Vote on closing Pacoima charter is delayed

After a dizzying 2 1/2 -hour discussion, a divided Los Angeles school board Tuesday postponed a vote on whether to close a Pacoima charter school that has been beset with low test scores but claimed a near-perfect record of getting its low-income minority students into college.

The delay on the future of Discovery Preparatory Charter School came after a compromise plan to extend the charter for a year unraveled under a barrage of conflicting legal opinions and last-minute developments.

“I’m kind of baffled,” school founder and Executive Director Matthew Macarah said. “And I’m exhausted.”

More than 200 students, parents, teachers and school supporters filed quietly out of Los Angeles Unified headquarters afterward, many not exactly sure what had happened.

Before the meeting, district staff already had postponed for two weeks the day of reckoning for another school: Pacifica Community Charter in West Los Angeles. Pacifica, like Discovery, enjoys broad community support and also was expected to fill the board room to contest a staff recommendation to close the school.

At the start, the school district’s charter school division recommended closing Discovery, citing the campus’ lagging test scores and state requirements that charter schools must either improve low student achievement or maintain achievement levels that are at least middling.

The test scores of Discovery, instead, had been heading in the wrong direction. Macarah explained that his student population had changed; it used to come from a high-achieving charter middle school. But in 2004, that campus opened its own high school and lower-achieving students from regular district schools replaced them at Discovery.

Macarah’s experience with a shifting student population is a real-world illustration of research released today. Charter middle schools in California significantly outperform traditional middle schools, even after adjusting for students’ ethnicity, family income and other factors, concluded researchers with EdSource, a Bay Area nonprofit that reviewed student achievement in California.

Those outcomes are flipped for elementary schools -- where traditional schools have higher scores -- and mixed for high schools, with charter schools owning perhaps a slight edge.

Macarah said he expects to do considerably better on this year’s testing now that he has overcome serious management problems that he concedes had much to do with his inexperience at starting and running a school.

This too illustrates a finding of the EdSource report: Independent charter schools are not doing as well as are charter schools that belong to an established charter management organization, such as Green Dot Public Schools, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Aspire Public Schools.

Macarah emphasized that every one of Discovery’s graduates last year was accepted to a two- or four-year college. The school district has neither challenged nor verified that claim.

A slim board majority was on the verge of giving Discovery a one-year extension, which would have mandated a steeper rise in test scores than the state requires.

But suddenly Gregory McNair, head of the charter schools division, said there were serious problems with the language in Discovery’s renewal petition that hadn’t yet been dealt with. It didn’t help that district lawyers were putting forth conflicting opinions on the legality of the one-year extension as well as other matters related to the discussion.

School board President Marlene Canter said she was more confused than ever by the end of the discussion. And her colleague, Monica Garcia, who had tried to work out a compromise, simply threw up her hands and shook her head, unable for a minute to say anything.

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An edge for charter schools?

Charters do somewhat better than regular schools at improving test scores in California, according to a new study, and charters run by management groups outpace independents.

Performance on state improvement targets

*--* Percent Schools Number meeting target Charter 346 60% Noncharter 7,122 52%

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*--* Types of Percent charter schools Number meeting target Chains* 59 67% Independents 287 59%

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*Charters that are part of a multi-school management group, such as Green Dot or KIPP

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Note: The study doesn’t claim to prove that charter schools are better; the effect could, for example, be a result of charter schools having more motivated students.

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Source: EdSource