A charter story that pushes the skepticism buttons

From the Oakland Tribune, 11/14/05:

Kids taught with tough love in Oakland American Indian charter school is on the rebound, nominated for state Blue Ribbon award By Alex Katz, STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND — If you mess up at the American Indian Public Charter school in Oakland's Laurel district, everybody will know.

One boy learned that lesson the hard way last week, when school Director Ben Chavis brought him in front of the entire school and called him a thief.

Chavis told a few hundred students in grades 6 through 9 that the boy stole a radio and some money. Embarrassment, Chavis says, is a good form of discipline.

"He loves his hair," Chavis told the school. "I'm gonna shave it all off. He'll be bald tomorrow."

The next day, Chavis said he made good on his threat to cut the boy's hair — with permission from the boy's father.

This school brought its base API up from 596 in 2002 to 813 in 2004. This is on a scale of 200-1000, as education wonks know. (The API is California's Academic Performance Index, a compilation of stadardized test scores given to each school by the California Department of Education.)

Well, I'm sorry, but I'm a former consumer reporter, and the No. 1 rule in the consumer advocacy field is: If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

I would like to believe that a school could make a gain like that legitimately. But I can't.

The president of Oakland's teachers' union is dubious too, according to the Tribune article:

Charter school critics, including Oakland teachers union President Ben Visnick, say charters have an unfair advantage when it comes to test scores because it's easier for them to expel low-performing students, or prevent those students from enrolling in the first place.

"I'm not saying they're cheating on the test scores or anything like that," Visnick said. "But the district doesn't do a good job of holding these (charter) schools accountable."

And the following quote in the Tribune article caught my eye particularly because I had just been reading Jonathan Kozol's acclaimed new book "The Shame of the Nation."

"I would liken (Chavis) to Joe Clark from the movie 'Lean on Me'," said California Charter Schools Association spokesman Gary Larson, referring to the famous baseball bat-carrying principal from New Jersey.

Here's what Kozol says about Joe Clark.

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Some will recall the adulation heaped upon a principal in Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1980s, who became the subject of a film and was presented to the public as a salvatory figure who was not afraid to discipline black students with unusual severity and walked the hallways of his high school with a bullhorn and a bat. The principal, whose name was Joe Clark, came to be a favorite of the White House in the Reagan years and was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, where he was photographed holding his baseball bat in both hands and looking as if he would not hesitate to use it. Education Secretary [William] Bennett called his school "a mecca of education" after Clark threw out 300 students who were often late for class or had high absence rates, whom he described as "parasites" and "leeches." Two thirds of the students he threw out ended up in the Passaic County Jail, according to a teacher at the school, but average test scores briefly rose a bit because the kids who scored the lowest now were gone.

When I visited the school in 1990, its famous principal had already departed. (He was subsequently appointed the director of a juvenile detention center.) Whatever promise had been represented by his highly visible presence had departed with him. He left behind a grim and stolid school where classe in the language arts took place in a dingy basement, full-grown adolescents I observed had to squeeze their bodies into desks that were the size appropriate for elementary school, and English classes that I visited were stripped of literary content and were used almost exclusively, according to their teachers, to drill students for exams. The average reading level of the students was below sixth grade.

The Paterson "turnaround" had been suspicious from the start. It had sounded too good to be true, and it turned out that this was so; but the general pattern of identifying principals who have a vibrant public presence, and attach themselves to trends and slogans that may be in favor with tough-minded politicians ("cracking down" on troublesome teenagers, for example, and insisting there are "no excuses" for a student's failure), then attributing to each of them the gift of working a near miracle in record periods of time, repeats itself in other urban districts to the present day.

This is the same old story, Kozol points out.

There are hundreds of principals in our urban schools who are authentic heroes, few of whom would emulate the posturing and bluster of Joe Clark and most of whom do not receive the notice and support that they deserve. ... [T]]here is this inclination to avert our eyes from the pervasive injuries inflicted upon students by our acquiescence in a dual system and to convey the tantalizing notion that the problems of this system can be superseded somehow by a faith in miracles embodied in dynamic and distinctive individuals. I don't believe that this is true. I don't believe a good school or a good school system can be built on miracles or on the stunning interventions of dramatically original and charismatic men or women. I don't think anyone really believes this.