- Exclusive interview with Jack McCarthy, AppleTree Institute president and CEO [FOCUS, AppleTree Early Learning PCS Cesar Chavez PCS, Paul PCS, Washington Math, Science, and Technology PCS, Tree of Life PCS, Center City PCS, Potomac Lighthouse PCS, Ingenuity PrepPCS, Democracy Prep PCS, Imagine Southeast PCS, and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
- D.C. schools need a mayor who’s in a hurry [KIPP DC PCS, DC Prep PCS, and DC Scholars PCS mentioned]
- What a Difference Charter Caps Make....
- What Applying to Charter Schools Showed Me About Inequality
- Md. ranks near bottom for charter school laws
Exclusive interview with Jack McCarthy, AppleTree Institute president and CEO [FOCUS, AppleTree Early Learning PCS Cesar Chavez PCS, Paul PCS, Washington Math, Science, and Technology PCS, Tree of Life PCS, Center City PCS, Potomac Lighthouse PCS, Ingenuity PrepPCS, Democracy Prep PCS, Imagine Southeast PCS, and Rocketship PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
March 24, 2014
I met recently with Mr. Jack McCarthy, the president and chief executive officer of the popular and highly respected AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation and Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School. The setting was a little unusual for my exclusive interviews since our conversation took place at the Southeast Washington, D.C. Douglas Knoll Campus. The school is located right in the middle of a subsidized housing complex.
Mr. McCarthy wasted no time in explaining the mission of AppleTree. “Our goal,” Mr. McCarthy explained, “is to close the achievement gap before our children enter Kindergarten.” The CEO related that AppleTree now educates approximately 640 students on seven sites. Some 73% of all AppleTree pupils qualify for free or reduced lunch. Eighty Pre-Kindergarten three and four year olds are enrolled at Douglas Knoll, 95% of whom at this facility are eligible for free and reduced lunch. The location of the school is intentional, as I was about to learn is they way everything is approached at the charter.
“We are able to reach the children who benefit the most by locating the school inside of the housing complex” stated the AppleTree CEO. “Access to this type of program is especially important for kids living in poverty. The groundbreaking Hart and Risley study found that low income children by the time they reach three years old are exposed to 30 million fewer words than those of middle or upper class families. In order to reverse this phenomenon AppleTree designed an evidence-based, data-driven program that is highly focused on building young children’s language and vocabulary skills with teacher-child interactions that are warm and nurturing.”
The issue Mr. McCarthy and is team is addressing is especially profound. Today, about 70% of DC third graders cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “The Nation’s Report Card.” Research has demonstrated that the failure to learn to read by the end of third grade is a leading contributor to students being identified for special education, being retained in grade, dropping out of high school and the failure to find a job.
I asked Mr. McCarthy what led to his creating AppleTree. The story is fascinating. It turns out that Mr. McCarthy was a co-founder in 1996 of Boston Renaissance Charter School, the first such school in Boston and only the nation’s 32nd charter. He was responsible for finding and financing a building for the Kindergarten to sixth grade 650 student school and arranged for $12 million to renovate their 14 story building. His “epiphany” came during Renaissance Charter’s first lottery. He watched as 1,000 parents found out that their children were not selected for admission. Everyone seated around him was crying; there was not a dry eye in the place. The powerful value of charter schools indelibly entered Mr. McCarthy’s being.
Through a DC contact from a foundation that supported Boston Renaissance Mr. McCarthy became involved in the birth of the charter movement in the nation’s capital. He worked with early pioneers such as Mike Peabody, founder of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, and Congressman Steve Gunderson, who shepherded the original D.C. charter legislation through Congress. In 1996, the AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation was formed with the mission, according to the school’s website, “to increase the supply of effective schools through innovation.” Mr. McCarthy and his partners created the first charter school incubator which led to the founding of some of the city’s early groundbreaking public charter schools such as Cesar Chavez, Paul, and Washington Math, Science, and Technology.
