Do Charter Schools Pass The Test?

By Jodie Morse/Mesa

Out here on the frontier, only the hardiest survive. And Paramount Academy is both figuratively and literally on the frontier. The school operates out of a handful of trailers at the edge of a cookie-cutter housing complex in Mesa, Ariz., a rugged desert city that sprouted into a Phoenix suburb two decades ago. But the academy sits on an ideological edge as well: Paramount is a charter school, a publicly funded enterprise that's privately run--in this case, primarily by a former shoe-repair-shop owner who never graduated from college--and free of the bureaucracy that bogs down so much of public education.

To survive, schools like Paramount must compete for market share by advertising in newspapers, putting up lawn signs and showering parents with pamphlets. Paramount likes to boast about its tiny student-teacher ratios, school uniforms and musical-theater program. A flyer for the school asked, "Are you ready for a change in public schools?"

Carrie Roan, a medical transcriptionist, was more than ready when she heard a radio ad for Paramount two summers ago. With 30-plus kids per class and unbending teachers, the public schools had failed her daughter Staci in most of the familiar ways. But after a year at Paramount, Staci was thriving. With the help of the school's performing-arts program, the once shy fourth-grader had found her voice and performed a Beach Boys medley in a charity concert at the Phoenix airport.

But not everything was ideal, and trouble was coming. Though Staci was more confident, she seldom brought home much schoolwork. Instead, she complained of unruly classes and bus rides. Then the school business got in the way of education. Paramount had to cut staff and stop ordering new school supplies. In February the school lost its music teacher in a salary dispute and suddenly switched to a much cheaper, 4-H agriculture curriculum. Staci would have to drop her singing ambitions and cultivate seedlings. "Paramount was attractive to me because of the choice," says Roan, who is enrolling her daughter in another school for the fall. "But now I'm finding that charters are full of dysfunction." Kathy Leih's two daughters didn't last even a year at Paramount. One spring morning three years ago, they piled into the school van with their classmates for a field trip--to distribute flyers for the school. "They're supposed to be in school learning, not advertising," says Leih, who promptly moved her children elsewhere. "I mean, really, who's benefiting from this?"

Since the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, the movement has multiplied at a dizzying pace. Today half a million students attend more than 2,000 such schools in 35 states. And that number is sure to swell. With his voucher proposal all but dead on Capitol Hill, President George W. Bush is calling for $175 million to help launch new charter schools. The education bill approved by the House last week gives students in low-performing schools the option--and the bus fare--to transfer to charters; schools that fail three years in a row could be shut down and reopened as charters.

The pet project of free-market devotees, charter schools were built on a simple premise: Give parents the choice, and they will vote with their feet. Innovative charters will flourish, the rest will close up shop and lousy public schools will get with the program. And as in any market, there will be both winners and losers. But the power will fall to parents to do the research and pick wisely. Looking for smaller, safer havens for their children, poor parents have signed on in droves.

Yet it remains unclear if charters have lived up to their promise. Two recent studies have found that students in charter schools outgained their public school peers on standardized exams. But studies of charter students in Michigan and Texas found that their test scores severely lagged. The Texas House has since passed a two-year moratorium on the creation of new charter schools. Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania legislators are pushing for more oversight. "Despite the rhetoric that charter schools were going to be hothouses of reform, the results are mixed," says Bruce Fuller, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "We have to ask if charters are beset by the same problems as garden-variety public schools."

No state better illustrates the promise and the perils of this experiment than Arizona, the state with the largest number of charters in the nation--some good, some bad, some in between. The question is whether parents have the tools to tell them apart. In Mesa, the state's largest school district, 5,000 youngsters--about 7% of the district's students--have flocked to Mesa's 26 charter schools, which come in all shapes, sizes and creeds--Montessori schools, patriotic history schools, schools for troubled youth. One school, sandwiched in a strip mall between a Taco Bell and a Dairy Queen, offers its students credit for working at Pizza Hut.

Mesa's public schools responded to this educational free-for-all by creating arts and Montessori magnet programs. The competition for pupils--and $5,000-a-head state funding--has grown so fierce that the public schools now advertise in movie theaters. District teachers can take customer-service workshops; a portion of their pay hinges on how well they rate on consumer-satisfaction surveys.

Some charter success stories have emerged. One is Mesa Arts Academy. Its 170 students win national art competitions, and in the past two years have posted gains of more than 40% on standardized exams. The school is located inside the 25 crime-ridden blocks known as Southside, after the neighborhood's resident gang. Public schools here were historically overcrowded, and the one thing Southside had going for it was a vibrant Boys & Girls Club, where kids spent their after-school hours doing homework and playing basketball.

