by Kyle Stokes
State Impact
March 28, 2013
The ink was barely dry on a legal decision that sealed fate of The Project School — Mayor Greg Ballard had ordered the Indianapolis charter school to close — when some of the school’s staff declared they would still hold classes this year, charter or not.
And about 20 defiant families have done just that.
The school they’ve opened, called “Project Libertas,” has very little money. But with about 35 students in Grades K-8 and a small staff of former Project School hands, the parents are now seeking a more permanent home.
“I don’t know there’s even a word to describe us,” says parent Matthew Brooks, sitting in a small room in the school’s current location — a church-run gymnasium on Indianapolis’ east side. “We’d need a few hyphenations. We’re an independent, hyphen… communal, hyphen… startup school.”
In a hotbed of school choice — Indianapolis has 11 school districts, more than 40 charter schools and more than 50 private schools accepting vouchers — Project Libertas parents’ choice to start a new school speaks to the depth of their distrust for existing educational options.
“My kids were ignored” in a local public school, says parent Audretta Wright. “Although these teachers here are all white, they care about these kids whether they’re black, Mexican, white — it doesn’t matter.”
There are few guarantees the parents’ choice will pay off. The school will have to earn accreditation against the backdrop of The Project School’s closure due to low test scores and alleged problems with its budget.
But Project Libertas parents say they’re starting fresh, with fewer students and a refined focus.
“We aren’t The Project School,” Brooks says. “The leadership from The Project School is not here. Most of the founders are not here. We’re something completely different.”
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN CHOICE & ACCOUNTABILITY
“Maybe [Project Libertas] is a case of where a state like Indiana has whet parents’ appetite about what school choice is like,” figures Jeanne Allen, the president of the D.C.-based Center for Education Reform, “and they want to figure out how to do it, and maybe how to do it better.”
When Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard revoked The Project School’s charter, we wrote how the school’s closure highlighted a fine, but definite line between school choice and accountability.
Allen sees that tension in play in Project Libertas as well. She tells StateImpact:
There’s a real, important tension between making sure that the schools we send our kids to do well and respecting a parent’s choice, which may be guided by any number of other factors. The balance for school choice is on choice and accountability. We believe both have to be in place in order for choices to be successful.
That said, these parents were obviously unsatisfied with what was being offered in their local public school… They chose to help create this particular charter [The Project School], which on paper, their measurements showed they were failing to meet even basic measurements of success. What’s happening is that these parents still feel that this school had some capacity to educate their children.
But while Ballard cited The Project School’s academic track record in shuttering the school, Parker Baxter of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers says Project Libertas’ academic performance is less of a public concern when private funds underwrite the school’s operations.
“That’s certainly a concern at a broad level, but not necessarily a public concern in the same way that it is when the school’s actually receiving public money,” Baxter says.
‘THEY NEED FINANCIAL HELP, THEY NEED PHYSICAL HELP’
Project Libertas parents refused to turn any students away — which comes at a high cost.
For tuition, the school only asks families to pay what they can. But that only covers half of the school’s expenses. Donations and fundraisers cover only some of the rest.
“Our year is totally not what we thought it was going to be,” says Jeremy Clay, who has five children at Project Libertas.
Clay, a stay-at-home dad who does contracting work on the side, now asks clients to write checks directly to Project Libertas to supplement his tuition payments.
“We’re having to be involved at a level that I haven’t been involved with in a long time, both financially and physically.”
Teacher Owen Harrington says his paychecks from Project Libertas have been spotty. Some pay periods, he estimates he receives 70 percent of the total he’s owed. Other times, he’ll receive closer to one-quarter of his full salary amount. But Harrington is optimistic about the school’s future.
“Things are looking up, seriously, for next year. It’s worth fighting through. It’s not easy fighting through. Honestly, I’m blessed that I have a very understanding landlord,” Harrington says. “I have been late more often than not this year with my rent… My wife has been a rock. I can’t believe she has still put up with this.”
ACADEMICS, VOUCHERS & THE FUTURE
Megan Howey Hughes is a Project Libertas teacher who’s become, more-or-less, the school’s principal. She says the school has tried to maintain some continuity with its academic offerings. She says the school’s staff is working to retain The Project School’s focus on interactive lessons and project-based learning.
