Do Charter Schools Pass The Test?

Out here on the frontier, only the hardiest survive. And Paramount Academy is both figuratively and literally on the frontier. The school operates out of a handful of trailers at the edge of a cookie-cutter housing complex in Mesa, Ariz., a rugged desert city that sprouted into a Phoenix suburb two decades ago. But the academy sits on an ideological edge as well: Paramount is a charter school, a publicly funded enterprise that's privately run--in this case, primarily by a former shoe-repair-shop owner who never graduated from college--and free of the bureaucracy that bogs down so much of public education.

To survive, schools like Paramount must compete for market share by advertising in newspapers, putting up lawn signs and showering parents with pamphlets. Paramount likes to boast about its tiny student-teacher ratios, school uniforms and musical-theater program. A flyer for the school asked, "Are you ready for a change in public schools?"

Carrie Roan, a medical transcriptionist, was more than ready when she heard a radio ad for Paramount two summers ago. With 30-plus kids per class and unbending teachers, the public schools had failed her daughter Staci in most of the familiar ways. But after a year at Paramount, Staci was thriving. With the help of the school's performing-arts program, the once shy fourth-grader had found her voice and performed a Beach Boys medley in a charity concert at the Phoenix airport.

But not everything was ideal, and trouble was coming. Though Staci was more confident, she seldom brought home much schoolwork. Instead, she complained of unruly classes and bus rides. Then the school business got in the way of education. Paramount had to cut staff and stop ordering new school supplies. In February the school lost its music teacher in a salary dispute and suddenly switched to a much cheaper, 4-H agriculture curriculum. Staci would have to drop her singing ambitions and cultivate seedlings. "Paramount was attractive to me because of the choice," says Roan, who is enrolling her daughter in another school for the fall. "But now I'm finding that charters are full of dysfunction." Kathy Leih's two daughters didn't last even a year at Paramount. One spring morning three years ago, they piled into the school van with their classmates for a field trip--to distribute flyers for the school. "They're supposed to be in school learning, not advertising," says Leih, who promptly moved her children elsewhere. "I mean, really, who's benefiting from this?"

Since the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, the movement has multiplied at a dizzying pace. Today half a million students attend more than 2,000 such schools in 35 states. And that number is sure to swell. With his voucher proposal all but dead on Capitol Hill, President George W. Bush is calling for $175 million to help launch new charter schools. The education bill approved by the House last week gives students in low-performing schools the option--and the bus fare--to transfer to charters; schools that fail three years in a row could be shut down and reopened as charters.