Choosing Diversity: How Charter Schools Promote Diverse Learning Models and Meet the Diverse Needs of Parents and Children

Choosing Diversity: How Charter Schools Promote Diverse Learning Models and Meet the Diverse Needs of Parents and Children by Lance Izumi

January 2019

ISBN 978-1-934276-39-6

ISBN 978-0-936488-06-6 (e-book)

Pacific Research Institute

101 Montgomery Street, Suite 1300

San Francisco, CA 94104

Tel: 415-989-0833

Fax: 415-989-2411

www.pacificresearch.org

Nothing contained in this report is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.

©2019 Pacific Research Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written consent of the publisher.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Charters for Children with the

Most Special Needs

Life Learning Academy

NYC Autism Charter School

Chapter Two: Diversity Within Diversity

Natomas Charter School

Classical Academy

Chapter Three: High-Tech Charters

Design Tech High School

Summit Shasta Public School

Chapter Four: Classical Charters

John Adams Academy

Mason Classical Academy

Photos of Schools Featured in this Book

Chapter Five: Meeting Needs in Rural America

Grimmway Academy Shafter

Chapter Six: Urban Charters—

Controversies from Coast to Coast

Magnolia Public Schools

Success Academy

Chapter Seven: Successful Urban Schools

Avondale Meadows Academy

DSST Public Schools

Conclusion

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About Pacific Research Institute

INTRODUCTION

"In my experience, people think, ‘Oh, all charter schools are the same.’ Nope, they’re not all the same. In fact, they’re quite a bit different. But a lot of people don’t know that. A classical charter school is far different than a STEM school. So, I think it’s important to really make sure the reader understands that not all charter schools are the same.

~ KELLY LICHTER

FOUNDER OF MASON

CLASSICAL ACADEMY

Introduction

KELLY LICHTER’S OBSERVATION is absolutely true and illuminates the reason for this book. In the ongoing debate over regular public schools versus public charter schools, an important distinction between the two types of schools is often overlooked: while most regular public schools are cookie-cutter imitations of each other, there is a wide diversity of learning models used by charter schools.

Over the years, proponents of charter schools have offered many reasons for the establishment of these independent public schools. Always key among these various reasons has been the concept of choice for parents and students, plus the diversity of educational experiences promoted by that ability to choose.

For example, the California Charter School Association’s definition of a charter school underscores the key elements of unique educational experiences and choice:

Charter schools are independent public schools with rigorous curriculum programs and unique educational approaches. In exchange for operational freedom and flexibility, charter schools are subject to higher levels of accountability than traditional public schools. Charter schools, which are tuition-free and open to all students, offer quality and choice in the public education system.¹

The landmark 1992 California legislation that established charter schools is among the oldest state charter school laws in the nation. It has influenced many subsequent charter school laws. Reading the California law, it is clear that choice and diversity of learning experiences is the raison d’etre of charter schools.

Increase learning opportunities, expanded learning experiences, different and innovative teaching methods, and expanded choices in the types of educational opportunities that are available are all phrases that are used in the text of the law that underscore how essential choice and diversity are as the foundation for charter schools.²

Yet, the discussion of charter schools often treats charter schools as a group. As a result, studies of student achievement often compare charter schools as a group versus regular public schools as a group. However, whereas regular public schools are more likely to be similar to each other in terms of curricula and teaching methodologies, charter schools, by definition, are not only different from traditional public schools, but also differ from each other. Grouping charters together, therefore, fails to recognize the diversity among charters that is their inherent characteristic.

In my 2005 Pacific Research Institute book Free to Learn, I examined a number of individual charter schools in California and found that these schools used a variety of educational models to improve student learning and meet the needs of diverse student populations. Much has changed since Free to Learn was published more than a dozen years ago, both in the charter school world and, more generally, in how educational services are delivered. This book profiles charter schools that epitomize this evolution.

While test scores on annual standardized tests in the core subjects are still one consideration, other issues must also be examined as parents and students exercise their freedom to choose the right school and learning program.

Take, for instance, Stacey, Noe, and Edgar, who are elementary school students at Grimmway Academy charter school in the small rural town of Shafter in Kern County, California. Each of these students had safety issues at their previous regular public school, ranging from bullying to shootings. Their parents chose Grimmway Academy largely because the school offered a safer learning environment for their children. Their stories will be told in greater detail in the book.

For many parents, non-test-score issues, such as school safety, can trump test-score performance when it comes to choosing any school, including choosing a charter school. That is why the title of this book is Choosing Diversity rather than Choosing by Test Scores.

Education policy analysts are coming to this conclusion when they judge the school-choice decisions of parents. Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, points out: . . . while researchers often look to test scores to determine school quality, parents do so to a far lesser extent. Parents prioritize school safety, while student performance on standardized tests is one of the least important factors parents cite.³

Doubt is now being cast on key aspects of current specific standardized tests being used by states to measure student performance.

