An Educated Choice

Rhode Island charter schools offer options and innovation in a beleaguered education system. But are they money well-spent?

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An advantage to charters is they can decide to be small and can regulate their growth, a luxury that traditional public schools don’t have, since they must accept all students residing within the district who haven’t chosen another type of school. Each charter school has its own board of directors, which is responsible only for that school, and many are sponsored by nonprofit organizations. The level of partnership varies, however. At Beacon, five representatives from Providence-based Johnson & Wales University –– including the school’s president –– sit on the board and regularly attend meetings. The university also has donated cooking equipment and offered help with designing the curriculum and basic financial management, according to Clif Boyle, Johnson & Wales vice president of academic affairs. On the other hand, the Compass School has little interaction with its sponsor, Save the Bay, says Allen Zipke, Compass’s director, who is working to develop a partnership.

The administrators and faculty at each school adapt the curriculum, teaching methods and facilities to best meet what the board has decided is best for the individual school and its students. Proponents say this makes charter schools highly flexible, adaptable environments more suited to tailoring to the needs of the students at each particular school. Oliveira calls it "shared ownership for the outcome of students." 

"Everyone has a stake," he continues, "in making quality decisions that produce quality results, and that’s what we’re seeing in charter schools."

Parisi doesn’t see it quite that way. He believes charter schools are not accountable to its main constituency: the communities that pay at least a share of the bill to send those children to school. Charter school boards, he says, "are not elected [by the community], and I think that matters."

The AFT and other unions, such as the National Education Association Rhode Island, have a more basic beef, too: eight of the eleven charters employ non-union teachers, creating a wedge of non-unionized workers within public school districts in which all other teachers are union members.

Critics also point to how charter schools are funded. Charter schools get their money from a blend of federal, state and local funds, just as traditional public schools. There are differences in the percentage that comes from each source, and the funding formulas vary, but the net effect is there are now competing educational systems clamoring for those dollars. This year’s budget calls for charter schools to get about $27 million from the state –– money that likely would have been added to the $696 million the state budgeted this year for traditional public schools if charter schools didn’t exist. And in tight budget times with a General Assembly that has decided against allocating more money to public education this fiscal year, those public school budgets are even tighter.

THE FOCUS GROUP sessions have ended, and the students who participated are going to their regular classes. A floor below, a group of ninth- through eleventh-grade students have completed a battery of exams to chart their progress in math, reading and language arts. Robert Pilkington, who to many is the face of the charter school movement in Rhode Island, is taking me on a tour of Beacon. He is proud to show it off.

Beacon occupies two floors of a building owned by The Homestead Group (formerly the Arc of Northern Rhode Island), a not-for-profit agency that assists disabled people. The building is a former furniture store built in the 1920s. Tin panels painted white are riveted into the ceiling. The stairs squeak. The theater arts concentration is in one classroom. The visual arts section is in another. Other classrooms are used for whatever subject needs to be taught at that time. A small lending library is wedged in the hallway, with no walls. It’s separated from the rest of the common space by four dwarflike bookshelves. Chinese history is mounted on a partition in the same hallway, just before rows of student lockers. It looks like a kiosk at a mall.

It is cramped, but there are expansion plans. By fall, the third floor should be renovated, adding classroom space. Homestead is moving out, so the fourth floor will be in play. In any event, no one is complaining about the current space. After all, it’s far better than Beacon’s last location at a former parochial elementary school on George Street, a place so old and dingy that administrators were embarrassed to show it to parents. When it was warm, shoes would stick to the waxy floors. When it rained, the roof leaked. A bucket was placed in the visual arts classroom to catch the water. When Beacon moved to its present location on Main Street, students commemorated the past by drawing on a mural above the school’s front doors a bucket with a drop of water poised to fall in it.

Beacon almost never made it to its new digs. The state closed the school in June 2005, after Beacon nearly went bankrupt. Administrators had overestimated the number of students who would attend the school in its first two years of existence. To make matters worse, they missed the deadline to trim staff to reflect the lower enrollment figures before state law barred them from making any layoffs. By March 2005, Beacon did not have enough cash to make payroll. It asked the state education department for a $280,000 bailout. But the loan came at a heavy price: Beacon would have to surrender its charter when the school year ended.

"The past administration didn’t know what it was doing," Pilkington says. "They just ran the place into the ground."

