Do Charter Schools Pass The Test?

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Mesa's public schools responded to this educational free-for-all by creating arts and Montessori magnet programs. The competition for pupils--and $5,000-a-head state funding--has grown so fierce that the public schools now advertise in movie theaters. District teachers can take customer-service workshops; a portion of their pay hinges on how well they rate on consumer-satisfaction surveys.

Some charter success stories have emerged. One is Mesa Arts Academy. Its 170 students win national art competitions, and in the past two years have posted gains of more than 40% on standardized exams. The school is located inside the 25 crime-ridden blocks known as Southside, after the neighborhood's resident gang. Public schools here were historically overcrowded, and the one thing Southside had going for it was a vibrant Boys & Girls Club, where kids spent their after-school hours doing homework and playing basketball.

In 1995, the club joined forces with local school officials to open a charter with a two-pronged course of study--mornings devoted to academics, afternoons to social studies and arts electives like orchestra and mural painting. The whole operation is conducted by principal Sue Douglas, 51, who spent 15 years teaching and serving on boards of private schools.

Her first months on the job were a crash course in how the other half lives. Police shut down a methamphetamine lab a block from the school. Kids confided they slept under their beds to avoid bullets from drive-by shootings. So Douglas and her teachers and parents worked with police to clean things up. Prison inmates were bused in to sweep crack vials from the school playground. Parents cruised Southside armed with cell phones, ready to dial police at the first sign of trouble. Now when Douglas circles the neighborhood, kids bolt out of their homes as if she were the Good Humor man. "She's not afraid to walk up and down the streets like she's lived here for years," says Emily Valenzuela, a mom who lives a block away. Neither are the dozens of kids from Mesa's ritziest zip codes who now commute to Southside to attend the academy.

Mesa Arts is a takes-a-village enterprise. But many of the city's charter schools are less lavish affairs that can fall prey to the strains that plague most start-ups. This was certainly true of Paramount Academy. Launched in 1997, the school was originally led by Marsh Dale Cline, a seasoned public school teacher. His son Dale R. Cline was a member of the board and also groomed the school grounds. After cycling through several board members and surviving one aborted takeover attempt, the senior Cline resigned last summer. His son, who freely admits "my background's not education," took the helm with another manager and opened the school with a new charter and a different sponsor.

The second blow came last fall, when parents started decamping to other schools. Paramount discovered it had overestimated its head count, and state funding was reduced by $400,000. With its credit cards maxed to the hilt, the school made cutbacks. The school is suffering from growing pains and will be on its feet this fall, according to Leo Condos, a Mesa attorney who represents Paramount and specializes in charter-school law. Says Condos: "Most of the people in the charter business have an educational dream, and they just don't always pursue it with the best business knowledge."

In this brave new marketplace, education and business are harder and harder to separate. For this school year, Paramount budgeted $5,000 for advertising and $6,000 for textbooks. Even as the school was freezing funds for new supplies, Paramount principal Bud Garrett had to send his teachers door-to-door to recruit new pupils. "We scrambled big time," explains Garrett, "flyering and advertising until we got up to 140." While Garrett and his staff were out fishing for students, Cline was hard at work on another venture: a second Paramount campus in nearby Peoria, where he says there are "better market opportunities."

Arizona prides itself on not suffocating charter schools with red tape. Most states grant charters for five years; Arizona's span a full 15. Short of requiring that an applicant not have a rap sheet, there are no resume requirements for running a charter school. The state has closed down just four schools, none of them for academic reasons.

Arizona scrutinizes the annual financial audits of charter schools, but pays less heed to what goes on in the classroom. Paramount, for instance, has drawn no special attention for its schizophrenic test scores. In some areas close to 70% of students met or exceeded state standards last year; on the eighth-grade math exam, none did. In April, Kristen Jordison of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools made a routine visit to Paramount Academy on a day when all but kindergarten classes were suspended for testing. On the basis of that visit, Jordison said the school "seemed to be doing what they need to do." During a visit by TIME, however, a group of students had locked several boys inside the girls' bathroom. The crowd of students summoned to the principal's office outnumbered those in some classrooms--evidence, Garrett says, that charter schools tend to be magnets for misfits. "I got kicked out of my public school last week for cold-cocking a girl," boasted a student.