Thwarting Charter School Efforts

January 06, 2004

From today's Center for Education Reform's Newswire, we have the story of a charter school application which was denied on some suspicious grounds.

One of the more creative reasons for denying a charter application can be found in Portland, Oregon, where a team of administrators recommended to Portland’s District School Board that they deny a charter application because it called for “too many instructional days” and not enough administrators.

As you may know, two of the pressing problems of today's public schools are too many instructional days and too few administrators! Most public schools only use less than 70% of the available weekdays, or the equivalent of sixteen weeks of vacation. And as for administrators, these are basically people making higher than a teacher's salary, most of which are certified to teach, and are not teaching. While we certainly need more quality administrators, our solution wouldn't be to order more of them in bulk.

The application is for the creation of the Arthur Academy and duplicates the Arthur Academy already in operation successfully in another Oregon district. The model proved so successful that the founders sought to replicate the program in Portland and throughout the state.

This is something for which public schools are positively famous: Ignore what has been proven to work in the real world, in favor of programs and techniques which will "theoretically should be producing results ... any day now."

The school utilizes Direct Instruction in reading and math and the Core Knowledge sequence for history, science, geography, music, art and PE.

Direct Instruction? That's where they beat the children with sticks, or something. Well, maybe they just have the kids learn old-fashioned phonics. And Core Knowledge? That program's based on the scandalous idea that kids should learn a specific body of knowledge and skills each year they're in school. What!? They don't have the kids "construct their own knowledge and meaning"? They don't have their math students use calculators? And they actually teach the kids (gasp) American and World History? Where's the Social Studies?

By the end of its first school year, every one of the 38 Kindergarteners could read almost a year ahead of grade level – with some even reading at a third grade level. Their Stanford Achievement Tests went from the 57th percentile in the Fall to the 89th percentile at the end of year. While the Portland Board’s stated denial was based on skepticism about the effectiveness of the curriculum, the internal review documents said something much different. The school founders and advocates are appealing the Board’s recommendation.

Skepticism indeed! This is very confusing how one school could have some Kindergarteners reading on a third-grade level, when in most public schools they have trouble getting them to read on a Kindergartener level! Fortunately, there are other options available for the founders of these schools, and Oregon is considered to have a fairly strong Charter School Law. Let's hope they're successful in reaching more of Oregon's kids. The rest of us could take a page from their book!

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* CER's Jan. 6, 2004 Newswire is not yet available online, but here is the Newswire page.