Amistad Academy Endangered

A great organization, ConnCAN, has been fighting to improve the charter school legislation in CT.  Its Executive Director is Alex Johnston(alex.johnston@conncan.org).  Let's hope the CT legislature has the good sense to do the right thing:

Amistad Academy and Elm City College Preparatory School say they're in the business of "dramatic, life-changing" education for inner-city kids. Now these schools, two of New Haven's best, face their own dramatic, life-changing moment. They can keep growing, turning more and more struggling students into academic achievers. Or they can wither on the vineeven while their sister schools in New York City flourish and multiply.

The difference between Connecticut and New York lies not in the students or parents, but in the politicians. In New York, they like charter schools. In Connecticut, not so much.

The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would let charter schools like Amistad and Elm City expand. Without that permission, Amistad will have to scrap plans to open two new schools this fall: a K-4 school to feed into its existing middle school, and a high school for Amistad graduates.

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Amistad Academy Endangered
It's crunch time for New Haven's high-achieving charter schools

by Carole Bass - April 6, 2006, New Haven Advocate

Amistad Academy and Elm City College Preparatory School say they're in the business of "dramatic, life-changing" education for inner-city kids. Now these schools, two of New Haven's best, face their own dramatic, life-changing moment. They can keep growing, turning more and more struggling students into academic achievers. Or they can wither on the vineeven while their sister schools in New York City flourish and multiply.

The difference between Connecticut and New York lies not in the students or parents, but in the politicians. In New York, they like charter schools. In Connecticut, not so much.

The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would let charter schools like Amistad and Elm City expand. Without that permission, Amistad will have to scrap plans to open two new schools this fall: a K-4 school to feed into its existing middle school, and a high school for Amistad graduates.

Worse, Elm City won't be able to add grades to its skeletal elementary and middle schools, which currently serve grades K-2 and 5-6.

"That would be a total disaster," says Dacia Toll, director of Amistad Academy and president of Achievement First, the parent organization for both Amistad and Elm City.

"We would have to make the difficult decision whether to tell our current [Elm City] second-graders and sixth-graders, "You can't come back,' or to tell the kids who've been accepted for next year's kindergarten and fifth grades that we're not going to be able to take them after all."

A decade after it began, Connecticut's experiment with charter schools is itself at a turning point.

Charter schools serve public school students but generally operate outside the control of their local districts, instead reporting directly to the state. A 1996 law allows for such schools but strictly limits their size and per-pupil fundingin part to keep the experiment under control, and in part to keep critics at bay.

Now the schools are pushing for more seats and more money. The critics, notably the state's teachers' unions, are pushing back.

"The purpose of the 1996 law was to create incubators of innovation," says Mark Waxenberg, director of government relations for the largest such union, the Connecticut Education Association. "It was never to create a charter school system . What you're doing is setting up a separate system that takes away from the public school system."

Maybe the law didn't anticipate the closed loop of K-12 charter schools that Achievement First is trying to create. But the Achievement First schools are so stunningly successful that it's a no-brainer for the state to help them grow into what Waxenberg calls "chapter two."

Amistad Academy, the flagship, opened in 1999 with a determination to close the "achievement gap" between poor, minority students and their white counterparts. It takes in fifth-graders who read like second-graders and turns out eighth-graders whose standardized test scores top the statewide average. That's with a student body that is 98 percent black and Latino, overwhelmingly poor, and selected through the same lottery that serves the New Haven district's magnet schools.

When Elm City Prep opened in September 2004, only 26 percent of its kindergartners and first-graders could read at grade level. By the end of the school year, that number soared to 96 percent, with 56 percent rated as "advanced" readers.

Waxenberg says the CEA wants to learn from those successes. He says that's why the teachers' union is using the state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request detailed information from all Connecticut's charter schools: titles, pay and work rules for all employees; names, subjects and certification status of all teachers.

The FOI request caught Amistad off guard. School officials wonder what the CEA is up to.

The union is not trying to organize Amistad teachers, Waxenberg says. Rather, the CEA is interested in "learning from [the charter schools] and taking those lessons to the legislature. Their expenditure of dollars is obviously having a positive impact. We're familiar with their curriculum; we're familiar with the instructional methodology. But one of the critical things is, where do the dollars go? Do more of the dollars go to instruction? This basically is to build a case for what we need in the public school systems."

Dacia Toll, of Amistad, is skeptical.

"We don't want a war with the union," she cautions. "We're working to comply" with the FOI request, though the schools haven't yet done so. And, she notes, "We've repeatedly invited the union leadership to visit the schools and stay for as long as they would like."

The union has not taken her up on the offer, Toll says. Waxenberg's rationale for the FOI request for financial information would, she says, "make more sense if it came with a request to visit and engage in a conversation about teaching and learning."

Not all of Connecticut's 14 charter schools produce strong academic results. And, nationally, charter school students do no better than their public school counterpartsa bit worse, according to some studies.

But the Achievement First model is unassailable. That's why New York City offered money and buildings to get the organization to open schools in Brooklyn last fall, with another two scheduled to start in August.

Those schools could have opened in Connecticut instead. Achievement First desperately wants to grow here. It has been stymied by the enrollment cap of 250 to 300 students per school and by the state funding, currently $7,625 per pupil. That will rise to $8,000 next school year, still well below the public school average.

Operating expenses at Amistad average $10,700 per student, Toll says. To supplement the state funding, Achievement First raises private money.

It's fundraising now for its fall expansion: a ninth grade for Amistad High, to be launched in partnership with Yale University, and a kindergarten for "baby Amistad." If the legislature doesn't approve the expansion, "then we don't open," Toll says. "It'll be a real tragedy."

The education and appropriations committees unanimously approved a bill allowing charter schools "with a demonstrated record for raising academic achievement" to expand to 85 students per grade, "within available appropriations." Legislators stripped a provision that would have boosted spending to $10,000 per pupil. To pass, the bill needs approval by the full House and Senate before the session ends on May 3.

A worst-case scenario, in which the charter schools get nothing they've asked for, could jeopardize even Amistad Academy. When government helps charter schools grow and thrive, philanthropists are willing to pay part of the tab. But to expect private funders to keep writing life-support checks while the state blocks the spread of a spectacular success story is "a big ask," Toll says.

"These are urgent issues," she says. "They will have a significant impact next year."

And beyond. The debate is not just over enrollment caps and per-pupil spending, but over fundamental philosophical questions about the role of charter schools.

Should they remain, as the CEA's Waxenberg contends, small and experimental, aimed at funneling good results back into the public schools? Or should we encourage them to keep growing as long as they keep succeeding?

Before legislators answer that question, they should ask the kids over at Amistad and Elm Cityand the kids on their waiting lists.