Learning Matters: Doubts about the proposed K-8 charter school in Glendale
The Glendale Unified School Board recently received a petition asking it to authorize the establishment of a charter school within its boundaries. The proposal is for a new K-8 dual-language-immersion program at a site yet to be determined, but likely somewhere south of the Ventura (134) Freeway.
A charter school, for those who don’t know, is a publicly funded school operated independently of its host district and free of many of the state regulations governing school districts. Among other loosened constraints, charter schools allow students living outside the host district to enroll without the inter-district permits required for transfers between districts.
The development committee of the International Studies Language Academy, known as ISLA, filed the petition, with approximately 300 signatures attached in support, many of them belonging to parents of students currently attending Glendale schools. As required by law, the Board of Education will conduct a public hearing on the matter on Tuesday and must render a decision at its meeting on Dec. 15 whether to grant or deny the petition.
While the School Board has been counseled to stay closed-lipped about the petition’s merits until all the evidence is in — and a full analysis of the nearly 250-page petition is completed — the district is soliciting public opinion through a survey available on its website, www.gusd.net. I reviewed the petition and completed the survey, and I’m hoping my comments here will encourage more readers to weigh in, either in writing or at Tuesday’s meeting.
For my part, I am encouraging the board to deny the petition, though I agree with the desirability of expanding the district’s dual-language-immersion offerings for middle and high school students. I believe the proposed charter school will be counterproductive for both the petitioning families and the students of the district. More to the point, I have concerns about the school’s short- and long-term viability as well as its governance plan.
I’ll start with the statement of need in the petition’s introduction. “ISLA’s development team was formed due to the growing success and popularity for elementary two-way dual-language-immersion programs in Glendale, the increases in the waiting lists for the immersion programs in Glendale, particularly in Spanish, and the scarcity of immersion middle school option[s] for continuing French, Italian and German immersion students in Glendale.”
In other words, unlike the more common examples of charter schools designed to encourage educational innovation in low-performing schools or districts, this charter is designed to replicate and expand on Glendale’s success. It’s more about wants than needs, and what parent doesn’t want more for California’s children?
But I suspect that in a district like ours, where there are so many excellent, existing school options, fewer parents than petitioners anticipate will be ready to switch to a school without an established track record.
I could be wrong on that point, as several Foreign Language Academy of Glendale, known as FLAG, parents have already announced they’re ready to jump ship as soon as they get the chance to enroll in ISLA, despite the petitioner’s claim that “…Success for ISLA is directly linked to success at GUSD’s Franklin Magnet School and other nearby immersion schools.”
But even if ISLA reached its target of 438 students in the first year, I have doubts about its interpretation of enrollment projections and its ability to reach a student population of 1,056 by the fifth year. And I can only imagine the turmoil that would be involved if it were to reach that number. From my years on the school board when the FLAG programs were established, I’m familiar with the administrative and financial stresses and strains that can occur where four languages are taught to four groups of students in one school.
As much as I’ve appreciated the growth and spirit of Franklin Magnet School, which started with three languages and, amid considerable hand-wringing and the near cancellation of the German program, added French in 2012, I have since then expressed my belief that we were short-sighted to place so many languages in one elementary school. I would not recommend such an arrangement today.
Maybe such a start-up school would work in Miami, Fla., home of the model school on which ISLA’s middle school plan is based; I don’t know Miami. But I see it struggling to survive in Glendale. I also lack confidence in the future of a school supported, in large part, by organizations and interests so far from home.
The ISLA team “is a parent-led group working with educators, outside consultants and in collaboration with the International Studies Charter School in Miami, Fla.” What is evident through the petition and supporting documents is that the outside consultants include a Las Vegas company that will provide “back office services” and investors from the Turner-Agassi Fund, established, according to its website, “to provide investors seeking both financial and societal returns access to the growth of America’s most innovative educational organizations.”
I guess what concerns me most is the notion of public schools developed and governed as private rather than public investments. That issue, however, does not fall within the criteria the board may consider in its decision — unless, perhaps, the collective opinion of our community could reasonably affect ISLA’s chance of success.
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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.
