Looking at Charter Schools in Alberta

Foulston is a busy nine year-old. He’s got charismatic brown curls, plays hockey, loves Harry Potter and giggles when he sings “Waka, Waka” with his mom.
He also attends Westmount Charter School, blissfully unaware that he is at the centre of a heated debate, one that has seen many kids leave public schools for charter schools.

“There has been some threat around the idea that we’re stealing their students,” says Westmount Principal Martha Faulkner. And, with an almost 250-percent increase in charter school enrollment between 2000 and 2009, perhaps the public schools are right to feel a little bit concerned.

It’s been 15 years since charter schools were introduced into Alberta, yet the animosity surrounding their role within the education system rages on. Charter schools are publicly funded schools. They receive about the same level of funding as any public school and don’t charge for tuition. But charter schools operate autonomously on a mandate — or a charter — and report directly to the province rather than to a school board. That lets them deliver education programs based on unique learning philosophies, or with a special focus such as the arts, science or language-acquisition while still following an Alberta Education-approved curriculum.

Critics of charter schools view them as an American idea thrown into Alberta’s education landscape that allows schools to specialize, on the taxpayer’s dollar, explicitly specifying how they teach and restricting whom they teach. They defend public schools by putting them on the same sacred ground as universal health care — one collective, equalizing an education experience that’s available to all.

Despite these criticisms, it’s clear charter schools are a hit in Calgary — 5,930 of the 7,161 students enrolled at charter schools throughout Alberta in 2009 went to one of the six charter schools in Calgary. The number of students in Calgary charter schools has more than tripled over the past decade, and even though that may seem small when compared to student enrollment at the Calgary Board of Education (CBE), which sat at roughly 99,680 students in 2009, it’s likely more students will continue to swap schools in the coming years.

Back when Bjorn was ready to start kindergarten, his parents, Quinton and Yenny, put him into Collingwood School, a CBE school in northwest Calgary. Yenny had recently emigrated from Venezuela, and the school’s Spanish language program let her plug into the culture she was home sick for.

Bjorn was a smart and popular kid at school. “Everybody knew Bjorn, from the teacher to the principal,” Yenny recalls. “He was tutoring other kids, helping other kids.”
But, by Grade 2, it was clear the opportunities at Collingwood were not meeting Bjorn’s needs.

“He never felt the need to push himself,” Yenny says.

Bjorn’s faltering at school stemmed from more than just a lack of motivation. It was the public school’s standardized curriculum that seemed to stifle his growth. “There was no room to be unique,” says Yenny, pointing out the practice of the teacher using the same assignment for all 22 students in Bjorn’s class.

Bjorn’s parents began to consider their options when the school’s assistant principal suggested Bjorn get his IQ tested. With an IQ of 130, a child is considered gifted and can apply for a spot in one of the CBE’s designated schools for gifted children, or become eligible for an individual program plan designed and instituted by his teacher.In Yenny’s mind, this was not a solution.

Yenny decided to look around for other education alternatives. She stumbled across Westmount’s more-nuanced “multiple intelligences” approach to education, which views exceptional ability as not being isolated strictly to academic success; it also shows up in other areas, including creativity, autonomy and problem-solving skills. The fact Bjorn would be able to be in a school geared towards developing his specific type of gifted intelligence and do work at grade level in areas like language arts, but charge ahead in math, quickly convinced Yenny to make the move to Westmount.

Candace Saar, a former teacher with the CBE, understands why parents have moved their children to charter schools. “One of the problems with CBE is that it is too big to be responsive to emergent needs in education,” she says.

Saar, now an education consultant and researcher with the Galileo Education Network — a Calgary organization that does research into new learning environments and promotes professional development for teachers — says the industrial model of schooling offered by the CBE is increasingly out of synch with current realities.

“For a hundred years, kids have been colouring maps and memorizing fragmented bits of information to be recalled on demand,” she says. “We need new images of what responsive, engaging learning environments ought to look like. That’s the niche that charter schools have emerged to fill: centres of innovation, where new ideas about education can be worked out.”

That’s pretty much what the Alberta government had in mind when it introduced the charter school concept in 1994. Charter schools were meant to act like a fast-moving advance team, checking the lay of the land, testing and then bringing back new ideas about the best route forward to teach kids. Their smaller boards, one per school, could adjust quickly and be flexible to the needs of their students. In turn, Alberta Education required charter schools to communicate, in some manner, what they’ve learned with other schools.

But the collaborative ideal between charter and public schools never materialized. In fact, little communication exists between the two systems. The relationship has become bogged down in antagonism, and the children within the public system are not enjoying the promised benefits of the experimentation done by charter schools.
Part of the problem is what makes charter schools work ruffles some feathers. The Alberta School Boards Association (ASBA), which creates policies and bylaws for all Alberta school boards — except charter boards — has concerns over the fact charter schools spend public money, but don’t have publicly elected boards.

And then there’s the Alberta Teacher’s Association (ATA), the union that negotiates salaries and sets the labour standards for the rest of Alberta’s teachers. At a charter school, teachers can be hired based on their particular passion or expertise. And if they fizzle out and stop being a good teacher, they can be let go. Within a public school, this is much harder to do because of the teacher’s union, which often puts teachers into schools and roles based solely on seniority and not expertise that might fit with a specific school’s philosophy.

