Schools

Princeton Patch: Charter School Reform: What's the Answer?

Patch interviewed Princeton's Julia Sass Rubin, a spokeswoman for Save Our Schools.

Patch spoke to Julia Sass Rubin, a Princeton resident and member of Save Our Schools, who spoke at Hillsborough's Board of Education meeting Monday. We discussed charter schools, a hot topic across the state and in Princeton, where school officials estimate they will nearly $5 million to fund two local charter schools in 2011-12. 

What is Save Our Schools and what is its mission?

We are a non-partisan grassroots group of parents and other public school supporters who believe that every child in New Jersey should have access to a high-quality public school education.

Find out what's happening in Hillsboroughwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

We are volunteers and we don’t take external funding. We formed late last summer when it became obvious to us the threat to our public education system was bigger than just passing our local budget.

We started in Princeton with literally six people sitting around a living room. Now have members in every legislative district across the state.

Find out what's happening in Hillsboroughwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

There are three issues that we’re focused on: seeing that schools are fully funded to the legal requirement of the funding formula, strongly opposing vouchers and charter reform.

What is Save Our Schools' stance on charter schools in New Jersey?

We are not against charter schools, many of us have children in charter schools. But we know the New Jersey charter law is broken. We are advocating a set of reforms to fix the law.

Transparency and Accountability: Charter schools do not get held to a uniform standard of accountability and transparency. Some school are great on this, others are not. If you want to find out who is contributing to a charter school- the private funding- you may not be able to do that even though it is a public institution. Some schools are terrific on this, but we need to set the bar high enough so that everyone is at that level.

There is also need to know who is coming into a charter school and who is leaving and how they’re doing. Some charter schools have very high attrition rates and we can’t tell if an individual student who leaves is high performing or low performing. Schools whose test scores improve over time may just be seeing the low performing students leaving. The only way to know this is to make this data very public availability and right now it’s not.

We should have access to student demographic information- who receives free and reduced lunch, has limited English proficiency or special needs. There are so many factors that determine how students perform on standardized tests and right now that information is only available on a limited basis or on an aggregate basis.

Student Population: The second piece is that charter schools don’t start with the same population as traditional schools.

To get into a charter school you have to apply, so you’re already altering the makeup of the students. You tend to get families that are less poor, less likely to have limited English proficiency and less likely to have special needs than the surrounding districts. If you look at charter schools with high test scores, they tend to have fewer of each of those groups.

Because they are educating different kids, that has social and financial consequences and it makes it very hard to compare apples to apples.

We know those factors are huge in driving test performance. 

So how do you make that comparable? We know that charter schools are given 90 percent of the per pupil average of educating the kids, but that factors in the additional cost of educating special needs students, those with limited English language skills and those with free and reduced lunch: that means charter schools are getting much more than 90 percent if they’re not educating those kids.

So the challenge is traditional schools are left with the most expensive and most challenging students, yet they have fewer dollars. We have tried to address the lack of demographic representation through an opt-out lottery; every child would be entered into a lottery unless they chose to opt out.

Community Control: New Jersey’s charter school law is unlike any other state's. As of a month ago, 39 states and Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. have charter school laws and not a single one is like New Jersey’s in that we have no cap on number of charter schools that can be approved, and it’s done without local input and control and yet they are paid for locally. 

Other states have local control over charter schools, either by the school board or a vote of the population. Other states have caps on absolute numbers of charter schools or if non-local entity (for example, the state) authorizes a new school, it’s paid for by whoever authorized it. 

What that means is that in New Jersey, your tax dollars are paying for something that you have zero control over and if approved, come from your traditional schools. Unfortunately, it’s a zero sum game; it’s not a limitless pool of money for public education.

Critics have said that having local control would shut down charter schools. But 12 of 39 states have local control, either the school board or voters have to approve a new charter school. We wouldn’t be the only one. And all of those 12 states have charter schools that have been approved.

Local communities should decide what they want, schools are a communal good. It may shut charter schools down in some communities, but that means the communities don’t want them.

We’re a democracy; every community should be able to decide. Public education is not an individual good or commodity, it’s not like buying a sweater. We don’t make individual choices; we make communal choices about what kind of public education we offer our children.

You don’t expect a choice with how our roads are maintained. You don’t get to decide what color your street is paved, it’s decided for your community at a municipal level. Schools are a communal good just like that. It only works if a community makes decisions. If you apply to the Department of Transportation for your street to be paved purple, but then your neighbor has to pay for it, I think that’s a good example of how New Jersey charter schools work.

This is not about closing existing charter schools or reauthorizing existing schools. The schools that are here are here, the point is to address the issue going forward before a lot more schools that are approved that people don’t want.

In an ideal world, how would you like to see the charter school law changed?

There are two bills that have incorporated all of these reforms. Assembly Bill 3356 would provide greater accountability, transparency and an opt-out lottery. The bill has been voted out of committee but has yet to be voted on by the full Assembly and there’s a hold on it in the Senate to keep it from being introduced.

Assembly Bill 3852 has a Senate version 2243 which would provide for local control. The bill has yet to be voted on by the full assembly and is waiting to get a Senate hearing.

We think the Senate version of Bill 3852 is being held off so it doesn’t have to be voted on because it’s so popular.

We want to know where our legislators stand so voters can hold them accountable. We don’t want them to hide behind tricks and evasion. And we want the vote.

If the voters felt a school system were inadequate and couldn’t get a charter school approved at the school board level, you could still, under our reform, get your fellow citizens to vote for an alternative. That’s how democracy works.


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