One of the most unique components of AppleTree is the Institute. Mr. McCarthy explained that it “serves as the research to practice” branch of the organization, developing new instructional techniques and refining proven strategies. Data and continuous improvement are heavily relied upon to drive pedagogical improvement.
During the 2001 to 2002 school year the Institute opened Apple Early Literacy Preschool, a privately funded lab school at the Riverside Baptist Church in Southwest D.C. with two classrooms of 36 pupils. According to Mr. McCarthy their main emphasis was to provide and develop a quality program that “would do no harm to the children and at the same time figure out the most effective way to teach this population of underserved kids.”
In 2005 AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School opened at the Riverside location. Six more campuses were founded over the next five years. The work of AppleTree has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and private sector match partners including Fight for Children, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Boeing, JP Morgan, PNC Bank and others. The entities have provided $6.5 million in grant money toward the development of Every Child Ready, a unique program that includes teacher professional development, curriculum, and systems for school support. In addition, DC based Venture Philanthropy Partners invested $3 million in AppleTree’s 5-year business plan. The focus of AppleTree’s Every Child Ready early learning model is “what to teach, how to teach, and how to tell it in improving instruction and learning.”
I then asked Mr. McCarthy about the recent controversy regarding whether the Early Childhood Performance Management Framework developed by the D.C. Public Charter School Board was overly tilted toward academics rather than emphasizing social and emotional development. The AppleTree CEO was happy to answer this question. “This is a false choice. It’s like asking what is more important in water: hydrogen or oxygen? A student needs both components to be successful. We are satisfied with the Early Childhood PMF and we understand that it will improve over time.”
Combining research and instruction AppleTree has grown into a $15 million system with 175 staff. There are seven AppleTree Early Learning preschools and the organization also provides instructional support to preschool and Pre-Kindergarten classrooms at four other charters, including Tree of Life, Center City, Potomac Lighthouse, and Ingenuity Prep. Moreover, the influence of AppleTree continues to grow. Through it’s AppleTree @ model, it will operate preschool and Pre-Kindergartern for Democracy Prep when it takes over for Imagine Southeast next fall. AppleTree also plans to team with Rocketship Education Public Charter School when it opens in D.C. in 2015. These AppleTree @ partnerships will provide a smooth transition from preschool through elementary school at Democracy Prep and Rocketship.
During our conversation it became clear to me that Mr. McCarthy has a much different vision from many other charter founders I have met. He comes across as not much interested in conquering the early childhood market for children so he can boast about the size of his student population. What drives the AppleTree founder, and what leads to him putting in seemingly endless workdays, is his desire to truly close the achievement gap by bringing effective early learning to scale in DC. This may be why he and his team are realizing impressive results. Compared to children who have not attended AppleTree his alumni recognize 25% more letters entering Kindergarten, and score 20 points higher in reading in first grade. Mr. McCarthy had this to say about the school’s accomplishments:
“We provide an education that provides children with the skills and positive behaviors they need to succeed in school. Since many of our parents didn’t have great educational experiences, we help them understand what their children are learning and assist them in making good school choices.
AppleTree is leveling the playing field between affluent and disadvantaged, children, while also leveling the playing field between new preschool teachers and more experienced ones. These will always be our goals of our research to practice model. Our intent is to continuously improve our practice.”
D.C. schools need a mayor who’s in a hurry [KIPP DC PCS, DC Prep PCS, and DC Scholars PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By David Alpert and Natalie Wexler
March 21, 2014
Ask most of the candidates in the District’s April 1 Democratic primary about the gap between our most and least successful public schools, and they’ll tell you they want every school to be great. That’s a laudable aspiration, but at our current pace it will take more than a generation to get there. Sadly, few candidates support acting boldly to change the lives of students being left behind.
