Charter Schools’ Response
PPS Charter Schools Audit
June 15, 2009
Introduction
The seven charter schools sponsored by the district would like toacknowledge the great effort and hours of work put into the recently released audit, Portland Public Charter Schools: An Assessment of Performance and Impacts. The District Performance Auditor spent many hours interviewing charter school leaders and visiting the district-sponsored charter schools to better understand operations and programming. All seven of the district-sponsored charter schools participated in the study because the auditors conveyed to the schools that theaudit work would result in improvements and efficiencies in overall district administration of the charter schools it sponsors. This audit should be viewed as one document in the pool of charter school research in the state, but until a corresponding document sponsored by the state’s charter schools with comparative data from state charter school research is also presented, the PPS audit should be considered only part of the story.
The charter schools listed in this report have coordinated a joint response to the audit report fortwo key purposes. First, to acknowledge some of our challenges highlighted in the report, list what actions are being taken to overcome those challenges, and outlinehow the district might better support its charter schools in those efforts. Second, to address some of the specifics of the report, augmenting or correcting information where necessary and clarifying misperceptions that may have formed as a result of the audit report.
This response is respectfully submitted by the administrators of the following charter schools:
The EmersonSchool
Opal School of the Portland Children’s Museum
TrilliumCharterSchool
SEIAcademy
ArthurAcademy
LEP High
PortlandVillageSchool
The goals of public charter schools, established by ORS 338:
- Increase student learning and achievement
- Increase choices for learning opportunities
- Better meet individual student academic needs and interests
- Build stronger working relationships among educators, parents, and other community members
- Encourage the use of different and innovative learning methods
- Provide opportunities in small learning environments for flexibility and innovation, which may be applied, if proven effective, to other public schools
- Create professional opportunities for teachers
- Establish different forms of accountability for schools
- Create innovative measurement tools
As the PPS Charter Schools Audit quoted, “it is the intent that public charter schools may serve as models and catalysts for the improvement of other public schools and the public school system.”
The goals outlined in the 1999 Charter Law specifically do not require that charter schools provide a financial benefit for their sponsoring districts, nor does the law require charter schools to perform in any achievement measures at a level higher than district averages. Charter schools offer choice to parents, students and teachers; and they offer opportunities for innovation that may be applied to other public schools. The law was not created, nor do charter schools exist now, to serve solely the districts in which they reside. They provide, on a very small scale, competition to the status quo public school model. The legislative goals listed above convey the rationale of the 1999 Legislature in adopting the state charter law. It does not convey the intent or expectation that every charter school in Oregon address one or all of the goals.
While the PPS Charter Schools Performance Audit points out some acknowledged issues with charter schools in the district and in general, it is also clearly a report with an agenda of giving districts more control over charter schools in their realm, and limiting the autonomy of individual schools. There is no data to compare PPS Staff and Parent Satisfaction against that of charter schools; no data to compare PPS demographics against public school demographics nationwide (as this report has done with PPS charter schools); and no measure or report of how the PPS charter schools meet all nine of the goals outlined in ORS 338. We would hope that the state will soon commission such a study, if it is not already underway; to balance the views of this report with equally supported data from the charter schools and independent, objective, third-party entities.
Corrections to Audit Report
In our review of the PPS Audit Report, we found a few errors we would like to correct:
P. 21 and 23– Emerson’s low income student population is 23%, not 18%
P. 23 – Emerson’s percentage of Male students is 51%, not 43%
P. 24 – Opal is listed as “Core Knowledge” but is “Reggio Emilia inspired, Inquiry Based” in approach.
- Emerson is listed as “Inquiry-based” but is “Project Approach.”
- SEIAcademy is listed as “Instruction model not clearly specified” But their model is defined by charter as “Project-based,Cooperative Learning, Service Learning, andDirect Instruction.”
Enrollment Trends and Demographics
All of the PPS-sponsored charter schools are passionate about serving diverse demographics. The charter schools and districts must keep in mind, however, that there is no legal requirement that charter schools serve low-income or otherwise at-risk populations, or that charter schools serve diverse populations, or have “higher at-risk” levels of enrollment than district or other public schools. The audit seemingly assumes that charter schools must serve more at-risk students and have greater diversity in their student bodies than district schools. The charter schools are unclear regarding the basis of this assumption.