When Beacon closed, critics said its financial woes were an example of why charter schools don’t work: too much autonomy, not enough oversight. But a band of supporters, led by the school’s students, refused to give up. They held protests, attracting local media; they petitioned the state to review the matter. More than sixty students attended a July hearing before education department officials. Mattera, a rising junior at the time, wore a white T-shirt on which he scrawled his appeal to the hearing officer in black ink:

"Mr. Avila"

"Be our Hero!"

"Save our School!"

"Please!"

The state recommended that Beacon not reopen, but other forces were at work. Johnson & Wales had agreed to sponsor the school should it be allowed to reopen. Meanwhile, Governor Carcieri, Woonsocket Mayor Susan Menard, state lawmakers from the Woonsocket area and local leaders were pushing education officials to reconsider. Just a week before classes were to begin, Beacon was told it could reopen. Ninety percent of the students –– many of whom had enrolled in other schools –– returned to Beacon. The school, like some educational Lazarus, had been raised from the dead.

Beacon’s charter is up for renewal in June; until then the school can’t raise additional private funds. But Pilkington says the school is "on the cusp" of being on firm financial footing, ending last school year with a $117,000 surplus.

Beacon is the only charter school in Rhode Island to have been closed; the others are thriving, if one considers the schools’ academic performance and that nine of the eleven schools had waiting lists last year. The case is not the same with charter schools nationwide, where the reviews have been mixed. Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says that’s because some states authorized schools with looser regulations and have been reluctant to close them when they did poorly.

Rhode Island passed its first charter school law in 1995. It allowed for flexibility in designing the curriculum, but not much else: The schools were part of the local school district, the teachers were union, and the finances were strictly regulated. Charter school backers lobbied for more autonomy. Three years later, they got it. The amended law allowed charters to govern themselves and be sponsored by nonprofit organizations or colleges and universities in the state, separated them from the local school districts and the unions, and gave them more control over their spending.

Representative Paul Crowley was one of the lawmakers that introduced the amended legislation. "I never felt it would be a substitute to the public school system," says the Newport Democrat. "It was unrealistic to create charter schools that would serve 100,000 kids, but there should be some competition and some options to the public school system, and if they worked, they could wake up public schools to think, ‘Hey, we have to do something different here.’ "

Parisi says his union initially supported charter schools as experimental schools, as laboratories of sorts where the teachers were unionized, and lessons learned could be shared with other district schools. When the laws were changed in 1998, the AFT chapter, along with other unions, rebelled. "When you create autonomous schools," Parisi says, "they’re not integrated with other schools in the community, and there’s no sharing with the community. There’s no advantage to the whole."

With the moratorium in place and no new money in this year’s budget, charter schools are at a halt. Crowley says this is because there’s no extra money to fund new schools and because lawmakers want to ensure they’re giving enough to existing schools. "The way the law is written [a charter school is] more or less an entitlement. Once it gets there, we have to fund them," he says.

Stephen Nardelli is aware of the budgetary constraints, but he believes charter schools have proven their worth. "The bottom line is we’re stuck at eleven," says the executive director of the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools. "We’ve got five quality proposals (to open new schools). We’ve got parents petitioning. We’ve done everything they wanted us to do, so it’s very frustrating that we’re not allowed to grow the industry."

THE SENIOR-LED musical has ended to rousing applause, and the jubilant students and beaming parents stream across the street to Beacon, where the culinary students have prepared sweets such as mini eclairs and baklava. Paintings and sketches from the visual arts seniors have been mounted on the cafeteria walls. A man notices me admiring a watercolor portrait of a lone wolf set against a nighttime sky. He introduces himself as Paul Galley. That’s his daughter Elizabeth’s work, he says. She’s going to Rhode Island College to study art on a presidential scholarship.

I ask him if Beacon has been good for his daughter. "Oh, yeah," he says. "It built up her confidence. She actually opened herself up. She’s a much more open kid. She takes pride in what she does. She understands what an education is, how important it is to go off and do things."

Would she have gotten the same education at a traditional public school? "I’m not sure. Really I’m not," he says. "But really it was the best niche for her."

He looks again at the art. "I think this is a great fit for a lot of kids," he offers. "It lets them be themselves. They don’t get pushed back in the shadows of a room and then fade into nothing. They get the chance to be awesome kids."