Equity and fairness Maine's publicly chartered schools

The "chartered" with a "d" is deliberate for two reasons: for the first, see my earlier post, Charter as Verb: Innovation and Autonomy. The second reason is that it enables us to examine our existing system of schools as "publicly chartered" as well, and to ask the question: is the "charter" that our current schools negotiated with the towns they serve (in the case of our public/private academies 150 or more years ago) adequate? If not, might we consider a process of chartering new schools that might match up better with today's realities? Those realities are the ones our legislature will need to wrestle with, as this last group of Rep. Steve Lovejoy's questions makes clear.

Should we require that charter schools take a truly representative population that gives it the same demographics as the public schools they draw from? Should it include special education If not, aren't we creating an unequal field in terms of comparisons of the results of the schools?

Yes, we ABSOLUTELY should require that publicly chartered schools serve a truly representative population, including students with special needs. A less than carefully constructed charter law would exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the class divisions in American K-12 schooling - where the gulf between what those of means and privilege have access to, is from birth on, ever-widening. A carefully constructed charter law can give public school students access to the types of approaches once thought to be the province only of private schools.

Each of the 6 or so Gates Foundation-linked start-ups I had some working experience with, including Casco Bay HS, built into its agreement with the host district or charter authorizer some version of the phrase, "replicates the demographics of the sending area."
This has been reliably accomplished all over the country, usually using a "banded lottery." In the case of CBHS, Portland's HS population at the time was roughly 70% white, with 35% receiving free and reduced lunch. 18% had a special ed designation, 20% were English language learners. By "banding" the lottery with 5% of those numbers, we were able to start that first year with a demographically representative group.

This is another area where a well-crafted state authorizing law is crucial. The law can establish the demographic categories that are going to "replicated" in the lottery, so that every individual community doesn't have to (or get to) make up their own criteria for what it means to serve all children. It means, or should mean, that charters serve ALL children, period. This is another area, where, to my mind, Maine's law needs to be stronger than the latest version of LD1438 which, though not designed to, has the potential unintended consequence of making is easier for a charter school to opt out of serving special education students.

How? Well, some communities in Maine already have much more "public school choice" than most states, and what follows attempts to explicate some of what works about the system we have - a gap analysis of sorts that specifically looks at which children have options, what those options are, and how, if possible, we can increase both equity and choice. (For now, we'll not touch much on the de-facto public schools like Thornton Academy or Lincoln Academy (which are really separate, non-profit institutions) since these schools must serve special ed students - but these schools will have to be factored into a chartered school bill, since they too will feel threatened by such an approach.)

So what choices to Maine parents have? A mini-case study, with some personal experience, might help folks understand how complex the landscape is. In some communities, some of our superb private/independent schools, mostly non-profit, ranging from the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) in Edgecomb to Waldorf schools to Wayneflete, qualify as “schools of choice” for what amounts to a voucher (in most communities, $9,066, which is based on a state formula that translates the various kinds of tax revenues that fund public schools). But they do not, in most cases, serve special needs students.

CTL, where one of my daughters went for grades 6-8 and the other for grade 8, has for years qualified as "receiving" school of choice for parents in Edgecomb and Alna. CTL is notable in that the tuition is kept a low as possible - around $7,300 per kid per year 2 years ago – so that the “voucher” can cover the entire cost.

But if your child has special needs, or otherwise does not meet the selection criteria for CTL (which makes clear, up front, that it does have programs specifically designed for struggling learners) he or she is not accepted. Those parents can send their kids to the Edgecomb Eddy School, or in some cases to Great Salt Bay Community School in Damariscotta or Boothbay Elementary but those option may be disappearing soon. In fact, CTL has become a haven (mostly - there are real exceptions) for parents from surrounding towns who can afford an additional $7,300 per student or so, and value the amazingly strong sense of community and the efficacy of a deliberate design (Nancie Atwell’s).

And just to further complicate the equity pie, while you have no real choice if your child has special needs, Edgecomb is one of a sizeable number of Maine towns where residents (including for the past few years my ex-wife) can use this voucher at ANY accredited school in Maine or elsewhere. That explains, in part, why a public schools advocate such as myself has a daughter at the private, all-girls Emma Willard School , from which her Mom graduated, in Troy, NY. In this case, the private school kicked in some financial aid, Mom kicked in a substantial amount, and the town of Edgecomb kicked in $9066.

So - I'll argue for a bill that prevents what I call de-facto private schools (which are different from schools like Lincoln Academy, which are de facto PUBLIC) from becoming charters. If we allow "dollars follow the student funding" to go to schools that cannot meet clear standards for meeting all students' needs, we, as Rep. Lovejoy points out are “creating an unequal field in terms of comparisons of the results.”

But that does not mean that we cannot balance equity and choice - in fact, we can fairly easily do a much better job that we're doing now. What would be fair - not to mention more cost-effective and educationally productive, would be to extend school choice to every family in Maine - but to authorize its disbursement only to schools that agree to the banded lottery approach.