The audit report shows that on average, district charter schools do not enroll a representative sample of low-income or minority students when compared to the average district enrollment. Specifically this is true of those schools serving elementary students. The two charter schools that serve middle or high school students exclusively do not reflect this trend in enrollment demographics. Because each charter school’s program is meant to serve a different niche in the district’s school choice palette, there are wide variations in demographics among the 7 schools, just as there are vast differences in demographics among district schools. All seven charter schools place a high priority on encouraging minority and low-income student enrollment;howeverthe elementary school programs still fall below district averages, though some of the schools are more successful in that effort than others.
It is important to note that Portland charter schools fall well within the range of low income and minority percentages at district focus/option schools, which are the “schools of choice” offered by the district. In many cases, individual charter schools are more diverse than focus/option programs. Charter schools are required by law to maintain a blind lottery enrollment process, and receive no transportation assistance from the district or state. To compare demographics of charter schools to all neighborhood schools in the district which have a guaranteed “catchment” area and bus service is inaccurate. Instead, demographics should be compared to other district schools where there is no neighborhood “catchment” component, and where parents are expected to provide or arrange for transportation to a school that is outside the neighborhood. See the table below for comparable schools data:
There are only two charter schools in PPS which serve high school grades, LEP High and Trillium, and the only comparable district “school of choice” high school is MLC (no catchment area, no transportation provided). Demographics of the charter schools show far more diversity than that of the MLC: LEP High has 63% Free/Reduced lunch and 49% minority population; Trillium has 29% Free/Reduced lunch and 18% minority population; and MLC reports 20% Free/Reduced and 16% minority population.
Given the lottery process defined by state charter law, there is no allowance for any kind of weighting or priority for low-income economic status or ethnic diversity in charter school enrollment. In many cases, there may be 150 applicants for 10 or fewer open kindergarten spaces in a school. Maintaining a demographic balance is a challenge that is very difficult to engineer given those limitations.
There are a number of barriers that prospective students of charter schools face where access to some district or state resources would encourage greater diversity among charter school applicants, thereby impacting the overall lottery results. The physical location of a school seems to play a large role in the population that is able to attend that school. Transportation is the single-most limiting factor in supportinglow-income familiesattending charter schools. While some charter schools (specifically those with older students) provide bus passes to their students (at great cost to the schools), most have elaborate carpool systems, encourage public transportation “bus pools,” and bike-pooling to ensure all students have access to safe transportation. At one charter school, due to the urban location, parents must pay regular city metered parking rates to drop off and pick up their students and to volunteer at the school. Efforts to have the city provide free parking spaces for school use have failed.
Having access to state Transportation Grant funding through the district would have a great impact on the schools’ ability to draw and retain more low-income students. Since charter schools enroll students from all quadrants of the city, existingdistrict school bus routes do not serve charter students well. Assistance from the state or district with transportation would be the single most effective aide to enrolling a higher percentage of low-income students in charter schools. The district could serve as the liaison between its charter schools and the state, in order to broker transportation reimbursement for the charter schools.
In addition, having specific information about school choice and charter school options easily available on the school choice web pages of the district websitewould help with answering questions and addressing concerns from low-income and minority families who would consider a charter school but might not make it to an informational meeting outside their own neighborhood or after hours.
Each charter school has a unique program that will naturally have a limited market within any demographic; access to central media for getting information out about the programs will ensure a broader population has enough information to make a choice. We would welcome collaborative discussions with the district to identify additional strategies that would boost schools’ abilities to effectively attain and sustain diverse student populations.
School Performance
Teacher Qualifications
The audit report examined teaching qualifications and experience levels at all 7 charter schools, pointing out that on average the teachers at charter schools are “less experienced, educated, and qualified than district teachers.”
