San Carlos is an unusual School District in that 6 of its7 schools (all except Central Middle School) are “charter” schools. I suspect most parents don’t even realize this because, with the exception of the San Carlos Charter Learning Center (CLC), all of the schools appear to be fairly “traditional.” CLC, which was the first charter school in the state, feels more like what a charter school was designed to do, with a much more flexible curriculum, staffing arrangements, educational experience, etc.
Last night the School Board had an excellent study session to understand exactly what charter schools are, what are the benefits and complications of having them, and why San Carlos has this unusual situation. Although the law and history here are extremely complicated, the highlights are as follows:
- One of the main reasons why the other 5 schools became charter schools was due to financial reasons — as charters, our schools get more money from the state than they would have under standard “revenue limit” payments. An updated financial analysis shows that this condition is still true — we currently get somewhere between $500K – $1.5 million more from the state (depending on enrollment assumptions) due to the schools’ charter status.
- The charter status has historically allowed us to grow our enrollment by taking out-of-district students without Inter-District Transfers and therefore more easily fill classrooms to capacity (which brings in more revenue with little additional cost). I wrote about this in a blog post last year.
- Although the general rule is that charter schools are open to anyone who lives in the state regardless of their home address, there are a series of both mandatory and discretionary “preferences” that govern enrollment. These get complicated, but for conversion charter schools (which all but Central and CLC are), the SCSD must give preference to students who reside in the “former attendance area” of a school — this is essentially what we have called our “boundaries.” The Board can only change these “boundaries” by getting a waiver from the State Board of Education, which seems like a fairly straightforward process. Also, there are mandatory preferences for current students (meaning once a student is in, he/she can’t be kicked out regardless of where they live or move to) and there are preferences for students who reside in the SCSD boundaries. If there is left over room, then all other admissions must happen by random lottery. The Board has some latitude on adding more discretionary preferences, but this is one of the areas where having Charter Schools makes dealing with our enrollment a bit more complicated.
- The above rules, however, do not mean that once a student is in an elementary school, he/she automatically has rights to go to our middle schools. We have in the past allowed all out-of-district elementary students to go to our middle schools, but given that the middle schools are reaching physical capacity, this may become an issue going forward.
- Being charter schools, we have a lot more flexibility in curriculum and instruction. Admittedly, we don’t use a lot of that flexibility (that’s a discussion for a future meeting), but we have been able to adopt certain materials that weren’t in the then current state standards. Because of recent state budget and curriculum changes, everything we are currently using in our district is now in compliance, but certainly this charter status gives us some future flexibility to adopt materials before they are state standards and do other things that our district believes will best serve children.
- As charter schools, we have more flexibility in employment particularly in our associate positions — such as P.E. teachers, music teachers, literacy associates, etc.
- The question had been raised as to whether our Special Education costs are higher for out-of-district students than for in-district students. If this were true, it could mitigate (or reverse) the financial benefit of bringing in more students out of district to increase our ADA. However, the analysis presented last night shows that this is not true — our incidence and cost of special education services is fairly consistent across both the in-district and out-of-district student population.
So, it seems all in all, there continues to be a net benefit to our district (and to our children) for remaining charter schools. However, I do think it is the current consensus of most involved that CLC remain the single school which is the more classic charter (if that is not an oxymoron) in the sense that it uses a significant amount of its flexibility for curriculum, personnel, etc. Our other schools can remain charter schools, keep the financial benefit and the added flexibility, yet still remain more “traditional” in many ways.
A natural question then becomes, why isn’t Central Middle School a charter school also? Well, according to Charter school law, every district must offer a “non-charter” alternative at every grade level. Interestingly enough, we didn’t do the for the elementary schools. But we learned last night that such a requirement could be met by a District working with a neighboring District (e.g. Belmont or Redwood City) to guarantee acceptance of one of our students if they requested to be in a non-charter school. To my knowledge, no one has ever requested this in the history of our district, but that arrangement would satisfy the requirement.