That could include by the way, existing (or recently existing) public schools, such as the West Harpswell School or the Lubec school, which could reconstitute as a pre-k-12 charter school - in collaboration with Maine Enterprise Schools and/or our partner Learning Works, with another replication model, or on its own. It could include a public school such as Casco Bay High School, which has had a number of out of district students each year – each one of which must be negotiated via an individual superintendents agreement – a process neither transparent nor workable at any significant scale.

Such choice among public schools, which could include public charters, is only putting into practice what some folks already have access to – if in some pretty bizarre ways. For instance, if you're in the newly consolidated RSU 12, you can drive 55 miles from the tip of Westport to the northern reaches of Palermo and, for high school, choose between, depending on the details of the previous agreements each town had, between Wiscasset High School, Erskine Academy in China, Hall-Dale in Hallowell, Lincoln Academy in Damariscotta (or, as explained earlier, take your voucher to NYA or Wayneflete).

But…if you're one of the declining number of students at Boothbay Region HS, your only public school choice is Boothbay High. And if you're one of the declining number of students at Wiscasset High School, you're only choice is Wiscasset High School. Both schools, 11.5 miles away from each other, seek to maintain status as "everything for everyone" factory-model high schools, despite the fact that they’re both below 300 students – a size at which, as studies such as those of David Silvernail have indicated, efficacy is hard to come by.

Dr. Silvernail has, by the way, discouraged his work from being used to say “large schools are better than small schools.” His work looks at correlations between certain factors and certain outcomes –and based on a conversation I had with him this summer, does NOT imply that 100-student or smaller schools are not feasible. What his work shows, more accurately, is that smaller schools that attempt to be everything that larger schools are end up not being very successful, or very cost effective.

We can make smaller schools cost effective, but in order to do so, different assumptions need to be made. Very small schools public schools that seek to operate with a different learning paradigm – Northhaven comes to mind, where Barney Hallowell and others have created and sustained a K-12 school that outperforms almost every Maine school system in the things that matter most to parents and communities – are saddled with the same certification and EPS funding formula that were designed for entirely different approaches, and end up with extraordinarily high costs. Northhaven’s $16,000 plus Northhaven figure consistently tops Maine’s per student cost lists. But an unnecessarily large part of that additional cost is simply the certificated staff it takes to legally meet the requirement of who teaches what to whom - with 100 or so kids K-12.

If a community such as North Haven (and Lubec and West Harpswell and the very non-island community of Greenville) had a business plan - which should be just as important as the educational plan - for a public chartered school that worked based on the $9,066 per student cost, why wouldn’t we let them roll it out? For most communities, that would be a considerable savings over the actual per student cost-per student now (made up of state reimbursement and local contributions.) Factor keeping even 10-15 more kids each year more in schools and on track to contribute to their community and/or to move on college, the military, or adventure.

Cost per student vs. benefit per graduate?

Not only is the real cost per student in most Maine systems SUBSTANTIALLY higher than $9,066 - but when you factor in the many dollars that are disbursed for the benefit of children through the social services and health care systems, every child WELL-educated at a public chartered school would be a bargain.

And when you also factor in cost per graduate, which can include all of the costs that accrue to a community (and state) when it's young people are unable to envision a future for themselves, it almost doesn't matter whose economic projections you use, the results are the opposite of what we hope for - and promise - our young people. See the so-called “Georgetown study,” Prepare Maine, or Jon Riggelman’s recent op-ed piece in the Brunswick Times-Record.

Our organization, Maine Enterprise Schools, has been working with forward-looking school superintendents (William Shuttleworth in Cumberland, Heather Perry, now the new AOS 3, Tom Morrill in Auburn, Bob Hasson in Cumberland) about becoming the a pilot site for a plan that could enable any community in Maine to enroll a minimum of 40 students within the first two years and a maximum of 100 students at any one in a fully-accredited public school. We plan to replicate, at a Maine scale, the process that produced Casco Bay High School - that of a community deciding that it's current public school needs could not be adequately met by its current public schools options.

Supt. William Shuttleworth of RSU 1 has been among the most aggressive "can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" reformers in Maine - in large part because he recognizes that change is going to come. If we're to protect, preserve, and extend the promise of public education in the US, those of us in the system (those of us who ARE the system) need to embrace the new paradigm. Later this week, Maine Enterprise Schools will present this week a dollars-in, dollars-out plan for a collaboration with two or more local non-profits and the four districts that make up the Bath Regional Vocational and Technical Institute. Not only will this proposal not require additional infrastructure, it is explicitly designed to leverage other investment that will preserve and transform cultural assets such as Morris Farm in Wiscasset, the Boothway Railway Village and Museum, Round Top Farm in Damariscotta, or the Kennebec Freight Shed in Bath.

So...in case you've made it through these last three long-ish posts and are itching for specifics - your reward will come in a day or two. In answering Rep. Lovejoy's questions, I was trying to make it clear that the assumptions that underlie his questions, while accurate in the current fun-house mirror of school funding, need not be brought forward as constraints on the legislature's next round of consolidation and/or chartered school legislation. Nor should they be - while it is not practical to start with a completely clean sheet of paper, we at least should be able to say, "If we DID have such a clean sheet, what would we put on it?" What would be EQUITABLE, as opposed to merely, "best we can do?"