Diversity May Spell Ruin for Successful Charter School -- 06/26/1998

Diversity May Spell Ruin for Successful Charter School

26 June, 1998
10:09 a.m. EDT

By Ben Anderson
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) - State education officials in North Carolina are about to turn their backs on Healthy Start Academy, a charter school responsible for nearly doubling the test scores of 170 minority students in one of Durham’s most desperate neighborhoods - all in the name of diversity.

Under the terms of the legislation creating the state’s charter schools, they’re required to have students populations reflecting the racial make-up of the area in which the school is located. In the case of Healthy Start Academy, a K - 2 school for students in a poor, crime-ridden section of Durham, the quota system demanded it have 45% black students and 55% white students.

But Healthy Start has 168 black students and two white students - a 99.5% to .5% composition - and could be shut down by the state’s education department for not complying with the quota mandate.

Students at the school were tested last fall using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which pegged the average skill level of the pupils in the 48^th percentile, meaning the students’ average test scores were lower than more than half of other students taking the same test.

The test was administered one school year later, with kindergartners scoring in the 99^th percentile and second graders in the 75^th percentile. First graders were not included in the test sample.

Tom Williams is the principal of Healthy Start, the state’s first charter school. A Long Island, New York native and retired school superintendent, he moved to North Carolina six years ago to be closer to family.

Williams noticed on the first day of school that his students, "did not know school behavior," and quickly instituted a regimen of behavior for the students. "We spent the first three weeks working on school behavior," Williams said. "We walked up and down the stairs 12 to 15 times a day until we got it right. We walked the halls all day long ‘till we got it right, until we could walk without hitting, without punching, without screaming, without banging on the walls for three weeks."

The regimen eventually paid dividends. "At the end of the three weeks, we all knew what was expected of us when we walked in the halls and most of the discipline [problems] just went away," Williams said.

Once conquering the behavior problems, Williams enacted what he calls "special programs that public schools have forgotten," including the use of phonics in reading programs rather than whole language, basic arithmetic rather than new math, and a core knowledge curriculum which covers "everything else that the public schools don’t seem to want to talk about," said Williams.

Williams also refused to settle for the North Carolina standard course study, and raised the minimum standards by at least half a grade level for each student.

Under Williams’ management, the students began showing academic improvement, bucking conventional wisdom in the process. "We took all of the things that public schools use as an excuse - being black, being poor, being fatherless, all that kind of junk, drug culture, alcohol; all this stuff that they say, ‘this kid will obviously be a failure," we took these kids who were failures in public schools and turned them into absolute champion academics at the tender age of five, six and seven," Williams said.

But Williams said that kind of success has worried what he calls North Carolina’s academic bureaucracy. He suggests that school boards, superintendents and the National Educators Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, are "very distressed" because the school had too much success with so many black students, and Williams said he expects an effort by those who oppose charter schools to shut down Healthy Start.

The key for opponents of the school appears to be the quotas written into the legislation, which was co-sponsored by state Senator Wib Gulley. When asked about the quota mandate in the law, Gully told CNS "There are no such things as quotas under the bill, there are no such things as requirements of percentages."

But Gulley’s explanation contrasts with what CNS found in a copy of the charter school statute, which states, "Within one year after the charter school begins operation, the population of the school shall reasonably reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the general population residing within the local school administrative unit in which the school is located or the racial and ethnic composition of the special population that the school seeks to serve residing within the local school administrative unit in which the school is located."

The statute also gives the State Board of Education the power to revoke school charters if the mandates are not met, and Gulley told CNS that he included the ethnic composition requirement in the statute "to avoid segregation."

Attempts to reach Governor Jim Hunt were unsuccessful, and the governor’s office did not return a telephone call from CNS seeking comment.

Williams claims that state and local officials are drafting legislation designed to regulate charter schools out of business. "There are three primary reasons why education in America is failing today. First are the school boards. Second are the superintendents and the third are the teachers unions," Williams said.

Williams and Healthy Start Academy have found support from the North Carolina Foundation for Individual Rights. NCFIR Executive Director Jack Daly is preparing to challenge the state’s department of education and says he plans to file court briefs on behalf of the school this later summer.

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