Well-run charter experiments in two states show dramatic results

WASHINGTON — Are charter schools still the best hope for students from America's low-income urban families?

Some charters do fail — victims of poor management or an inability to raise students' achievement scores.

But two powerful experiments — one in Boston, the other in the San Francisco Bay Area — suggest the power of well-run charters to break through barriers and dramatically increase the potential for inner-city children to succeed.

Critics have said test scores in charter schools aren't materially better than in regular public schools. Even when charter school scores are better, the critics dismiss the findings by suggesting the charters have an advantage because they're skimming off students from committed families already more engaged in their children's education.

But a rigorous Harvard-MIT study of Boston-area students, sponsored by the Boston Foundation, has shown otherwise. Massachusetts uses lotteries to decide which children get admitted to charter schools — and which don't. So the researchers were able to compare the subsequent academic performance of the lottery "winners" and "losers."

And what they found was extraordinary. At both the middle- and high-school levels, students who'd won the charter lottery subsequently scored impressive gains, both in math and English skills, compared with students who'd lost and remained in the regular public schools.

"We were thrilled with the charter school results," says Mary Jo Meisner of the Boston Foundation. "There's been a feeling there's nothing you can do for poor, urban kids unless you cure poverty" and "fix" the entire environment that holds them back. The test results, she adds, show that's "just not true."

A more recent foundation-sponsored analysis, Meisner says, explains a crucial difference: time in school. Compared with the regular Boston schools' short days, the charters typically offer longer hours. Combining that with more personal attention to each child's needs produces real results.

Based on its charter-school findings, Boston Foundation President Paul Grogan and his colleagues led a major campaign to double the number of charter-school seats available in Massachusetts. Enlisting corporate and civic allies, it formed a broad "Race to the Top Coalition" to take advantage of the school-funding competition being conducted by the Obama administration.

Gov. Deval Patrick, at first hesitant, embraced the idea. And the Legislature, notwithstanding members' fear of teachers union retribution, passed a landmark education-reform bill giving underperforming school districts major new powers to help lagging students, including the right to move or fire teachers, start new schools and expand school hours.

Significantly, the bill doubled the state's number of permissible charter-school seats — from 16,739 seats to 35,082 seats for the most underperforming urban school districts.

In California, there's a 20-year old program — "Making Waves" — that has been coaching underprivileged African-American and Latino kids in Richmond and San Francisco through the public schools and in college.

The program, founded by multimillionaire investor John Scully and the late Rev. Eugene Farlough, is the epitome of "wraparound, year-round service." Children aren't just provided tutoring and ongoing academic enrichment but every assistance from solid meals (children with higher protein intake have higher achievement scores) to mental-health counseling (to cope with trauma many have experienced).

And the results are little short of sensational: Virtually all the students graduate from high school and 94 percent go on to college.

With its full-time staff of academic advisers, psychologists, social workers and nutritionists, Making Waves has extraordinarily high per-pupil costs (roughly $21,000 child per year). But by forming its own charter school — overcoming bitter opposition of the Richmond School Board — the program has been able to get some government funding to supplement its high, philanthropy-provided costs.

There's no chance, in Scully's view, to break America's "cycle of poverty" in troubled neighborhoods unless we increase our per-student expenditures dramatically to address young people's myriad needs. Such an investment, he argues, "will be recouped many times over in economic growth and increased productivity."

It's a difficult message to absorb in hard economic times. Though as both the Massachusetts and Bay Area reforms suggest, there's one constant: Charters, with their entrepreneurial flair and freedom from work-rule focused school unions and deadening school bureaucracy, will have to figure prominently in the equation.

Neal Peirce's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. E-mail nrp@citistates.com