The District’s traditional public schools have made significant strides, with scores rising to the point at which last year 47 percent of D.C. Public Schools students scored proficient in reading on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (D.C.-CAS), the District’s standardized test, and 50 percent did so in math. But that means only about half of our students are able to perform fairly basic math and reading tasks.
There is a long way to go. And the gap in achievement between wealthier and poor kids not only persists but also is increasing in some areas.
The bottom line is that the pace of change has been excruciatingly slow, with scores rising only about 1.3 percentage points per year. At that rate, true change will not come until the children of many of today’s elementary school students are starting school.
What do the candidates for mayor and D.C. Council have to say? Several, including Mayor Vincent Gray, are calling for extended school hours or after-school programs. Many talk about modernizing buildings. Charles Allen, a candidate for council in Ward 6, wants to involve parents more. Brianne Nadeau, running in Ward 1, and Andy Shallal, running for mayor, emphasize bringing wraparound services into schools to combat the effects of poverty. At-large candidate John Settles would create more specialized or magnet programs, while his competitor Nate Bennett-Fleming says we should “raise expectations” to push all kids to go to college.
These all are worthwhile steps on a long road to gradually improving a system that faces many challenges. But Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has set a goal of reaching 70 percent proficiency by 2017, and it’s hard to believe that any of these initiatives will move the needle fast enough to get us close to that.
Gray suggests that there is no “magic bullet or quick fix” and that education reform simply takes time. He may be right. But some education activists point to schools that seem to have figured out ways to help disadvantaged students achieve at higher levels quickly. If they’re right, shouldn’t we try to bring their approaches to more students, without delay?
Of the 143 D.C. public schools where 70 percent or more students are low-income, 23 are also high-achieving, with proficiency levels at 60 percent or higher. Of those 23, 19 are charter schools. For example, at KIPP D.C.’s Key Academy middle school, where 81 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price meals last year, the D.C.-CAS proficiency rate was a phenomenal 81.5 percent. That rivals Alice Deal in Tenleytown, the city’s most desirable middle school, which had 85.6 percent proficiency but was only 21 percent low-income.
At D.C. Prep’s Edgewood Elementary, which was 85 percent low-income, third-graders who have been at the school since pre-K scored as well as their counterparts at Upper Northwest’s Murch, which was only 9 percent low-income. Meanwhile, only 42 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals citywide score proficient in reading.
These charter operators seem to have come up with ways to improve the performance of low-income students more rapidly than DCPS. Some observers say the District should ask these schools to scale up their approaches. Why not try to maximize the number of students who benefit from something that appears to be working?
Others point out that not all charters are high-performing, and that’s true. And critics claim the reason that some charters are successful is that they’re able to “skim the cream,” either because the parents who apply to charters care more about education than those who don’t or because the schools somehow manipulate their admissions processes.
We’re not taking a position on that claim here. But it’s clear that if we’re going to bring fundamental change to education in the District, we have to reach all kids, not just a select group. One way to do that, and to test whether the methods of successful charters would work on a broader scale, would be to require certain charters to give a preference in admissions to all the kids in a given neighborhood, as DCPS schools do. Another would be to have high-performing charter organizations partner with struggling DCPS schools to try to turn the schools around while working with the same population of students.
That’s beginning to happen in at least one school. Stanton Elementary in Anacostia, which was one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the District, has been operated by a charter organization, Scholar Academies, for the past three years. (Disclosure: One of us, Natalie, serves on the board of a charter school, DC Scholars, that is also operated by Scholar Academies.) In that time, while Stanton has remained a DCPS school subject to the same union and other requirements as all DCPS schools, math scores increased from 8 percent proficient to 42 percent, and reading from 13 percent to 20 percent. Those who knew the school in its “before” phase say it’s now almost unrecognizable. Could that happen at other schools as well?
We asked the leading mayoral candidates about these ideas. Most demurred. Muriel Bowser said she would defer to the Public Charter School Board and didn’t take a position. Gray and Jack Evans are open to charter schools broadly, but weren’t eager for the mayor to play a major role in recruiting school operators. Shallal had strong reservations about expanding the role of charters.
