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.

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?

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.