill more seats. Blue Ridge
Academy
took disciplinary referrals from the school
system. A real charter school seeks waivers from
expensive bureaucratic regulations costing money
and stifling creativity. Blue
Ridge
has no waivers. (In fact, not a single Virginia charter school has a waiver of any kind.)
Nor
did the School Board exercise its responsibilities
as a charter authorizer to ensure these things
were in place before approving the charter. That’s because
Virginia
educators think only in terms of traditional schools, and
seem unable to operate outside a “stove pipe”
management system in which public education can
only be delivered by the people already in charge.
The
result is the creation of charter schools in name
only, with all of the system burdens and little of
the support – but a conduit for money from the
federal government, and no incentive to act
differently.
The
problem at
Blue
Ridge
can hardly be laid at the foot of the current
leadership. The
relatively new School Board has replaced its
school superintendent, and is now faced with a
condemned athletic stadium and the discovery that
the school system hired 23 more teachers than it
had budgeted for.
The
difficulty didn’t start on this Board's watch
… but that’s no comfort to parents who saw
their children’s academic performance rise at Blue Ridge
Academy,
or for the students who found themselves in an
educational setting that worked for them.
The
answer may be to look to Richmond.
Although Gov. Mark Warner has supported
charter schools in his rhetoric, only two have
been created during his term of office, and his
state Department of Education has been passive in
fostering charter activity.
But
advocates can take heart in Warner’s recent
appointment of education innovator Andrew
Rotherham to the State Board of Education. Rotherham,
a change agent who helped midwife the federal
charter school law during the Clinton
Administration, and knows what it takes to get a
good school going.
In his remaining months in the Governor’s Mansion, Warner
should ask Rotherham to head a task force that
will energize the charter school movement in
Virginia, provide a real education to educators
about what charter schools can and should be, and
ensure that future schools are charters in more
than name only.
And then the Governor should do what it takes to save
Blue
Ridge Technical
Academy.
--
March 28, 2005
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