Struggling charters face uncertain future

By the rules, Discovery Charter Preparatory School in Pacoima ought to be doomed because its test scores have fallen from the penthouse to the cellar.

For its part, Pacifica Community Charter School in West Los Angeles raised eyebrows with its “learn as you feel like it” approach, which also produced low test scores. Pacifica didn’t even receive a valid school score in 2004 and 2005.

The state says that to survive, charter schools must improve student achievement, and these schools, by key measures, have not.

So with the city’s school board scheduled to decide today whether these schools will live or die, the decision should be easy.

Not necessarily.

Both schools have legions of defenders, and their fate raises broad questions about Los Angeles’ growing charter school population. At present, 103 charter schools enroll more than 42,000 youngsters, about 6% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Under a less formulaic approach, Discovery and Pacifica come out better; both schools have provided environments in which some students have clearly done well. But that’s not good enough under the no-nonsense sink-or-swim paradigm of the district’s charter school division.

Though some charters have thrived, L.A. Unified hasn’t been especially helpful to flailing schools with potential, critics say. Until this year, the charter schools division would typically visit charter schools once a year; this year’s multiple appointments have been about evaluation, not assistance -- a logical outcome given limited staffing and the political leanings of some school board members who have viewed charter schools as a drain on resources.

Discovery and Pacifica insist that they want to work with the district to improve. “We will make any changes your office deems necessary,” Discovery Executive Director Matthew Macarah wrote to the charter division.

Those involved in both schools insist that their students would be badly served by shutting down the campuses.

“We meet kids’ needs that neighborhood schools have been unable to provide for,” said Beth Abels, who heads Pacifica’s governing board.

Charter schools are independently operated under contracts with local school districts, which are charged with providing oversight. Charter schools are freed from many education code regulations, such as union work rules, in exchange for improving student achievement.

Charters are typically approved for five years; the sponsoring school district must decide whether to renew them. This year has been renewal time for 19 charter schools in Los Angeles.

As of 2005, the law has stated that charter schools must improve student achievement -- at least somewhat -- or maintain respectable test scores overall.

There is, however, potential flexibility in approving charters with poor test scores if a school district wants to find it, said Greg Geeting, a senior staff member with the state’s charter school division. A charter school can pass muster, according to regulations, if its performance is judged “at least equal to the academic performance of the public schools that the charter school pupils would otherwise have been required to attend ... taking into account the composition of the pupil population that is served at the charter school.”

Discovery, a high school with 360 students, hit a high point in standardized test scores during its second year, landing in the top 10% of schools that served a similar student population. But in 2005 and 2006, the school ranked in the lowest 10% overall and even in the lowest 10% of similar schools.

Macarah offers explanations for it all. The school’s initial student population, he said, came from the nearby Community Charter Middle School, which delivered well-prepared, motivated students who continued to excel at Discovery.

But then Community opened its own high school and most of Discovery’s students came instead from lower-achieving district middle schools, such as Maclay, Macarah said. That same year, a series of management crises eventually prompted Macarah to fire the school’s principal, a move that divided students and faculty on the eve of state testing.

“Student leaders (among them, the student body president) advocated that, by way of protest to the firings, all students should sabotage the school’s scores by selecting ‘C’ as their answer to every question on the test,” Macarah wrote in a letter to the district. At year’s end, “over 60% of the staff either left ... or was dismissed.” That required a rebuilding effort, which included repaying most of a $500,000 debt and establishing a proper governing board.

The next year, scores improved but remained in the bottom 10%, although there may be an error in its comparison ranking with similar schools.

Macarah is hoping that a new comparison will show that his school’s scores will at least rank favorably with schools enrolling similar students -- although that’s not a sure thing, a state official said.

On its own, the charter office concluded that Discovery has trailed similar local campuses. Discovery responded with its version of what it calls a more apt local comparison group.

But there’s more than test scores at issue. Macarah says that a higher percentage of his students pass the high school exit exam, that a much higher percentage took the SAT, and that, last year, all graduating seniors enrolled in a two- or four-year college.

When it recommended denying the charter renewal, the charter office had not independently verified these claims because these items are not on its checklist. Its rubric, which looks at test scores, derives specifically from the education code.

The school board has found it difficult to close schools that have a strong community following or sufficient political influence to make a case for survival. So far this year, the board has revoked one charter and failed to renew one other. The vast majority have been or will be renewed.

Regarding Discovery, school board member Monica Garcia said that before closing a school, “I want to make sure we’re not denying students access to an opportunity” that is helping “some profile of students.”

Pacifica, a kindergarten through eighth grade school with 160 students, has had to defend its reason for being as well as its student achievement.

The school’s philosophical manifesto states that “children should be the subjects of their own educational experience” and stipulates that “children will involve themselves in developing their own curriculum.”

This partly means that children are not coerced into learning anything at any particular time, although a skillful teacher is expected to creatively inspire children to pursue the class’ learning goals.

L.A. Unified hasn’t exactly lent a timely helping hand, school leaders say.

A reviewer from the district’s Program Evaluation and Research Branch visited the school in 2005, but the office didn’t distribute its politely scathing findings until May 2006, school leaders said. The school’s instruction was uneven and “only loosely based on state standards,” Eric M. Anderson wrote. And students “often leverage the autonomy afforded to them to avoid participation in learning activities,” he said.

School staff said they immediately embraced the report’s practical suggestions, such as team teaching and using experienced teachers as mentors.

This year, the school has put increasing focus on state academic standards and the state tests, although the results won’t be available for months. Even so, the school’s 2006 score showed substantial improvement over 2005. But the gain isn’t registered on the state’s official website because the school turned in its 2005 scores late. And the school lacks any score at all for 2004 because too many of its assertively nontraditional parents refused to allow their children to take the tests.

Has all the effort made enough of a difference at Pacifica?

“Our sense,” said Gregory McNair, the head of the charter division, “is no.”

howard.blume@latimes.com