Tommy Wells, however, said he would like to give this a shot. Rather than closing neighborhood schools, or waiting years for DCPS to try to turn them around, he advocates recruiting charter operators with proven track records to do the job. The schools would remain part of DCPS and might at some point become traditional public schools again. “But we can’t wait,” he said. “We can’t close more schools and consign more neighborhoods to not being able to have great schools.”
This wouldn’t be the right approach in every sector of the District. And at this point, we can’t be sure it’s the answer even for poor neighborhoods. But thousands of students in D.C. schools aren’t getting the education they deserve, and we need to try something bold if we want to reach them before it’s too late. Isn’t it worth a try?
What a Difference Charter Caps Make...
Education Week
By Sara Mead
March 19, 2014
Charter supporters nationally are focusing on New York City, where recently-elected Mayor deBlasio seems to be making good on campaign promises to oppose charter co-locations and charge charter schools rent (never mind charter parents are city taxpayers, too...)--a potentially a significant blow to the city's charter sector that has garned significant national criticism for the Mayor. While lots of smart folks have written on this, I can't help be struck between the contrast between what's going on in New York right now--and the consternation among charter supporters leading up to last year's election there--and the current D.C. Mayor's race.
A hotly contested Democratic Mayoral primary is currently underway in D.C., and with the entry of independent councilman David Catania into the race, the November election may well also be competitive. While the identify of the next Mayor clearly has major implications for the city's education system--including both DCPS and charters--none of the frontrunning candidates in D.C. have demagouged charter schools the way deBlasio did in his campaign, nor do D.C. operators view the election with the anxiety we saw in New York a year ago. Even candidates who have not historically been viewed as particularly friendly to charters have been talking about how to better integrate charters and DCPS to meet the needs of kids and families--not getting rid of charters. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that charter schools are a much bigger piece of the public education landscape in D.C.--where they account for more than 40 percent of students--than they are in New York. That difference again has a variety of causes, but a major one is the cap that existed on charters in New York before 2010, limiting the number of charters that could be created even in the face of high parent demand and evidence that New York charters outperformed their peers. While the state lifted the cap in 2010--allowing some high-performing charters to grow--its legacy has meant the New York charter sector is relatively small, and made it possible for deBlasio to paint charters as a marginal, niche phenomenon that drains resoruces from the majority of the city's schools--in contrast to the central part of the public school ecosystem that charters are in places like D.C. Even D.C. leaders who are skeptical of charter schools know that a lot of their constiuents' children and grandchildren attend charters--or that they hope to send their kids to charter schools someday--and that makes a difference in the political dynamic around chartering.
Obviously, market share isn't everything: Quality of charter school options is even more important, and D.C. has made major strides on this front over the past five years--closing low-performing schools, growing high-performing seats to replace them, and raising the bar for all charters. I've been fortunate to be a part of that. But the contrast between New York and D.C. should also remind us that limits on charter growth can create situations that endanger even high-performing charters--and we shouldn't ignore that these barriers continue to exist in many places where there is high unmet parent demand.
What Applying to Charter Schools Showed Me About Inequality
The Atlantic
By Conor Williams
March 20, 2014
By the time we arrived—five minutes late—the school’s basement was packed. As I turned my eyes to the lectern, I wondered at the speed of childhood. My son turns three this summer, and yet, here we were, jammed into this basement to hear one of D.C.’s best charter schools explain why we ought to send him to them next year. On a Saturday, no less!
Even though it was a chilly February day, the room was hot; my one-year-old daughter squirmed in my arms and pulled off her hat. The room’s temperature brought everyone to fidgeting with our scarves and sweaters—young, old, black, brown, white, parents, kids, male, and female. As we all peeled off layers, the room’s impressive diversity came into focus. In a town as racially, residentially, socially, culturally, and economically segregated as D.C., it was an encouraging sight. I want my kids to attend a school that looks like this, I thought.
