Charter Schools Can Provide the Answers to Hard Problems : Education: By waiving 6,000 pages of Education Code, they can change curriculum and set their own standards. They can save money by cutting administrative bloat. The trick is winning school board approval.

Junior high school principal Mary Ann Owsley has taken a path that 99.5% of all the public school principals in California have avoided. She has opened a charter public school in Orange, one of only 63 such schools in the state and the first charter school in Orange County. Until Owsley came along, charters were non-starters.

Charter schools are regular public schools that are allowed to waive 6,000 pages of Education Code to do obvious things, like take charge of the curriculum. Charter schools can save a school money by cutting administrative bloat. They can offer early-morning or late-evening classes, by charging for them. They can bring in ‘50s-style discipline and uniforms. They can hire non-credentialed instructors to increase the teacher/student ratio. To take just one example, T. Jefferson Parker could teach creative writing, without having to prove his merits with a piece of paper.

Equally important, the charter concept allows a school to change teacher evaluation methods. Fountain Valley Supt. Rubin Ingram says his district spent $50,000 over a two-year period to rid a school of an incompetent second-grade teacher who “behaved bizarrely” and “couldn’t keep her wig on straight.” In a charter school, he could have said, “my way or the highway.”

An L.A. charter school called Edutrain is a perfect case in point of what can be done away from the Education Code’s mandated bureaucracy. Keith Turnage started the school as a nonprofit corporation, with the help of Pacific Mutual, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and a host of other corporations.

A home to juvenile delinquents, Edutrain employs about half of its 800 students as clerical workers, gardeners and security aides--something schools down the street can’t do--in addition to offering solid academics. Turnage says his school “saves” juveniles from the streets and from existing juvenile camps.

Similarly, an El Dorado County charter school run by Principal Marta Reyes and Supt. Ken Lowry takes a “Nordstrom’s approach” to educating juvenile delinquents. The school pays teachers anywhere from $7 to $27 an hour, based on merit, not seniority or number of degrees.

The fly in the ointment in the charter approach is the approval process. State legislation passed in 1992 requires that 50% of the teachers in a school, or 10% of the teachers in a district, sign a petition, which then must be approved by the school board and the Department of Education.

The problem is not with the teachers, whose support is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success. The stumbling block is the school board. The charter petition gives a school the right to secede from the district, taking the power of the purse with it. Although a school board that approves a charter petition can revoke the entire charter contract, or deny renewal when the charter school’s five-year contract is up, the school has five years with which to prove itself away from school board politics and interference. It’s a rare school board that will allow that.

To get a charter approved, it helps a great deal if a school district is ripe for change. Orange Unified had suffered through seven different superintendents in four years, and at least one new principal every year in the same period. On top of that, one school board member had been charged with statutory rape, another was convicted of extreme anti-abortion activities in front of a clinic. A third public employee, back in the 1980s, was convicted of a major embezzlement.

The situation is similar in Los Angeles Unified, where charter applications have reached the maximum 10 schools per district. There is a feeling among parents and teachers that any change is better than no change. Both are tired of living in an area where 100 administrators make over $100,000 a year, yet children feel unsafe in school.

A bill that would have allowed L.A. and other districts to have more than 10 charter schools died this year. So did a dozen others that would have encouraged more charter start-ups. On the plus side, the charter movement has allies on both sides of the political aisle. Ultraliberal Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and staunch conservative Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) both introduced pro-charter legislation this year. Any movement that can unite those two can’t be all bad.