We would like to address experience level first. None of the charter schools studied is more than 7 years old, and the average age of the seven charter schools in 2007-2008 was 4 years. With a growing stable staff at each, there is still far less experience on average than at district schools that have been in existence for many decades, sometimes employing the same teachers for multiple decades in the same building. Due to the funding inequities between public charter schools and non-chartered public schools, in general, staff at charter schools are paid less than comparably experienced staff at regular public schools, with that salary discrepancy growing with years of experience, making it difficult to attract many incoming teachers who have more than 10 years’ experience. While an average experience level of 6.7 years (in 2007-2008) is significantly lower than the PPS average, that average is expected to slowly rise as the district’s charter schools age. The district’s average teacher experience level is fairly stable and would not be expected to change dramatically, and we expect that the experience gap will begin to close with each additional year in the life span of district charter schools. Staff satisfaction survey results at charter schools reflect a very high level of job satisfaction, indicating that although the salaries are not as high as at district schools, the benefits of working with like-minded educators under a common mission outweigh the lower salaries. We do not have staff satisfaction survey information from district teachers to compare with, so it is difficult to know if charter schools bring improvements in teacher satisfaction as an innovation.
Regarding education level of charter school staff, there is no requirement either in state charter law or in any of the charter contracts that a certain percentage of staff hold Masters Degrees. In fact, one of the provisions of the charter law is to allow for flexibility in hiring requirements for both teaching and administrative staff. It is instructive to note that the school with the lowest rate of teaching staff with Masters Degrees (Arthur Academy, 5%) exceeds the district average in classes taught by Highly Qualified Teachers (100% vs district at 94%), as well as exceeds averages in district and state Reading, Math and Writing assessments. Those results would indicate that there are other more statistically significant factors than education level of the teachers that lead to successfully meeting/exceeding state standards. State law requires at least 50% of teachers and administrators to be licensed by TSPC, a requirement that the audit report clearly states has been met.
While there is a lower percentage of classes taught by Highly Qualified Teachers (HQTs) in charter schools than in district schools, it should be noted that not all classes offered at the Middle and High School level are required to be taught by HQTs. Three charter schools that are strictly serving elementary grades report 100% HQTs. The specific programming of the upper grades charter schools include many options for student learning that are outside the normal High School electives options, which would indicate a greater use of community experts, mentors, and business community members working with students. These opportunities are exactly the flexible learning environments the state’s charter law was designed for. The more informative statistic would be the percentage of classes requiring HQTs, and the percentage of teachers in those classes who are HQTs. This data may be available in the individual charter school annual reports, or could be easily obtained from the charter schools directly.
Financial Stability
The district audit report highlighted the ongoing issues that many charter schools face with getting timely municipal audits completed. This is an acknowledged struggle for many of the charter schools. There are few municipal auditors with experience in charter schools, and not much leverage when an auditor simply fails to complete the work on schedule. Even those charter schools that turned in their audits on time or close to on time struggle to have the work completed by the auditors prior to the audit due date. Auditors reschedule site visit appointments with no explanation, fail to meet specific deadlines, and require constant management on the part of a charter school to ensure the report is completed on time. This is an ongoing challenge for charter schools, and one that does not have an immediate remedy in place as each school must approach their audit separately from all the others, leaving each audit a small piece of the auditors’ overall business. The district’s charter school leaders are working with the charter school administrative office at PPS to remedy this situation with the most current auditors.
We agree and appreciate the finding that district assistance with a unified format for quarterly financial reporting would dramatically improve the consistency of reporting andshorten the preparation time for individual charter schools, as well as ensure the information that is specifically important to the district for oversight is included in those reports. It is likely that such a format would lead to more consistent timeliness in reporting as well, allowing for “plugging-in” of information instead of full-report generation with every report for each school.
Student Achievement
Student Achievement at charter schools is reported through the same channels as at district schools. The Oregon Report Card publishes student achievement data on all state standardized assessments, as well as on other indicators of a charter school’s success (student attendance, graduation rate, etc.). There does appear to be enough data for school-to-school, school-to-district, and school-to-state comparisons, which are published annually through the district and state; though the PPS Audit Report states, “Annual reporting requirements are not well understood by charter schools and the district is unclear about what charters should be accountable for…The myriad of student achievement goals and academic expectations for PPS charters results in a less than optimal system of accountability.” There appear to be very clear expectations as far as the charter schools are concerned, and they are outlined in the following paragraph of the report, “All charter contracts require charters to meet federal AYP standards including academic achievement in reading and mathematics. In addition, all charters but LEP High are required to meet district averages in Writing assessments.” However in the same paragraph, the district report states, “…it appears that neither the district charter manager nor the charter schools seems entirely sure of the academic expectations and reporting requirements for which they are accountable.”