Seeding Success in Charter Schools

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It's hard to overstate the hopefulness the nation brings to the challenge of educating students living in the debilitating grasp of urban poverty. To Oprah Winfrey, the School of Washington, D.C., 320-student public charter boarding school for 6th through 12th graders that sends most of its graduates to college, is a dream come true. President Barack Obama called a true success story when he signed public service legislation before an audience of dignitaries gathered at the campus last spring. Journalists also are drawn to inspirational charter schools like SEED. What makes them successful, they want to know, when so many schools leave so many students so poorly educated? Culture is big part of the answer. The schools tend to be small, personal places where adults and students are closely connected, where students care because they feel cared about. They're often tough-love places that demand discipline and send relentless message to students that education matters and that, if they work hard, they'll be successful, an orientation to the world that's utterly lacking in our deeply dysfunctional urban cores. There's regular recognition for strong grades and good citizenship. Students are taught sense of optimism that helps them get through the long school days and years required to catch them up to their middle-class peers. As charter they've been able to select teachers who share the schools' belief systems. They are inspiring places that prove that we can do better in urban education. But journalistic portraits invariably leave us with less-glossy image of inspiring charter schools like SEED. They convey sense of the difficulty and expense of the schools' work and the difficulty of scaling up these entrepreneurial educational enterprises. The New York Times Magazine duly noted in profile this fall that the school--which opened in 1998 and graduated its first seniors in 2004-had won college acceptances for 97% of its graduates and that 90% of the school's impoverished, almost exclusively black, graduates go directly to college, compared to 56% of black students nationwide. But the Times also points out that the school has very high student attrition rate, and that many of the separations are not voluntary, reality that diminishes the impressiveness of the school's college-going rate. SEED unapologetically expels more students than day schools, about 20 year, journalist David Whitman wrote in Sweating the Small Stuff (Fordham Institute, 2008), which profiles high-achieving urban schools. One-third of students repeat 8th grade, Whitman reports, and only about half of the school's 7th graders will graduate from SEED. The Times puts the school's graduation rate even lower, at about 30%. Last year, reduced its attrition by limiting the number of staffers permitted to expel students. But high student attrition afflicts many high-achieving charter including the well-regarded KIPP and studies show that it's the weaker students who leave. The accounts of and other schools also reveal that it's extraordinarily expensive to surround struggling inner-city students with the supports they need, making the schools difficult to replicate. The Times points out that now spends $35,000 year per student, or about four times the average federal, state, and local spending per public school student. It required an act of Congress to establish the school's funding at that level. When opened second school, in Maryland, in 2008, it again required special funding stream, provided by the Maryland state legislature. On Track to College To get sense of what it takes to get impoverished urban students on college track, consider the nine-year-old MATCH Public Charter High School, near Fenway Park in Boston. The school has an open-admissions policy and three-quarters of its students live in poverty, yet nearly 100% of its graduates win places at four-year colleges, and U. …