Chicago Sun Times April 26, 2009

HEADLINE:  Raising the bar on charter schools; Huberman wants uniform minimum standards as federal sanctions hit 4 here

By Rosalind Rossi and Art Golab

Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman is preparing to turn up the heat on Chicago's charter schools just as four charter operations here have been hit with the toughest level of federal sanction.

Huberman hopes to fine-tune the city's school closing policy and subject charters -- and any new schools created under Mayor Daley's Renaissance 2010 effort -- to the same minimum performance required of traditional public schools.
quot;Drawing a line in the sand is a good way to describe it,'' Huberman told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Charters have been touted as engines of innovation by President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Huberman's predecessor as CPS chief. The schools were envisioned as a way to give public schools some of the freedoms private schools enjoy -- such as avoiding teachers union work rules or certain public school policies -- in exchange for quot;chartersquot; agreeing to specific outcomes.

Yet four Chicago charters have fallen subject to federal rules about quot;restructuring,quot; the ultimate sanction under the No Child Left Behind law. In Illinois, restructuring can range from replacing staff to instituting a new, proven curriculum.

In New York City and Los Angeles Unified public schools, no charters have reached the restructuring stage, spokesmen there say, even though those districts have more charters.

However, Chicago charters still do better than traditional Chicago public schools in meeting federal muster, a Sun-Times analysis indicates. Just under a third of city charters are in quot;restructuring,'' compared with 42 percent of traditional CPS schools.

Some Chicago charters may look worse than their counterparts elsewhere because those with multiple campuses are counted as one charter. That increases their chances of having more quot;subgroupsquot; of students -- ranging from different racial groups to poor kids -- only one of which needs to perform poorly to make the entire charter miss quot;adequate yearly progress,'' charter officials say.
Five years of missing adequate yearly progress in reading, math, attendance or graduation rates triggers restructuring plans; six years triggers actual restructuring.
quot;If you looked at us as individual campuses, we'd be having this conversation about one campus,quot; where one subgroup -- the special education population -- has repeatedly failed to make progress, said Beth Purvis, executive director of Chicago International Charter Schools, which oversees 12 campuses.

Youth Connections Charter School serves mostly dropouts, on 26 campuses. Many kids enter in sophomore or junior year reading at the sixth-grade level, said executive director Sheila Vincent. For such a charter, Vincent said, No Child Left Behind quot;just doesn't work. I'm testing past failures. We didn't have these kids for four years.quot;

At two other charters under the gun, the Academy of Communications and Technology and North Lawndale College Prep, officials say their state test scores may be lower than the Chicago average, but their graduation rate -- a more important bottom line -- is higher.

At North Lawndale, President John Horan is challenging the graduation rate of 46.8 percent officially cited by the state. He says the correct rate is 81 percent, but a new CPS system miscounted some kids in data it gave the state, and quot;We have some board members tearing their hair out that the numbers are so grossly incorrect.''

Horan says 75 percent of past graduates are on track to complete college in six years, including many at selective universities.

quot;At the end of the day, if you have college prep in your name, you better have kids who graduate from college -- and . . . legitimate colleges, not Joe's Lube Shop,'' Horan said.

And North Lawndale stays in touch with its graduates once they go off to college, administrators say.

quot;We send them care packages every year,quot; said Principal Rob Karpinski. quot;We give them a stipend if they come back and show us their report card and that they are passing every class.quot;

However, North Lawndale's charter agreement and many other recently written Chicago ones do not set a performance floor; they merely require a charter to be rated on a variety of measuring sticks.

Huberman said he'd like to set a minimum threshold and improvement rate for charters.

quot;If a charter school fails to show the required improvement or meet a minimum standard, they will be subject to closing,'' Huberman said. quot;It's important that we hold charter schools to the same level of performance that we expect from traditional CPS schools.''