AK: Can The State Force District To OK Charter?

The Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board has made some charter fans big mad, and now the courts will be involved.

FNSBSD last fall dealt with a request to open a charter school in the district, to be the Pearl Creek Steam Charter School. The board voted unanimously to deny the request. They had plenty of reasons-- 52 pages worth, in fact. Those reason included a lack of a facility plan, lack of a clear enrollment projection, a mess of a contract, no transportation plan, an inadequate instructional plan that doesn't fully address state standards, no student lunch plan, no professional development plan, an admission plan that is probably illegal, an error-filled and incomplete budget, and the fact that this would have a big financial impact on the district. FNSBSD has already been closing schools to deal with dropping enrollment and funding. "Hey, the district is financially strapped, so let's open a new building," said no responsible school board ever. The Pearl Creek proposal is to reopen one of the closed schools as a charter school.

Also, said the FNSBSD board, this school is probably going to fail. "The plans in the application do not demonstrate likelihood of success," is how the board put it. Again, 52 pages of details covering the above.

The charter crew offers an estimate of $830,000 cost to the district. The district COO says it's more like $2.8 million. Coverage of the "controversy" has been extensive, especially from reporters Patrick Gilchrist and Shyler Umphenour at KUAC and Corinne Smith at the Alaska Beacon.

But Governor Mike Dunleavy would really like to see more charters, and so would Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, and so would the Dunleavy-appointed members of the Alaska State Board of Education, which has the power to overrule local school boards.

So in April, the state board went ahead and approved the charter over the objections and explanations of the duly-elected local school board. The state board declared that, essentially, the charter board had filled out all the paperwork, and that was good enough. Took them a whole fifteen pages to say it.

Bobby Burgess, the president of the FNSBSD Board of Education, had a comment for KUAC.

“Basically, my read of the state’s decision is that, if the application is filled out in full, the contents don’t really matter, even if the plan described is impossible to execute,” Burgess said. “It kind of seems like a lower standard than we hold students to on homework assignments.”

Cue the lawyers. The district appealed the state board decision. The charter board filed a civil lawsuit with request for a preliminary injunction in state Superior Court to force the district to sign the charter and get the building re-opened and ready. Last week Superior Court Judge Kirk Schwalm in Fairbanks denied the charter's request for preliminary injunction.

Now, in the newest twist, Acting Attorney General Cori Mills has filed an emergency petition to force the district to get that school opened. Because nothing says "We do too have an adequate plan for this charter school" than insisting you can get it up and running in two months. (Mills is Acting AG because the legislature rejected Dunleavy's first choice.)

Meanwhile, Pearl Creek STEAM Charter is still announcing that it will be open in the fall on both its website and Facebook page.

There are other issues at play here. Veteran reporter and columnist Dermot Cole points out that Pearl Creek will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, part of a larger charter trend in Fairbanks:

I believe that nearly all of the charter schools in the Fairbanks area have tended to attract enrollment from families with higher incomes or families where the parents have the time, energy and ability to be directly involved in their children’s education...

There are far fewer economically disadvantaged students in Alaska charter schools than neighborhood schools. There are also fewer students for whom English is a second language. Most charter schools do not have bus transportation for students, school lunch programs or other features that would make them more accessible to poor families.

I’m guessing, based on what I know about Fairbanks, that most charter school families have more flexibility built into their lives, whether it’s because of economic status, help from extended family members or the sense of mission that the best parents share.

Beyond all that, Fairbanks now has the bizarre situation of a district that has tried to cut costs by closing a school now being told by the state that they must reopen the building and pay for someone else to run a school there, reversing the decision of the elected local school board. 

It's not the most extreme version of state governments usurping the power of local school boards (take Ohio, where school districts can get in legal trouble for failing to hand buildings over to charters). But it is one more literal example of how running multiple parallel school districts costs the taxpayers extra. If only choice fans were honest enough to say, "We want choice, so we are going to levy a new School Choice Tax to pay for it." Good luck, Fairbanks.

NJ: Red Bank and the New White Flight

The Red Bank, NJ, school system is actually a tiny little thing. Three boroughs (Red Bank, Little Silver and Shrewsbury) run their own K-8 schools which then feed into a regional high school.

There's one other school in Red Bank-- Red Bank Charter School. Red Bank Charter School is back in the news because its operators have asked to double the schools size, from 195 seats to 400, in a move that represents a direct assault on the public schools of the city. RBCS has served not just as a drain on the public system, but a powerful engine for resegregation. Red Bank Charter School is not just an example of how charters gut public school resources, but how charters can be the new white flight.

Red Bank Charter is no Success Academy-- when they announced the expansion, they left their own parents and supporters flatfooted. In January, charter leaders held a meeting for parents who wanted some sort of response for when their neighbors cornered them in the grocery store. One characterized the proposal as a PR disaster. At that meeting, they learned that part of the reason for the initiative was Chris Christie's full-on support for charters in his State of the State speech.

Flanked by Trenton lobbyists and a pair of ex-superintendents-turned-consultants, charter Principal Meredith Pennotti said one key reason the school is seeking to expand is “the political climate” — specifically, Governor Chris Christie’s unabashed support of school choice.

