The ‘other’ public school

Charter institutions are on the rise, but jury’s still out on their success

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Nov 14, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The framed sign hangs, a bit crookedly, on a sky-blue wall in the Emerson School office.

“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world,” it reads.

Small groups of people scurry past the sign. They’re answering the phones. Leading kids in from their outdoor exercise. Dealing with cleaning up after a sick child in the boys’ restroom. Asking whether a visitor is the insurance guy.

And, in their own harried way, trying to change Portland’s educational world. Or at least this small chunk of it.

The Emerson School, housed in a former Montessori school space on the south edge of Portland’s Pearl District, is one of two new charter schools that opened in Portland this fall. That makes six public charter schools now quietly operating in the city, each working to offer kids and parents an alternative to traditional public schools.

The charter schools Ñ like the 34 other fledgling public charter schools across the state Ñ get public funding from the state of Oregon and are free to any student who enrolls. But they operate independently of local school boards and aren’t required to follow most local or state education regulations.

The schools espouse a range of educational visions, exemplified by Emerson and the other new Portland charter school, Victory Middle Charter School, which is housed in several rooms at the Blazers Boys and Girls Club in inner Northeast Portland.

The founders of Emerson believe in “project-based” learning and kids exploring ideas in part through trips into the community. There are no real textbooks, and no real homework, but a lot of reading and writing and math problems based on real-world and kid-world issues.

The founder of Victory School, meanwhile, thinks Portland schools have abandoned the education of poor kids by abandoning basic educational principles. Victory students work out of textbooks and complete worksheets with questions that former newspaper publisher and school founder Rich Blizzard sometimes writes himself about various chapter readings.

But as varied as Victory and Emerson are, their founders agree on what almost all charter advocates agree: that traditional public schools aren’t working for many children. And that they can create schools that do better.

“I don’t think public schools are failing our lowest-performing kids or our highest-performing kids,” says Jo Sigmund, a longtime teacher and a co-founder of the Emerson School. “I think they’re failing all of our kids.”

The nation’s charter school movement was already almost a decade old when Oregon legislators approved the state’s charter school law in 1999.

So Oregon still has many fewer charter schools than many states. California, for example, has more than 400.

“Given the analogy of the tortoise and the hare ... we might be more the tortoise,” says Joni Gilles, a charter school specialist with the Oregon Department of Education. She adds that some states that quickly started many charter schools also had many quick failures.

Charter school advocates are heartened, however, by the 17 Oregon charter schools that opened their doors this year, and the dozens that have won federal grants to begin planning their schools.

“It’s going pretty well,” says Rob Kremer, a charter school advocate and consultant who helps organizers prepare Oregon charter school proposals.

Charter school advocates are becoming critical of one aspect of the state’s charter law, however Ñ or how school districts are interpreting it.

The law expects local school boards to sponsor the charter schools. But the charter schools can draw students Ñ and thus state education money Ñ away from the sponsoring districts. So school boards, eyeing that potential money drain, can’t be objective judges on the potential value of a charter school, charter advocates say.

The Portland school board repeatedly rejected the proposal from Blizzard and two Portland district teachers for what would become Victory Charter. Board members said Blizzard and the two teachers Ñ who are no longer associated with the school Ñ didn’t show that the school would have the curriculum or educational expertise to succeed.

Eventually, Blizzard appealed to the state Board of Education, which agreed in January to sponsor the school in spite of Portland’s rejections. Victory became Oregon’s first state-sponsored charter school.

Elke Geiger, who researches charter schools for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, says those issues can arise in states that call for local school boards to be the primary charter “authorizers.”

“It would be like asking Wal-Mart if Kmart can come to town,” she says.

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