Stanford Professor Claude Goldenberg works with children from non-English speaking homes. “We’re trying to help [schools] figure out what to do with their large population of English-language learners,” he says, with an eye to making state-mandated language assessments more instructionally useful. He adds that the easier access he gains at the university charter schools makes a big impression at a time when schools are struggling to meet escalating state and federal standards on declining budgets. “I’ve never had such a hard time recruiting schools for studies. Resources are so constrained and people [who work] in schools feel like they’re in strait jackets.”
“The other difference is there is an attempt to coordinate the different research activities so our work will add up to a whole that’s greater than its parts,” Goldenberg adds, noting that it helps his work on language square with other Stanford studies on classroom management and the effective use of interactive whiteboards.
Problems in South Florida
Not all K-12 endeavors work out. The University of South Florida started the USF Patel Charter School in 1998 with high hopes and an ambitious agenda. Stephanie Jackson, who helped found the school as the associate director for the university’s At Risk Institute, recruited students from a Tampa neighborhood nicknamed “Suitcase City” for the transient history of its inhabitants.
“We walked the streets to get people to sign up,” recalls Jackson. “We wanted to get kids who had not had much educational opportunity, and needed intensive services, from school psychologists to social workers. We had the best and brightest professors helping the teachers there and South Florida students doing student teaching. There really was a committed effort (led by the university president and the dean of the education school) to do good things for these at-risk kids.”
'Because they're public schools, you're accountable to "public meeting" laws. The governance issues are complex and you need to create a governance system that is transparent and meets state and city regulations.' -Timothy Knowles, The University of Chicago Urban Education Institute
That all changed several years later, Jackson says, when the university and education school administrations changed hands. “The new president and new dean didn’t do anything. They went from having a lot of people interacting and providing services to kids to turning their backs.” Two years ago, USF Patel received an “F,” according to the state’s school evaluation system, and USF turned the charter over to the city school district.
Jackson notes that within a year, under the district’s management, the school became an “A-rated” school. “What does that say about the university? It was a ready-made laboratory for that university. It was on the campus. Why couldn’t they support this place?”
Experts on K-12 education offer some answers. Columbia’s Henig cautions about taking a top-down approach to school ownership: “It makes a big difference whether this is something initiated by the president or dean without strong faculty support.”
“It’s got to be an institutional commitment. There is no exit strategy,” adds Timothy Knowles, executive director of The University of Chicago Urban Education Institute, which manages four charter schools.
Lessons Learned
Those universities that are, so far, succeeding with their charter schools offer plenty of additional advice, starting with the admonition not to underestimate the costs of the undertaking. There’s the start-up costs to consider. ASU reports spending about $500,000, and $250,000 to $500,000 is generally estimated for anyone looking to begin a charter school. Stanford’s Stipek notes that there’s also an ongoing, in-kind contribution from universities to their schools, from financial and informational technology services to the time donated by administrators working directly with the schools. “I spend a huge amount of time with these schools,” says Stipek. The university also contributes $2 million annually to their budgets, she adds.
“Universities need to be able to raise money,” says Knowles. “To do what we think is right in our schools, we raise money consistently,” on the order of $4 million a year to augment the state’s per-pupil contribution. Be prepared also to face new kinds of governance and public accountability, he continues. “Because they’re public schools, you’re accountable to ‘public meeting’ laws. The governance issues are complex and you need to create a governance system that is transparent and meets state and city regulations.”