Except this was just an information session to encourage parents to apply for the school’s admissions lottery. Only a tiny fraction of the families in that packed basement will ever receive a spot at the school. Who knows how that small slice will look?
School choice—exemplified by charter schools—has changed the relationship between parents, neighborhoods, communities, and schools. And D.C.’s experiment with choice is as fully developed as almost any other public school district in the United States. That day, I stood there primarily as a parent and (to a lesser degree) as a former first-grade teacher, not as someone who writes about public education for a living. But on Monday, that moment spilled into my day job. It’s been on my mind ever since.
A lot of debates on school choice’s merits are unproductively narrow. Sam Chaltain’s new book, Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice, is a welcome exception. Chaltain spent a school year shadowing students, parents, teachers, and administrators in a new public charter school and a traditional district school to gauge how they’re coping with the state of public education today. Near the end of his book, Chaltain writes,
[O]ur democracy needs to be something we do, not something we have. When it comes to a nascent experiment like school choice, we have within us the capacity to turn an open marketplace of learning options into something creative and regenerative. But there is nothing automatic about it. Choice by itself leads to nothing.
One of the things that’s become clearer to me as we’ve worked through the application process in D.C. is the degree to which school choice is much less about choice than it looks on paper—or even in theory. There are Hebrew, Chinese, and Spanish language schools. One promises Spanish immersion, discovery-based learning, and an emphasis on ecological sustainability. There are multiple Montessori charters in our area (where I grew up, “public Montessori school” was an oxymoron).
My wife and I would love to pick a favorite from this list, but since demand for quality seats far outstrips supply, D.C.’s system is, in the words of a parent from Chaltain’s recent book, more “school chance” than school choice. “The most established charter schools have basically stopped being anything other than a true lottery ticket for families,” she continued. “Because most of the spots for the younger grades are taken.”
There are many reasons that the school’s basement was so packed. Washington, D.C.’s universal pre-K program is extremely popular: It enrolls almost 70 percent of the city’s three-year-olds and over 90 percent of the four-year-olds. It supports families by relieving some of their childcare costs and freeing parents to return to work sooner. It supports better academic outcomes for students in the short- and long-term.
But it also gives parents a chance to play the school lotteries earlier and more often. The sooner parents enter the lotteries, the better their chances of controlling some of the uncertainties involved. Parents prepared to enroll their children in the public schools at age three can sometimes secure a slot at a high-quality program that guarantees their child high-quality schooling through high school graduation. And if things don’t work out the first time around, they can take another crack the next year, since some schools start their pre-K programs at age four.
At another open house I attended (for a different charter school), a mother was incredulous to hear that the school anticipated having zero open slots for new kindergartners. They expected their already admitted pre-K students to fully fill those classrooms. Unless she had a three- or four-year-old she wanted to enroll in their lottery, they weren’t the school for her family.
Choice presents today’s parents with a brave new world of anxieties. In years past, her question wouldn’t have made any more sense than her disappointment—she wouldn’t have asked whether the school had open slots, since her child would have attended whatever public school the district assigned to her neighborhood, there would have been space, and school wouldn’t have started until the kid was (at least) five years old.
If the old system minimized parental anxiety, it also produced pathologies that fed its destruction. Too often, D.C.’s public schools have mirrored (and tracked) the city’s yawning income inequality gap—for every creative, exceptional program, there are several egregiously ineffective ones. And thus, as you’d expect, parental competition for seats in high-quality schools is intense. Property values in neighborhoods with strong schools have risen well beyond middle-class salaries; even small houses in these areas routinely fetch over a million dollars. In Washington, D.C., great neighborhood schools exist—but they are inaccessible to the middle class. This undercuts the democratic virtue of these schools; there’s nothing equitable about schools that are “open” to anyone whose parents can afford the steep property costs that serve as barriers to entry.
