Posted on 06/05/2007 6:47:03 PM PDT by bd476
Public charter schools - separate and unequal
Monday, June 4, 2007
By MARY JO MCKINLEY
The state must do much more to ensure that thorough and efficient isn't an empty promise.
CHARTER SCHOOLS are closing the achievement gap among New Jersey's poor urban schoolchildren, yet they continue to be treated as second-class citizens when it comes to receiving state education funding at levels enjoyed by other elementary and secondary schools.
A new report by the Education Law Center supports this troubling conclusion. Charter schools in New Jersey predominantly serve students in the state's most at-risk Abbott districts, the report states. But charter schools in those districts receive state funding at levels far below that of the public schools. The ELC went further, stating that there was no basis in the law for the state to "exclude students attending charter schools in Abbott districts from receiving the same funding as their peers in district schools."
A couple of real-life scenarios illustrate the impact of the state's policies toward charter schools. Two siblings in Newark attend different public schools. One attends North Star Academy Charter School and has an almost certain prospect of attending a four-year college. The other child attends East Side High School and has only a 15 percent chance of attending a four-year college.
The child who attends East Side High School receives $17,974 in education funding, and the child who attends North Star is funded at $10,582, or 59 percent of his sister's funding level.
In another example, two young brothers share a room and live with their single mother in an apartment in Red Bank. One attends Red Bank Middle School, the other Red Bank Charter School. The boy at Red Bank Middle School will receive Targeted At-Risk Aid funding next year, while his brother at Red Bank Charter will not.
Each pair of siblings comes from the same home and therefore shares the same socio-economic background, challenges and needs, yet they are not treated equally by the state.
Widening gap
The charter school success story has taken place against a backdrop where school funding inequity has become a widening chasm. Charter schools have seen overall funding formula reductions over the past decade and charter schools districts are not receiving the additional school aid provided to other at-risk schools. In addition, charter schools are prohibited from constructing new facilities and, unlike traditional districts, receive no state funding to lease, purchase, or renovate existing ones.
It's as if the state intends to put New Jersey's public charter schools in a precarious position, and as a result nearly all are feeling the pinch. Instead of rewarding charter schools that serve as uniquely accountable engines of education innovation, the state Department of Education continues to undermine the intent of New Jersey's Charter School Program Act of 1995.
From their inception, charter schools have been expected to do more with less. But even as public school districts have seen "full funding" shrink in recent years, charter public schools on average are receiving only 48 percent to 65 percent of what their peers in district schools receive, after facilities costs are taken out of operating budgets. There is no justification that the state can provide for forcing charter schools – or any other school for that matter – to choose between needed remediation programs and fixing a leaking roof.
Thus, although Abbott charter schools mirror the socioeconomic and racial characteristics of the district schools, their students receive substantially less educational funding than their peers. The funds that charter schools receive are far below the level determined by the court to be sufficient for the programs and services that are necessary to ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty.
For the next fiscal year, the state Department of Education has dedicated $67 million in TARA funding, recognizing that per-pupil spending in many non-Abbott districts is well below the state average and that these districts need more assistance in their efforts to provide students with a constitutionally mandated thorough and efficient education.
Poorer non-Abbott public school districts will receive additional funding for each low-income student to help close the achievement gap. Not so for charter schools in the same districts. Although 49 out of 53 charter schools, and 65 percent of all charter school students meet the criteria, they have been deprived of TARA funding.
Soon, we are promised, there will be an opportunity to fix these problems. The intention is that charter school representatives will have a seat at the table for the development of the new funding formula to ensure equity among all New Jersey public schools. But until the day comes when funding truly follows the child, the state must do much more to treat charter schools equitably and ensure that thorough and efficient isn't an empty promise. It is a constitutional mandate, after all.
New Jersey's 53 public charter schools serving more than 16,000 students deserve an equal opportunity to achieve the promise that their teachers, administrators, parents and the state envisioned.
Mary Jo McKinley is president of the New Jersey Charter Public Schools Association and director and co-founder of Academy Charter High School in Lake Como, formerly Belmar in Monmouth County.
ping
San Francisco Chronicle
Stakes too high to just check erasures, experts say
State educators call Chronicle's findings 'not particularly unusual'
Nanette Asimov and Todd Wallack, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, May 13, 2007
States should do more to find cheating than just analyzing erasures on students' exams, according to several experts who point to Texas and New Jersey as examples of a more vigorous approach.
Both of those states looked into why some of their schools had exceedingly large test-score gains from one year to the next. In some cases, they found cheating was the answer.
In California, The Chronicle analyzed test scores at more than 7,800 public schools over four years. At 292 of them, some scores were dramatically different from what would be expected, based on scores of other grades or years.
At one school, for example, sixth-graders who scored well below average on the 2005 math test were suddenly among the state's top math whizzes when they became seventh-graders in 2006...
Excerpt. Continues: Stakes too high to just check erasures
Doesn’t surprise me. My son’s teacher in a public middle school in California has been lying to us about an incident. He couldn’t take a computer test because the school had closed their computer lab unannounced. He asked if he could asked what he could do to make up the test, and the teacher told him nothing. However, she let another student e-mail a report to her that afternoon.
The teacher told the principal that the student had e-mailed her the report before that time. We’ve spoken to the other boy’s parents and got the original e-mail with the original date and time stamp. We caught the teacher lying.
$18,000 a year per student?!?
Amazing, isn't it.
And children who attend Christian schools or are homeschooled get NOTHING, even though the parents pay taxes to support the local school district.
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