“People coming into our space now would see the things that they saw at The Project School. We know that’s a model that was working and worked for kids. We developed it carefully, we saw it was working, and we see it working here,” Howey Hughes says.
Still, Project Libertas will need to prove itself academically. While the school’s staff uses state standards to guide their lessons and is working to improve areas of weakeness in The Project School’s curriculum, Libertas students won’t take statewide tests this year.
Next year, the school’s parents hope to gain accreditation as a “freeway school,” a type of private school. That way, parents could receive vouchers to pay their tuition, the school could then make ends meet and students would once again take statewide tests.
While The Project School closed with ISTEP passing rates among the lowest in the city, Matthew Brooks says the school’s charter called for making huge enrollment gains from year to year, which, he says, ultimately hurt the school’s test scores.
“The model didn’t produce low test scores,” Brooks says. “The business plan produced low test scores.”
‘A QUALITY SCHOOL OF CHOICE’?
With so much of Project Libertas’ staff and student body carrying over from a school with a track record of low test scores, has the school sidestepped the state’s accountability guidelines for charter schools?
Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen’s answer: not really.
“I don’t know that it’s fair necessarily to say that rather than playing by the rules of the game, they left the accountability field. We’re still grappling with what accountability really is. No state has done this right… What we’re assessing isn’t always a measure of whether or not our students are well-educated,” Allen says.
That said, Allen says if the school receives voucher dollars, Indiana law says private schools cannot receive F’s for two straight years or more without losing voucher funding.
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ Parker Baxter takes a slightly different tack. He applauds Indiana’s voucher law for holding low-performing schools accountable for their test scores through funding, but he says schools should be screened before receiving voucher dollars at all.
“The charter school approach really says that choice is a critical component,” Baxter says, “but it’s not in and of itself a value that trumps performance. Ultimately, the school needs to be a quality school of choice.”
Posing as Reform in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania State Rep. James Roebuck (D-Philadelphia) is not an honest broker. With more than $50,000 in contributions each year from the city’s teachers unions, the public should know that the reform bill he is backing for charter schools is about destroying, not reforming; about raising up the status quo, not real reform of our schools.
His reports and allegations, of widespread problems in charter schools across the state, are misleading and plain wrong. For example, he alleges that most charter boards have conflicts of interest with those with whom they work or depend for services. But that would also suggest that the largest employer in the school system is riddled with conflicts. Who isn’t related to a teacher or a child or a board member or a vendor in any district? Everyone with a pulse has overlapping interests. The only time it’s a conflict is when their views and their work is at odds with what’s good for kids.
Conflict of interest is code for keep charter schools small and insignificant. Demands from opponents for accountability is code for shut them down.
The charters are efficient, effective, albeit underfunded public schools that are oversubscribed and, in most cases, achieving above and beyond the traditional public schools.
Why would you try to save money on schools that are already underfunded and over subscribed? Why not save money on schools that are failing on a system that has a larger administrator/adult -student ratio than most comparable districts?
Philadelphia District:
15-to-1 teachers to students
655 administrators making over $100,000/dollars a year! (100 of who are teachers)
2980 in total all education administrators — Average salary is $104K
There are about 150,000 students in district public schools – 50 students for every administrator! A charter school survives with half as many administrators – an average of 100 kids for every administrator! Philadelphia imposed a cap on enrollment that is in violation of the state charter school law. Despite the fact that 50,000 students are on charter school waiting lists in the City of Brotherly love.
Roebuck’s efforts, and those of many of his colleagues, seek to put more state and district strings on charters in an alleged effort to make them more accountable. If the state and local education agency control were the answer to solving how best to educate kids, we would not have or need charter schools or any reform to begin with. The states and local districts are not school creators. They are rules creators. They are in business to manage and regulate, not to design and educate.
That’s why the only kind of reform that’s necessary in the charter arena in PA today is a change to the law that permits independent multiple authorizers, like public universities, to create and monitor charter schools. High quality authorizers outside of the traditional school entities yield high quality, highly accountable charters. Just look at Central Michigan University and the State University of New York as two examples.
We hope that Harrisburg will step up to the plate and show leadership on this important issue. The opponents are sharpening their knives in the name of reform. Nothing could be more disingenuous than calling their attack “reform.”
by Jeanne Allen