For a time, parents could apply to these schools from outside the neighborhood. As these schools have filled to capacity, that option has closed. So ambitious parents of modest means have turned to the city’s charter schools as an alternative. These schools offer (some) freedom: 1) from deadening public regulations and union contracts, 2) from staid curricula and pedagogy, and perhaps most importantly, 3) from the ironclad link between zip code and school quality.
And lo and behold, demand for seats in high-performing charter schools has skyrocketed: in 2012, there were more than 35,000 students on charter schools’ waitlists (though some were duplicates). There were only 77,000 students in the city that year.
As Chaltain illustrates throughout his book, this is how you’d expect a choice-driven market to work. This is what markets do. But when the good being transferred and traded is something that should be a baseline public good for all students, the market solution starts to run into trouble. We can’t address the imbalance of supply and demand by allowing others to pay more to squeeze others out of charter seats. That would simply reestablish the hegemony of privilege that made zip code such a strong predictor of school quality. So we use lotteries.
Charters’ lotteries respond to zip-code inequity in public education by randomizing a school’s enrollment. As a process, they don't favor wealth or other privilege. Lotteries are neutral. My son, with his two highly educated, almost-middle-class, white parents, gets no lottery advantage over his friend whose mother dropped out of high school and is raising her child alone. As far as the lottery is concerned, both kids are just numbers.
But lotteries don’t exist in a vacuum. If each one is neutral, a system of lotteries can still tilt in favor of families with sufficient resources and free time to get around town and apply to as many as possible. A student entered in ten charter school lotteries has a better chance at enrolling at one than a student entered in just one. And while D.C. unified its district and charter pre-K lotteries this year, a handful of high-performing charters stayed outside the system. You’d better believe that my wife and I applied to every one of those within two miles of our house.
On a related note: some charter schools rank their waitlist in terms of the order in which they receive lottery applications. Guess what? Parents line up outside these schools as early as 3:00 am to be first in line on the day they begin accepting applications.
Lotteries also reward families who can afford to live close to high-performing charter schools. When it comes to school choice, parents frequently cite proximity as a critical factor in their decision. My wife and I didn’t bother applying to charter lotteries that would have sent our son to Capitol Hill—it would have required an hour-long commute during rush hour. Even though living nearby doesn’t officially or directly improve a student’s chance of admission, students living far away are much less likely to apply. There are practical limits to the openness of charter school enrollment. This is a particularly pressing issue in D.C., where rapid gentrification is overrunning charters in neighborhoods that were once filled with a majority of low-income families.
So: what do we do when school choice still tilts the system towards talent or wealth or race? When I got to work the Monday after the open house, I checked the demographics of the warm-basement school we’d visited over the weekend. It was diverse—but artificially. The percentage of African-American students was about half what it should have been, given the demographics of D.C.’s student body.
Some have suggested that we might need to protect charters from this problem by means of policies that would ensure socioeconomic and racial integration of the schools. This would undermine the ethical neutrality of the lottery procedure, but it might be a better guarantee of meaningful equity of opportunity and better academic outcomes for all students.
The logistics of this are complicated. Over the last several years, the D.C. Council has considered bills that would allow charter schools to prioritize the lottery applications of students who live in the surrounding neighborhood. But while this might diminish privileged families’ ability to game the lottery system in the short term, gentrification could quickly convert the policy into a means for locking low-income families out of high-performing charters.
What else could the city do? Should it provide weighted lotteries to encourage charters to enroll students from a variety of backgrounds? Should it require quotas?
All of these solutions suggest the limits of what experts call “procedural justice.” At the school level, attempts to adjust the lottery unquestionably threaten the ethical neutrality of the school choice model. If the enrollment procedure no longer treats all students identically, it opens the door to charges of inequity. But what if that’s necessary to make charter schools more compatible with the big, democratic goals of public education? Are they still worth it?
