Mayor Puts Spotlight on Charter

After Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa thrust it into the spotlight this week, things quickly returned to normal at the Accelerated School -- one of the city’s publicly funded but independently run charter campuses.

Catherine Castillo Cota ate a pastrami sandwich before teaching the lunchtime honors class she recently added to her loaded schedule. A floor below, Jorge Lee corrected assignments from the 7 a.m. Spanish class he teaches before the regular school day begins. Later, math teacher Marty Romero guided six students through calculus problems in a course in which they earn college credit.

Teachers at the Accelerated School are expected to take on new duties and classes based on their students’ needs. At all grade levels, teachers are free to design their own curricula. And parents are required to be involved.

“It’s the kind of thinking out of the box we do that isn’t possible in a regular public school,” said Manuel Arellano, one of the principals at Accelerated. “It’s possible here because our teachers are very willing and flexible with their time.”

During his State of the City address -- delivered Tuesday from the gleaming South Los Angeles campus -- Villaraigosa held the school aloft as an example of why he plans to substantially increase the number of charter schools if he succeeds in taking control of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Here’s somebody [Villaraigosa] who’s tremendously respected saying charters can be high-performing public schools, so for goodness sake let’s use them as part of the solution,” said Caprice Young, executive director of the California Charter Schools Assn. “It’s very exciting.”

In embracing charters, Villaraigosa waded into an increasingly divisive debate, aligning himself squarely against a longtime ally, the powerful teachers union.

Union leaders are vehemently opposed to the charter school movement, portraying them as quasi-private schools that have produced questionable results and drained resources from district coffers.

Since the state charter law became effective in 1992, the schools have been touted as an alternative to traditional campuses and as incubators for innovative teaching.

The number of charters has taken off in recent years. About 575 operate statewide, with more than 350 more expected to open by 2008, Young said. In Los Angeles Unified, 100 charter schools will be open by fall.

Accelerated stands out among them. Former Los Angeles Unified teachers Jonathan Williams and Kevin Sved opened the school in 1994 with 52 students in space rented from a Hungarian Catholic Church. Today, they enroll about 1,000 students in elementary, middle and high school grades on a donated, four-acre campus lined with towering palm trees and modern buildings.

Based on a school concept designed in the mid-1980s by a Stanford University professor, the Accelerated School operates on two basic expectations: Slower students should be introduced to the same material as their more proficient peers, and parent involvement is key to a school’s success.

Parents must sign a contract agreeing to commit about three hours each month volunteering at the school and to attend a monthly meeting with teachers. They are also encouraged to visit classrooms.

“When they told me they required us to be involved, I knew it was a place I wanted my child to be,” said Eva Castillo, who coordinates the school’s parent volunteer program. “If they are comfortable with having parents around, it is because they are confident in what they are doing. It gave me a lot of trust.”

Other parents agree. Last school year, more than 4,500 parents were on a waiting list to enroll their children, according to school officials.

Unlike traditional L.A. Unified schools in which the central administration controls which textbooks and teaching programs are used, Accelerated teachers are expected to develop their own curricula. Cota, for example, shuns textbooks, grounding all her lessons in classics, such as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “Romeo and Juliet,” that line the shelves in her classroom.

A former attorney, Cota said she left her previous job at a traditional school because of the freedom at Accelerated.

“They allow us to teach the way we think is best,” she said recently. “At my old school they told me what to teach, how to teach. It wasn’t interesting.”

Without union contracts setting limits on workloads or hiring requirements, administrators have complete control over staffing and flexibility to make changes to accommodate students’ needs, such as adding Cota’s and Lee’s extra classes.

And the students, who are nearly all poor and largely native Spanish speakers, appear to have responded to the approach. Last year, elementary and middle school students scored an impressive 702 on a 1,000-point scale the state uses to compare schools -- a 128-point increase since 1999.

In addition, absence rates are far lower at Accelerated than the average in the district. Students said they enjoy school.

“You can see that teachers really care,” said 16-year-old Andrea Vazquez. “And it’s small enough that everyone knows each other.”

But teachers and administrators acknowledged that the demands there are high. Teacher turnover in the lower grades has slowed in recent years, but it remains a concern at the high school, which opened in 2004. Over the last two years, Sved estimated, about two-thirds of the high school teachers have left.

“It is a very challenging place to work,” said Lee, the Spanish teacher, who spent a recent Saturday giving a practice test for the upcoming Advanced Placement exam. “I get home tired.”

To A.J. Duffy, president of the roughly 48,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles, such expectations on teachers are unsustainable and dangerous. Charters, he said, “create short-term, used-up, blown-out teachers.... Without the union’s protection, teachers are being worked to death.”

Duffy, along with one school board member, has called for a moratorium on new charters in the district.

While acknowledging the accomplishments of Accelerated, Duffy said it is the exception rather than the rule.

“There are dozens of charters out there that are just a bunch of crap,” Duffy said. “They’re taking public money and not getting the job done.”

Priscilla Wohlstetter, a USC education professor who has studied charters extensively, said it remains unclear whether the schools perform on average better than traditional ones.

Regardless, Villaraigosa remains steadfast. A draft takeover proposal compiled by his staff called for doubling the number of charters in the district in coming years.

“I am an unequivocal supporter of charters,” he said. “I know what the [union] position is. It’s an area of disagreement.”