The Smarter Balanced test, for instance, which is aligned to the Common Core national education standards and which is part of the testing program of more than a dozen states, including California, has been sharply criticized by experts. When it was initially rolled out in 2015, math education consultant Steve Rasmussen produced an analysis of the sample Smarter Balanced math questions and found that based on these questions the Smarter Balanced tests Violate the standards they are supposed to assess; cannot be adequately answered by students with the technology they are required to use; use confusing and hard-to-use interfaces; or are to be graded in such a way that incorrect answers are identified as correct and correct answers as incorrect.⁴ Even more troubling, according to other experts, is the fact that it is impossible to determine if the problems cited by Rasmussen were corrected because the test’s producers do not retire or release any items from past administrations, so neither students nor parents can actually examine the nature of the test for themselves.⁵

In their 2018 critique of the Smarter Balanced test published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Hoover research fellow and former U.S. assistant secretary of education Williamson Evers and former senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education Ze’ev Wurman blasted the test and the state of California’s implementation of the test on a variety of fronts:

When the state adopts a brand new test that has not been validated against external known benchmarks...when the test shows inexplicable unnatural trends and the test-maker does not address them; when test results show strong bias against populations that already have academic challenges...when the state removes our ability to track the success of our students in multiple grades under the new test...then we clearly have a problem of trust, and we currently are flying blind.⁶

Respected experts say we cannot trust this standardized test to tell us if it is truly measuring student performance fairly and validly. Consequently, basing evaluations of charter schools, for example, on the scores of such a test would be misleading and would misinform parents and the public. Thus, the charter schools included in this book, Choosing Diversity, includes both schools that have high test scores such as Success Academy in New York City, and also charter schools like Life Learning Academy, which has lower test scores, but which provides a safe environment and high graduation rates for students who the regular public schools cannot educate because of their extremely challenging backgrounds.

In the profile on Life Learning Academy, I feature Allan Pickens, an alumnus of the school, whose life, as we shall see, was turned around by Life Learning Academy and is now, ten years after he graduated, a success by all measures.

There are close to seven thousand charter schools in the United States enrolling more than three million students. More than one out of every twenty students in the country attends a charter school. Given the number and variety of charter schools across America, choosing the eleven charter schools to profile in this book was a subjective process based on my many years of experience in education policy analysis. That said, I believe that the charters in this book epitomize the diversity of charter schools across America.

Through interviews with students, teachers, and school leaders, plus on-site visits and the analysis of key documents, I was able to get an in-depth view of these charter schools, including their learning philosophies, teaching methods, curricula, goals, and indicators of success.

These schools are as different from each other as one could imagine, from geography to student populations to teaching methodologies to technology use to curricula. They exemplify the diversity that is at the heart of the charter school ideal, which is to meet the needs of each individual student.

CHAPTER ONE

Charters for Children with the Most Special Needs

"I was always the kid that was picked on the most so that always made me defensive . . . Every day, just ready. Ready for something to pop off, right? Like everything, like every single day. And generally, I got my wish, like every single day something would pop off . . . Yeah, it’s destroying myself. But I’m telling myself, I’m destroying other people. . .Then, I got my head on straight . . . you’re gonna have to come back to Earth. And what better place than a school called Life Learning Academy that’s going to teach you how to make it in the real world, because what you’re doing now ain’t gonna cut it.

~ ALLAN PICKENS

LIFE LEARNING ACADEMY

ALUMNUS

Charters for Children with the Most Special Needs

LIFE LEARNING ACADEMY

ALLAN PICKENS’S LIFE was in a downward spiral. Not only had there been constant physical conflicts in his school life, violence was claiming those he knew. The people in your life who are passing away because of either drugs or violence, he told me, they literally would be there one day and gone.

You know, I go to school, I’m fighting all day, I’m getting into it with people, I’m having all sorts of issues, he says. In response, he would eat out of depression: I used to eat out house and home, like I would tear the refrigerator down by myself, though back then I didn’t understand it.

I’m a black man, he says, so we have a lot of those ailments, the heart attacks, diabetes, stroke, things of that nature, but it had a mental effect. Pickens’s weight ballooned: Okay, 330 pounds would be a fair estimate.

Not only was his mental and physical health in crisis, he had stopped going to school. After three months out of his high school, he met with San Francisco school district staff, and one of them told him about the Life Learning Academy charter school.

One of the stock arguments made by opponents of charter schools is that charters cream higher performing students from the regular public school system, leaving lower achieving students for the regular public schools to educate. This claim is not only false on a macro level, it ignores the existence of charter schools, such as Life Learning Academy, that explicitly target the most difficult-to-educate students.

Many studies show that the cream of the crop argument is a myth. For example, a 2018 Arizona study found that the average student transferring from a regular public school to a charter school in 2015 performed below the state average on the state standardized exam in both math and English. In contrast, students transferring from charter schools to regular public schools were the higher performing students.¹

If there is a charter school that truly busts the creaming myth it is Life Learning Academy (LLA). Located on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, LLA is housed in very humble facilities that from the outside are indistinguishable from the many abandoned buildings on the