For the next few weeks, everyone at my house will be on tenterhooks, waiting for the end-of-month lottery results. Like most of the parents Chaltain chronicles in Our School, we’re ambivalent about whether they deliver us unto a district or a charter school—we just want a safe place where our son (and eventually our daughter) will be academically challenged each day. Sure, we’d be particularly excited to hear that he’ll be able to attend one of the great schools at the top of our list. But we’ve realized that school choice isn’t really about choice. It’s about expanding access to effective schools enough to realistically raise families’ hopes, but nowhere near enough to solve educational inequity—even in places with a robust, vibrant charter sector like D.C.’s.
So, at best, charter schools are a mild corrective to inequity—even if the procedure of a lottery removes privilege from the process at one school, it can’t eliminate it from the broader charter sector and does nothing to address its effects after the fact. In the absence of a school system that provides access to an excellent education for all students, it’s understandable that a charter system would be morally appealing. But we shouldn’t confuse a Band-Aid for a solution.
Md. ranks near bottom for charter school laws
The Washington Post
Associated Press
March 23, 2014
FREDERICK, Md. — Maryland’s charter school laws are among the worst in the nation, according to two studies released this year.
The Washington-based Center for Education Reform and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools evaluated the content and implementation of charter school laws in 42 states and the District of Columbia.
In January, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools named Maryland last out of 43 in its own ranking of charter school laws. The state dropped from 42 to 43 in the National Alliance ranking. The 2014 Center for Education Reform scorecard released March 17 showed that Maryland scored 39th — two places lower than in 2013.
Three public charter schools are now open in Frederick County: Carroll Creek Montessori, Monocacy Valley Montessori and Frederick Classical. Officials at the Montessori schools did not respond to a request for comment on the ratings.
Tom Neumark, president of Frederick Classical Charter School, said he is disappointed but not surprised that Maryland continues to worsen for charter schools.
“Charter schools are supposed to be independent, and that’s basically what Maryland law guarantees you don’t have,” he said.
The studies’ criteria for grading the laws included whether the state allows entities other than traditional school boards to independently create and manage charter schools, whether independent authorization actually occurs, how many new charter schools are allowed to open, how separation from existing state and local operational rules is codified in law, and various measures of fiscal equity.
States also earned or lost points for accountability and putting the law into practice, Center for Education Reform methodology said. Points were deducted if the law is not followed or charter schools are not being approved for arbitrary reasons not set in law.
Good charter school laws ensure freedom and funding, Neumark said, but Maryland’s do neither. Frederick County charter school teachers are employees of the local school system and are bound by union-negotiated contracts, rather than being employed directly by the charter school.
Giving the school system hiring, firing, legal and budgeting power over a charter school is unusual, Neumark said. Frederick Classical may next year gain more freedom to spend money as it sees fit, he said, instead of going through the school system’s long procurement process.
The lack of independent authorizers is one of the biggest problems because local school systems — currently the only bodies able to green-light charters — are “not interested in approving their competition,” Neumark said.
Frederick County Board of Education President Joy Schaefer is comfortable with the ability to work closely with those schools on a local level, she said. The relationship between charters and the school system is a work in progress, she added.
“We were the first in the state to have a charter school, so we’re always looking to improve our model,” she said. “We’re very lucky that we have charter schools with boards and leadership that is very collaborative.”
Schaefer declined to discuss the financial aspect because Frederick Classical is appealing the school board’s charter school funding formula.
Delegate Galen Clagett, D-Frederick, believes the law creates a suitable climate for running charter schools. School systems should be able to dictate much of what charter schools do because they are held accountable by public money, he said.
“I think they’re doing OK,” he said. “We can’t have people popping these things up anywhere. ... You can’t make the charter school a private school, it’s a different animal.”
Neumark hopes the state legislature will overhaul the code governing charter schools as soon as possible.
“Maryland’s law is so out of the ordinary it’s not even funny,” he said. It’s “a pretend charter school law. It’s a charter school law in name only.”