The ATA has also taken an official stance against charter schools on the basis of their ability to discriminate on who and what they teach. “We oppose publicly funded charter schools that exclude students on any basis that violates human rights legislation,” explains ATA President Carol Henderson. “Not all parents can afford to send their kids to charter schools.” Moreover, she adds, a charter school does not have to make accommodations for children with disabilities.

Unfortunately, upsetting as it is for the ATA, charter schools are legislated to discriminate. It’s kind of how they operate. A charter school must provide a unique approach to learning designed to meet the needs of a particular group of students. A peek in the window at the Almadina Language Charter Academy in southeast Calgary and you’ll only see students who speak English as a second language, moving through each grade with two report cards — one for academics and one for language acquisition. The dance between the two — known as Learning by Design — is part of that school’s unique learning philosophy.

As for the money involved with attending a charter school, while most parents are familiar with paying several hundred dollars in annual fees, charter schools, despite the fact they do not charge tuition, are definitely more expensive.

The Calgary Girls’ School, a charter school which only teaches girls in Grade 4 through 9, leases laptops to their students at $345 a year. And at Westmount, books, fieldtrips and project supplies cost parents up to $491 a year. The biggest cost at a charter school is transportation — up to $750 a year, the only portion not fully funded by the Alberta government.

In the end, the lack of communication between charter schools and public schools may in fact come down to money, but not at the nickel-and-dime level of forking over money to lease a laptop or pay for transportation.

Shawna Ritchie, a policy analyst with the Canada West Foundation, says the problem stems from the fallout of applying free-market principles to education. “Alberta Education concluded that, in order for schools to improve, they needed more competition,” Ritchie says. “The assumption is that a system with one provider prevents innovation. School boards don’t have an incentive to change.” On the other hand, “charter schools are fighting for their very survival. A charter school can fail.” As a result, she adds, “charter schools have the compulsion to try to new things and the freedom to do so.”

In Ritchie’s 2010 report, Innovation in Action: An Examination of Charter Schools in Alberta, she describes the intent of this competitive setup: “Parents will choose to enroll their children in successful and innovative schools and withdraw them from less-responsive and less-successful schools. This natural selection puts pressure on the public system to perform better and stimulate innovation as schools compete for students.”

Within this business model, Saar says the CBE is very interested in protecting their market share. “They do not want to have declining enrollments because that threatens their operating budgets and essentially the empire that they have built, ” she says. In fact, Saar estimates the CBE employs more than 6,000 teachers, running the second-largest school jurisdiction in Canada. “That’s a lot of power.”

Joe Frank, the education manager with Alberta Education who oversees the operation of all charter schools in the province, has seen various attempts by charter schools to connect with this empire. According to Frank, “They have may have had a story to tell, but there was no one willing to listen. The larger boards were not receptive to what they had to say.”

With no formal mechanism for charter schools to feed their insights back into the larger public system — a mechanism that might massage or manage this relationship — the result has been, at best, an awkward silence. At worst, the charter school education experiment has been a waste of time and money.

Pushing back against all this divisiveness is the fact charter schools do work, if you define success through results on Provincial Achievement Tests. The Charter School Impact Study conducted by Alberta Education in 2006 looked at Grade 3 students from regular public schools and from charter schools with similar scores on their provincial tests. They compared their results in Grade 6 and again in Grade 9. The study concluded charter schools added more value to their students in both math and language arts than did regular public schools.

ASBA President Heather Welwood is convinced these charter school successes can be shared with the whole system. “Charter schools were set up to be research centres. As we moved along, we realized that things weren’t being shared and they had to be. We’re learning as we go,” she says.

According to Welwood, there’s also been a shift to improving communication between charter and public schools in the last two years. “It may be a matter of dollars. There’s simply not enough money to work in isolation,” she says. “With the students, we’re also working on developing 21st-century skills and one of those skills is collaboration. I think there’s been a recognition that adults will have to learn this, as well.”

Welwood places her hope for continued improvements in communication in the new focus of an old initiative called the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI). Established in 2000, AISI provides annual funds (approximately $140 per student) to any public school that can come up with a three-year plan to improve student learning. In practical terms, this means teaching schools how to network and share information.

Westmount recently participated in an AISI project that focused on sharing what it learned about motivating gifted underachievers. Annual reports, published on the AISI website, made strategies, successes and failures readily available to all school jurisdictions. Alberta Education then selected Westmount to present its best practices at its annual AISI forum.
Supporting this new mood for conversation was a 2009 leadership change at the CBE; Naomi Johnson, its new chief superintendent of schools, seems more collaborative and forward-thinking.

“It’s quite exciting. Dialogue is starting to happen,” says Faulkner. “Current senior leadership of the CBE is very much in favour of sharing information about best practices and providing for the needs of all students.”

In fact, in the last year, CBE trustees have met with all of the charter schools. “We’ve been very purposeful in developing a relationship,” says Johnson. “My work is about collaborative leadership in moving education forward. You can’t do that in silos, and you can’t do that by not working together.”

Frank is confident this impulse will continue to mature with an upcoming change in legislation— a new School Act is due in 2011. He won’t speculate on whether this will make charter schools better friends with the larger boards; after all, “You can’t legislate conversation.” He is sure, however, that “there will be something regarding the communication and what relationships with other education institutions should look like.”

Let’s hope he’s right. It would be so nice to get past the politics and back to the kids.