Not Fancy, But a Prep School All the Same
Interrupt a sixth-grade class at View Park Prep, and they’ll quickly tell you the mission of their charter school.
“To go to the best colleges and universities in the world,” several students blurt out before returning to their studying for a science test.
The full name of the public elementary and middle school is a mouthful--View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter School--but it says a lot about its mission. “They’re going to college,” headmaster Michael Piscal said, “and when they get there, they’re going to be the top students.”
Along with those expectations are other markings of private, or independent, schools: uniforms, a leader who calls himself “Head of School and CEO,” an ambitious fund-raising campaign and a waiting list with more than 1,000 names. Even the school golf tournament for dads sounds preppy.
In significant ways, though, View Park Prep looks nothing like the stereotype of a “prep school.” There is no tuition. And all but a few of the 342 students are black, closely reflecting the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods in the Crenshaw district. (Nationally, African American students comprise about 5% of students attending independent schools, according to the National Assn. of Independent Schools. Overall, students of color comprise 17% of all students at the association’s member schools.)
Charter schools such as the 3-year-old View Park Prep are public schools, funded by taxes, but they tend to operate more like private schools. Chartered by public school boards, they control their budgets and do not answer to a central office. Typically, these schools are small. They can design their own curricula. And without unionized faculties, they are freer to hire and fire their teachers.
The Presbyterian church on West 54th Street where View Park rents most of its space is in a neighborhood lined with tall, skinny palm trees, but the windows on most of the homes nearby have bars on them. Across the street from the campus is a beauty salon and a television repair shop. Neither looks like it is open very often, if ever. There have been days when Piscal has heard gunfire.
He arrived in the Crenshaw district by “dumb luck,” he said. After teaching English at the highly regarded Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, Piscal said he went looking for a less affluent, urban area to test his theory that a top-notch education could be delivered without charging eye-popping tuition.
“My goal is to provide in this community, in their own neighborhood, a school that can accomplish the same thing” as prestigious private schools, he said. “Why does a kid have to drive from Crenshaw to the Valley to get a good education?”
Parents at View Park say they tried their traditional public schools but found they were not rigorous enough and discouraged them from being involved in their children’s education. Like a private school, View Park requires parents to donate their time--and welcomes their money.
“When you come to View Park, you don’t just come as a child. The whole family has to go to school here,” said Rochelle Mackabee, the director of operations. Her son and nephew are in seventh grade.
Families at View Park Prep get in through a lottery. While some of them could afford private school tuitions, 60% of the households earn less than $45,000 a year, Piscal estimates, and 19% of students qualify for lunches subsidized by the federal government.
Greg Dulan, who owns a restaurant, had his children enrolled in a private school, but he now saves $15,000 by sending them to View Park Prep, he said.
“It’s a little more relaxed,” Dulan said, comparing View Park with his children’s old school in Westchester. “The parents aren’t as pretentious, but the academic standards are high, and that’s what I like.”
The curriculum closely mirrors that at private schools, because Piscal sought their input when he expanded an after-school program to found View Park Prep in 1999. In seventh grade, for example, View Park students read “Watership Down,” as do their counterparts at Harvard-Westlake. That prep school donated computers and desks, and several of Piscal’s former students there have taught at View Park. Harvard-Westlake’s headmaster, the retired chairman of its English department and the heads of several other area independent schools have given Piscal advice and sent philanthropists View Park’s way.
View Park Prep is used to visitors. Everyone wants to show off something. First-graders rope you into listening to them read. A fourth-grader studying California history offers trivia on the San Buenaventura mission.
View Park’s standardized test scores are well above the state average and among the best for elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which granted View Park’s charter. Piscal boasts that his fifth-grade students outscored those in Beverly Hills last year in spelling and language arts (although they trailed them in math and reading).
This year is a 10-year milestone for the country’s fast-growing charter school movement. The first law allowing charters passed in Minnesota in 1992, and California soon followed. Now, half a million children attend more than 2,400 charter schools in 34 states, according to the Charter Friends National Network. For all the success, however, some schools have been just flashes of grand ideas, failing because of mismanagement, squabbling and lack of funding.
View Park Prep began with kindergarten through sixth grade and added seventh and eighth last fall. In 2003, Piscal plans to add a high school--still a rarity in the charter school movement. He has discovered, as private schools know all too well, that to expand programs requires fund-raising.
The separate but associated Inner City Education Foundation is trying to raise $11 million to build View Park Prep its own campus. That sort of fund-raising is on the scale of an independent school’s, but, Piscal said, “we don’t have affluent parents who can contribute $20,000 a year to a capital campaign.” So, once again, he and View Park’s backers are opening their Rolodexes to solicit foundations and the prep-school world.
Tom Hudnut, headmaster of Harvard-Westlake School and Piscal’s former boss, said public and private schools should not consider themselves too different to learn from each other.
“None of us has a monopoly on good educational practice,” he said.