Best to expand the operation while the business climate supports it and before Christie leaves office. But there are more arguments-- none of them good.

RBCS likes to make the argument that they actually spend less per pupil than the public school system, even as research shows that they have been better-funded than the district to the tune of about $1,700 per student. They don't like to point out that the lower per-pupil spending is because they serve fewer students with special needs. NJ, like many states, has different state support rates for students with special needs, because they cost more to educate. In Red Bank Borough, the SSN population is 19.2%. At RBCS, the SSN population is 7.3%. RBCS spends less per pupil because they specialize in teaching the low-cost students. If you want a more complete, scholarly look at how this funding system works and how it affects local public schools, this paper by Julia Sass Rubin is worth a look.

When it comes to income, Red Bank Borough's free or reduced lunch population runs around 88%. RBCS runs around 40%.

Segregation is also reflected in racial makeup of the schools (here's where we could mention that New Jersey has a hugely segregated school system). Red Bank Borough is about 7% white. Red Bank Charter is about 52% white. The borough school is 80% Hispanic; the charter, 34%.

But RBCS admission is by lottery, which suggests that these demographics are not just the demographics of the students who attend RBCS, but the demographics of the students who apply. The charter is talking about going to a weighted lottery to favor poor students, but if this is their applicant pool, what difference would it really make?

Red Bank Charter School does not look very much like Red Bank, the borough, or the Red Bank Borough K-8 school.* What Red Bank Charter School does look like is the two neighboring boroughs. Those schools (Little Silver and Shrewsbury) have school populations that are 90% white and virtually without any free or reduced students at all. And they're very close by, so that if parents, say, wanted to get their children away from Those People, a move up the road would do it. What is a community to do to stop that kind of white flight?

Well, in a meeting between local journalists and three charter officials trying hard to sell the expansion, the answer emerged:

Although the charter school is supposed to offer an alternative so that they will as they said in this decision… so as to mitigate the effect of white flight. Now how do you do that? You start a small public school which will offer an opportunity for those who otherwise would leave town or choose the parochial or other private school. It’s as simple as that. What else would you do? Offer an alternative.

Yup. Charter schools as the new white flight. Don't buy a whole new house to keep your kids from going to school with Those People-- just sign up for your local charter.

RBCS uses many of the usual charter shell games-- they like to compare their PARCC scores to the Red Bank scores, despite the fact that their school population is hugely different from Red Bank's. If you care about PARCC scores (and I don't, but it is a reformy metric of choice) and if you can handle charts and regressions, this piece by Jersey Jazzman shows that RBCS's scores are nothing special, and that in some areas they are being outdone by the public system.  In fact, a parent did some number crunching and found that the Red Bank public school actually outperformed the charter without adjustment-- for just one example, the average 8th grade scores for ELA and Math were higher at the public school, for one example. We can play with these numbers all day, but at a minimum, we have to conclude that RBCS does not significantly outperform the public school.[Update: You can look here for Jersey Jazzman's latest look at the latest data. Nothing has changed.]

Many in the Red Bank community have spoken out against the expansion. It's a small district in a small community, and the doubling the charter size will gut the financial support for the public school. Duplicating services is not financially efficient or cost-effective, but it's worse than that.

Charters have introduced a new entitlement-- the right to attend a private school at taxpayer expense. Maybe you could make a case for this if the private school were demonstrably better-- but Red Bank Charter is not. Maybe you could make a case if it weren't going to cost the taxpayers more-- but you can't run two systems for the cost of one. Maybe you could justify it if the new system was going to help all students-- but this will damage the public system for the students left in it. And maybe you could justify it if the charter system was offering something special-- but apparently Red Bank Charter is here just to provide a new version of white flight. Absent other evidence, I assume that the teachers and students of Red Bank Charter School are decent folks who work hard. But is that enough reason to let the charter double its size and take a huge bite out of the public school budget?

Imagine if parents had to go door to door and say, "Hey, I need to take some tax dollars from you so that my kid doesn't have to go to school with your kid." Or maybe a community gathering where someone announces, "Let's take up a collection so we can pay some better-off white folks to stay in town."

The irony at the end of this K-8 kerflufflage is that all of these schools feed into the Red Bank Regional High School, a school so successful and well-regarded that it regularly draws students over and above those coming out of the feeder schools. In other words, when all is said and done, everybody's kids ends up in high school with Those Peoples' Kids anyway.

State Education Commissioner Hespe is expected to rule on RBCS's expansion plan soon. If you're in New Jersey, you might want to contact him with your thoughts. I'm over in Pennsylvania, but I can't even see a reason to keep Red Bank Charter School open, let alone expand it. But I have a feeling that the taxpayers of Red Bank could use a few more voices on their side.



*Courtesy of Red Bank SD, here's a demographic breakdown of the charter and public schools in nifty chart form

Apologies to those who got here early. Attempting to edit by phone led premature publication as well as a host of other issues appearing and disappearing (including, i guess, this oddly centered text).  This should now be it. I swear I'll never attempt editing by phone again.