So, what are the next steps? Besides further discussing a general philosophy and issues here, there are a few specific areas to address in the near to medium-term:
- The charters for four of our schools need to be renewed this year, so we need to understand if any changes should be made to such charters (like including the non-charter arrangements with neighboring districts)
- We should consider whether we should look into Central becoming a Charter School — the initial analysis shows that would bring in more money to the District.
- We should further discuss CLC, including its relationship to the District as well as how we are (or can) leverage “best practices” from CLC to other schools of the District.
I want to thank all of the administrators (and our attorneys) who put a ton of time into preparing for this study session. It was incredibly useful and enlightening. Stay tuned for more!
Seth, I’m curious as to what if any flexibility if gained by the charter status when it comes to evaluating teachers. In connection with Obama’s “Race to the Top” program I’m hearing that CA may have to consider some amount of reform in this area if it is to compete for the additional federal funding.
That is an excellent question. A couple of dimensions to this. As for the state of California, it just did pass a law which removed some ambiguity in the state law which may have made it ineligible to get “race to the top” funds. So now school districts in CA are eligible and we will be competing for some of those grants.
As to our charter status and how it relates to flexibility in evaluating teachers, that’s a bit more complicated. Start-up charters like the Charter Learning Center have a lot of flexibility in this regard, as they can write that into their original charter. Conversion charters — which our other 5 charter schools are — generally do not change how employees are represented when they convert to charter schools. In other words, in those charter schools, teachers (and other employees) are representative by a union and their agreements are collectively bargained. Provisions regarding teacher evaluations can certainly be negotiated in these collective bargaining agreements, but our status as charter schools doesn’t significantly change our ability to unilaterally implement something. Ultiimately it has to be an agreed-upon provision. That said, I think the trend (partially catalyzed by the federal efforts in this area) is that more school districts will modify how they evaluate teachers, and we’ve been talking about that ourselves in San Carlos.
Seth,
How do you compare CLC educational program with schools in the district? You mentioned that the SCSD should look at CLC’s relationship with the district. In what ways can our district learn from CLC’s best practices? In what ways will the school board be looking at CLC’s relationship with the district?
In many ways, I think CLC shows some excellent promise with its academics and with the quality of its students. At the same time, I do not feel that they are a fair comparison to district schools because of the advantages you describe of being a start-up charter (where district charters do not have those advantages). What are your thoughts?
Derek,
I don’t compare it directly because it is a bit of apples and oranges, and frankly I’m not an expert in educational methods so it would unfair for me to talk about the merits and drawbacks of different pedagogical approaches. However, it’s clear that CLC does have the freedom to “experiment” more, and in any experiment there are learnings. CLC and the SCSD have a unique relationship in that, despite the fact that CLC is a “start-up” charter, this community has always viewed it as part of the district. That is not true in most other school districts, as newer start-up charter schools have much more of an arms-length relationship with their corresponding school district. So, although we always need to examine the legal relationship in terms of oversight, liability, etc. (as these are required by charter law and just generally good practices), I want to the School Board to charge the administration of both CLC and SCSD to look further into leveraging best practices from CLC to use for the entire district (assuming they comply with law and ed code regulations, etc.). Some of those practices and educational approaches may not be appropriate for other schools, but I suspect a number will be. The next step would be for the School Board to have a follow-up study session on the relationship between CLC and SCSD and examine these exact issues.
Note that there are even potentially practices beyond the pedagogical that may be more useful to learn about. For example, are there certain approaches that CLC uses to motivate and reward teachers and can we learn anything from that and apply it across the district? This is an area where there are some restrictions for our other six schools since teacher contracts there need to be collectively bargained, but maybe there are appraoches that would be good to try to include in such negotiations. Again, I don’t know if they exist, but I want to push ourselves to continually examine them.
My belief is that every child in our district will receive a great education — it’s just that CLC takes a slightly different path to get there, and honestly it’s up to parents as to whether that is the right fit for their child. As a board member, my view is that in addition to having that great choice for parents, a main benefit of having CLC as an integral part of our overall district is to leverage what they learn along the way. I hope that answers your question.