Charter, Innovation and Transformation Schools

Charter Schools Charter schools are public schools of choice. They are publicly funded and open to all students, with no admission testing or screening. Each school has a charter, or performance contract, detailing its program, goals and methods of assessment.

Charter schools operate with increased autonomy in exchange for accountability. They are accountable for both academic results and fiscal practices to several groups: the authorizer that grants the charter, the parents who choose to send their children to the school and the public that funds them. Charter schools are also governed by Maryland Charter Law. This includes requirements for conducting an admissions lottery for enrollment and maintaining a waiting list.

See a list of all current City Schools charter schools, and click on a school name for contact information and school descriptions.

Innovation High Schools

Baltimore City Schools led a reform effort in 2001 to redesign, transform, and revitalize Baltimore’s neighborhood high schools. This reform created six new small, independent schools. Two of the six created schools converted to charter schools.  Two more converted to transformation schools. Each Innovation High School is operated by a non-profit governing board with the authority to oversee the implementation of the school’s approved model. Innovation High Schools have no entrance criteria and admit students through a lottery.

Transformation Schools
Transformation Schools are a direct response to changing secondary education in Baltimore. Six Transformation schools opened in 2008. The schools will serve grades 6 through 12 and will be operated by experienced, independent education entities. Each school will have a specific theme and a unique curriculum and will either focus on college, career, or alternative programming. Transformation Schools have no entrance criteria and admit students through a lottery.

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CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF CHOICE --------REALLY?

WE SEE THAT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE OVERWHELMINGLY ESTABLISHED IN UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES, TAKING THE PLACE OF THE COMMUNITY'S LONGSTANDING PUBLIC SCHOOL.  PARENTS OF UNDERSERVED SIMPLY WANT GOOD SCHOOLS.  WHEN THEY ARE TOLD THE CHARTERS WILL BE BETTER....THEY TAKE THEM.  TIME AND AGAIN WE SEE STATISTICS SHOWING THAT CHARTERS PERFORM NO BETTER, AND IN MANY CASES, WORSE THAN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL THEY REPLACE.  MIDDLE-CLASS PARENTS DON'T WANT CHARTERS, THEY WANT THEIR PUBLIC SCHOOLS BECAUSE THEY ARE BETTER.......YES, THEY ARE.

THERE IS ANOTHER REASON FOR CHARTER SCHOOLS.....DEVELOPMENT TOOL.....BUT ULTIMATELY PRIVATIZING ALL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION.

Four city charter schools to move
Bess Keller April 25, 2012 at 8:11 pm  Baltimore Brew

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Four Baltimore City charter schools are moving to new locations for the next school year and last night the Baltimore City school board, which oversees charter as well as traditional schools, approved three of the relocations.

Two elementary charter schools, Baltimore International Academy and Monarch Academy, have outgrown their current buildings. A secondary school, MATHS, has to give way to another charter school operator, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), which is taking over the entire building on Greenspring Avenue that now houses a KIPP school and MATHS.

MATHS (Maryland Academy of Technology and Health Sciences) is moving its grades 6-12 operation to a former middle school building on N. Dukeland Street near Park Circle.

KIPP will use the Greenspring Avenue building for both its grades 5-8 school, Ujima Village Academy, and its elementary school, Harmony Academy, now located on Shirley Avenue in Park Heights. By the 2013 school year, Harmony is expected to serve serve kindergarten through 4th grade.

The Baltimore International Academy, a foreign language immersion school that has outgrown its current northeast Baltimore space at the Maryland School for the Blind, will move about three miles southeast to the former Mother Mary Lange Catholic school building on Frankford Avenue.

The Monarch Academy, currently housed in the former St. Thomas More Catholic school building in northeast Baltimore, will spend the coming school year at the former William Pinderhughes school building in the Upton neighborhood.

The following year it will settle permanently at the former Coca Cola building on Kirk Avenue, about five miles south of its current spot. The school is slated to add 4th through 8th grades in the 2014-2015 school year.

The school board approved three of the relocations at last night’s regular meeting. (The relocation of KIPP’s Harmony Academy is the result of an earlier lease deal between the school system and KIPP.)

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Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers
Education Affinity Group

The State of Baltimore City Transformation and Charter Schools
Wednesday, February 9th from 12:00 – 1:30 PM

 

Presenters:
Carol Beck, Director of Supporting Public Schools of Choice
Erika Brockman, Executive Director of Southwest Baltimore Charter School

Chris Maher, Chief Academic Officer for the Friendship Schools

 

We were also joined by Baltimore City School Board members David Stone and Tina Hike-Hubbard, as well as Roger Schulman, Executive Director of the Fund for Educational Excellence.

 

We began the meeting by asking members to tell us something that’s still a mystery to them about transformation and charter schools – here were their responses:


What investments have been made in charters in Baltimore?

Are transformation schools living up to their promise?

How does the start up phase work?

What is the Gates Compact?
What are best practices that could be shared with other schools?

Does having the ability to hire non-union teachers make a difference?

What are the current challenges facing these schools?
What are realistic things that could/should be changed?
Demand versus capacity for these types of schools



Overview by Supporting Public Schools of Choice (SPSC)

 

Carol Beck began the meeting by providing a summary of the differences between charter and transformation schools (see handouts). Charter schools have a separate funding formula and they do not receive any support for their facilities; transformation schools are funded through Fair Student Funding and are located in City Schools’ buildings. The majority of charter schools in Baltimore serve grades K-8.

 

Carol noted that Baltimore’s charters are mostly “homegrown” – they are local efforts rather than being started/run by national organizations (with the exception of KIPP). This is different from some other urban districts, where most charters are part of national networks.