In 1995, the club joined forces with local school officials to open a charter with a two-pronged course of study--mornings devoted to academics, afternoons to social studies and arts electives like orchestra and mural painting. The whole operation is conducted by principal Sue Douglas, 51, who spent 15 years teaching and serving on boards of private schools.

Her first months on the job were a crash course in how the other half lives. Police shut down a methamphetamine lab a block from the school. Kids confided they slept under their beds to avoid bullets from drive-by shootings. So Douglas and her teachers and parents worked with police to clean things up. Prison inmates were bused in to sweep crack vials from the school playground. Parents cruised Southside armed with cell phones, ready to dial police at the first sign of trouble. Now when Douglas circles the neighborhood, kids bolt out of their homes as if she were the Good Humor man. "She's not afraid to walk up and down the streets like she's lived here for years," says Emily Valenzuela, a mom who lives a block away. Neither are the dozens of kids from Mesa's ritziest zip codes who now commute to Southside to attend the academy.

Mesa Arts is a takes-a-village enterprise. But many of the city's charter schools are less lavish affairs that can fall prey to the strains that plague most start-ups. This was certainly true of Paramount Academy. Launched in 1997, the school was originally led by Marsh Dale Cline, a seasoned public school teacher. His son Dale R. Cline was a member of the board and also groomed the school grounds. After cycling through several board members and surviving one aborted takeover attempt, the senior Cline resigned last summer. His son, who freely admits "my background's not education," took the helm with another manager and opened the school with a new charter and a different sponsor.

The second blow came last fall, when parents started decamping to other schools. Paramount discovered it had overestimated its head count, and state funding was reduced by $400,000. With its credit cards maxed to the hilt, the school made cutbacks. The school is suffering from growing pains and will be on its feet this fall, according to Leo Condos, a Mesa attorney who represents Paramount and specializes in charter-school law. Says Condos: "Most of the people in the charter business have an educational dream, and they just don't always pursue it with the best business knowledge."

In this brave new marketplace, education and business are harder and harder to separate. For this school year, Paramount budgeted $5,000 for advertising and $6,000 for textbooks. Even as the school was freezing funds for new supplies, Paramount principal Bud Garrett had to send his teachers door-to-door to recruit new pupils. "We scrambled big time," explains Garrett, "flyering and advertising until we got up to 140." While Garrett and his staff were out fishing for students, Cline was hard at work on another venture: a second Paramount campus in nearby Peoria, where he says there are "better market opportunities."

Arizona prides itself on not suffocating charter schools with red tape. Most states grant charters for five years; Arizona's span a full 15. Short of requiring that an applicant not have a rap sheet, there are no resume requirements for running a charter school. The state has closed down just four schools, none of them for academic reasons.

Arizona scrutinizes the annual financial audits of charter schools, but pays less heed to what goes on in the classroom. Paramount, for instance, has drawn no special attention for its schizophrenic test scores. In some areas close to 70% of students met or exceeded state standards last year; on the eighth-grade math exam, none did. In April, Kristen Jordison of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools made a routine visit to Paramount Academy on a day when all but kindergarten classes were suspended for testing. On the basis of that visit, Jordison said the school "seemed to be doing what they need to do." During a visit by TIME, however, a group of students had locked several boys inside the girls' bathroom. The crowd of students summoned to the principal's office outnumbered those in some classrooms--evidence, Garrett says, that charter schools tend to be magnets for misfits. "I got kicked out of my public school last week for cold-cocking a girl," boasted a student.

For many parents, the quality of the charter is almost beside the point so long as their kids are out of public schools. Even parents who have been burned by charters continue to relish their right to choose. After Buzz and Samantha Koch, ages 11 and 8, spent a year in a cash-strapped charter with no playground or library, their mother Trish became a tougher customer. She shopped around, sifting through test-score data on the Internet and touring a dozen charter schools, including many that she says made her think, "I wouldn't put my dog here." Her children are now prospering at the Noah Webster Basic School, a charter that attracts students who work above their grade level. Samantha and her second-grade friends spout square roots for fun. Fifth-grader Buzz just wrote a paper on Abraham Lincoln's photographer.

Where does that leave charters' biggest boosters, poor and inner-city parents who can't always take time off from work to go school shopping? Two years ago, Josefina Galvan, a Mexican immigrant who works the graveyard shift as a nurse's aide, enrolled her four kids in Paramount Academy on word of mouth alone. They lasted one year and learned so little that all four repeated their grades at their new school--another charter that came highly recommended but is no award winner. "Even if the charter schools are terrible, I wouldn't put my kids back in public school," she says. "I just have this feeling they're safer in charters. At least here in America I get to make that choice."