Providing more charter school opportunities can certainly improve educational outcomes in a given district for the students attending the charter itself, as has been demonstrated statewide with the vast majority of charter schools having proportionately more students meeting or exceeding state standards. To the extent the Regents and SUNY continue to approve high quality schools that continue this trend, students in PLA schools will have new and better public school alternatives.

Charter School Conversions - A Dubious Option
Besides approving new charters as a "restart" option to deal with PLA schools, another restart option is to convert a PLA school to a charter school. This approach is likely to be far less effective and even doomed to fail, absent an extraordinary change in a failing school's culture.

To date there are only nine charter schools that converted from a district school, at least two of which were more or less contract type schools previously established in a special district partnership with a community organization. Two others converted back to district schools, and another was shut down. The six remaining conversion charters were comparatively high-performing before converting, and have mostly remained so since then as charter schools. Accordingly, conversion schools have had an exceptional team culture of achievement that contributed to establishing itself as an independent, autonomous public charter school. The conversion process to a charter also required the schools to amend their district collective bargaining agreements to accommodate the requirements of a charter school, which the faculty in each school agreed to do.

By contrast, schools that have been "persistently lowest achieving" cannot easily transform to high performing as long as the same leadership, staffing and work rules under the union contract remain in place. Simply categorizing a PLA school as a "charter" is not enough. That is why any charter school conversion under the restart intervention must be implemented more along the requirements of the state's"turnaround" intervention strategy where State Ed. requires the school leader and at least half the staff get replaced.

Intervention a House of Cards w/o Enforcement
As for any intervention strategy for PLA schools, be it restart or turnaround or "transformation," the whole process can become a house of cards, even with the investment of $2 million annually in school improvement grants for each school. For example, the teachers union can refuse to amend the existing collective bargaining agreement, which is their right; or, negotiations can drag on. State Ed. admonishes that any refusal to make necessary contractual changes to implement an intervention strategy can lead to the school's registration being revoked; that is, the state can close down the school. Whether SED is actually serious about closing a school remains to be seen, considering the political minefield school closure attempts have been for the New York City Schools Chancellor.

Laws and plans and strategies are only as good as the willingness of the state--in this case, the Regents and Education Department--to enforce them. Local school districts and unions have the ability to resist by calling the state's bluff, and some might. While the Regents are the top education policy making board in the state, they also are very much a political body appointed by the state legislature, and therefore subject to political push-back. Which description of the Regents prevails in the effort to transform low-achieving district schools will determine its success or failure.

Peter Murphy
for The Chalkboard
Twitter.com/PeterMurphy26
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