 


Southwest Baltimore Charter School

 

Erika Brockman shared the history of Southwest Baltimore Charter School – she is a mother who helped found the school, which opened in 2005. It was one of the first charter schools approved in Baltimore. The school started with 60 students in K and 1st grade – now has 250 students. For the first five years, the school was co-located in a traditional school – this posed many challenges in dealing with the differences between the two schools’ cultures.

 

When Erika learned that Diggs Johnson would be closing, she approached the school board to find out if SW Charter could move into that building. The facility was in serious disrepair. An agreement was reached where SW Charter could use the building provided that they accepted any former Diggs students who wanted to attend. Also took on an autism program. In total, took on 100 additional students, had to hire 30 additional teachers. The building is a huge 70,000 sq foot facility, which is very different from their prior location sharing part of a smaller school building.

 

Erika noted that there is an ongoing issue of demand versus capacity – the district wants SW Charter to increase the size of its 6th grade, but they don’t want to do that because adding additional students, especially those who have not gone through the lower grades at SW Charter, could disrupt the school culture.

 

She is very worried about the new teacher contract because she doesn’t think the district knows how to implement it, especially the new evaluation requirements.

 

Friendship Schools



Chris Maher started by going through the Friendship Schools powerpoint (see handout). He noted that the schools aren’t yet meeting AYP because of their large special ed populations.

 

The turnaround effort at Calverton has been successful so far (this is only the first year of that project) – most of the current students are in grades 6-8, but they would like to attract more elementary students, since an influx of sixth graders (middle school choice) makes it difficult to maintain a consistent school culture.

 

Friendship operates schools in Baltimore and DC – the DC schools get approximately twice the funding of the Baltimore schools. Financial issues pose a big challenge, even between transformation and charters in Baltimore since there are different funding formulas. Transformations receive the same amount of start up money as charters but no additional funding after that (beyond FSF).

 

Chris noted that two transformation schools have now become charters (Baltimore Freedom Academy and the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women) – Chris thinks this change was due to the financial benefits of charter funding. Also, transformation schools have less administrative flexibility than charters.  THESE ARE NOW CLOSED!

 

Q: What can the DC Friendship schools do differently due to extra money? Longer school days (12% longer for students, 20% longer for teachers), pay for summer programs, greater professional development opportunities.

 

Q: Could SW Baltimore Charter could point to their operating contract as a reason not to expand the 6th grade? SW does not currently have a contract – they received a five year renewal and are still negotiating the terms of the contract as well as the terms of the conversion of Diggs Johnson.

 

SW Baltimore did not want to be listed in the Middle School Choice materials because they don’t’ want students from other elementary schools to choose to go there – would prefer to just stick with the Diggs students plus SW students.

 

By contrast, Calverton wanted to be in the Middle School Choice fair but the district decided not to include them this year.  You see the arbitrary nature of school choice.


 

Q: It seems like it would be detrimental to the district if transformation schools convert to charters – why wouldn’t the district support the transformation schools more to avoid that? The presenters aren’t sure.

 

Tina Hike-Hubbard noted that charters don’t really receive more money than transformations – charters receive less services/support from the district.

 

David Stone said that the school board is aware of these challenges and keeping that in mind while redoing the transformation schools policy. However, the board hasn’t received much direct negative feedback from transformation operators/administrators.

 

The presenters agreed that they’d like to see the district do a study of funding of transformation schools versus charter and traditional schools to see if the net support is truly equivalent.

 

Lessons learned – transformation operators were initially asked to start schools with 6th grade and 9th grade; now they are mostly starting with 6th or 6th/7th to help build school culture.

 

Human capital – Friendship didn’t have much autonomy over hiring teachers since they had to draw from the limited pool of available teachers. While technically transformation schools are contractually allowed to hire from outside the district, they aren’t able to do so until August, which makes it logistically very difficult since most qualified candidates would already have accepted jobs elsewhere by then.

 

Chris said the teachers union often creates unnecessary roadblocks – for example, he submitted a proposal in September for how to spend turnaround bonus money on increased teacher salaries. He just heard back from the union last week – they rejected the proposal. Now he has to try to come up with another proposal for those funds and the school year is almost over.

 

Special Ed – David Stone feels that Special Ed funding isn’t done correctly, especially as the district moves toward more inclusion. There needs to be more flexibility in how staff are categorized, for example, so principals can best provide services to students.

 

The Urban Teacher Center provides teachers who have Special Ed certification – Chris sees this as a major benefit since many Special Ed teachers aren’t certified in that way.

 

Q: What are your concerns about the new teacher contract? Uncertainty about how achievement units will be defined, the new categories of teachers. Makes it hard to plan ahead for next year’s budget when you don’t know how much your current teachers will be making. Evaluations haven’t been developed yet. Also concerned that the changes in the salary scales may create a competitive environment among teachers.

 

The group agreed that we should have a program on the new teacher contract, focusing on how teachers will be evaluated and how the district will determine whether the new contract has had a positive impact. Karen will work on scheduling this.

 

This year SW Charter implemented a new benchmarking system, MAP (Measures of Academic Progress), to look at individual student growth.

 

Gates Compact – Carol informed the group that the Gates Foundation recently invited charter and district leaders from six cities, including Baltimore, to help develop a district/charter compact. Currently, Baltimore City Schools’ Chief of Staff and CEO are reviewing the draft compact, which includes the creation of a policy work group and other agreements to promote collaboration. Gates is accepting requests for $100,000 grants to move local work forward. If Baltimore receives these funds, they may sit at ABAG. There may also be larger grants available to support collaboration.

 

David Stone asked the funders to help the district build the capacity of the Office of New Initiatives, which currently has only two staff people. The speakers feel that Office is critical as an advocate for charter and transformation schools.