Charters' enrollment exploding

Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Lured to Denver to work for Mayor John Hickenlooper, Peter Chapman moved his family from Boston to the far-northeast neighborhood of Green Valley Ranch in fall 2004.

He and his wife, Gail Busby, quickly enrolled their son, Evan, in a neighborhood public school.

Before the year was over, they had signed him up to go elsewhere.

Like a growing number of the city's families, they have chosen a charter school over the traditional options in Denver Public Schools. Evan is a fourth-grader at the Omar D. Blair Edison Charter.

Enrollment in DPS charter schools grew by 300 percent — to 6,846 — from 2000 to 2006. At the same time, enrollment in traditional DPS schools fell by 4,028 students.

A study by the Rocky Mountain News and the nonprofit Piton Foundation shows that families like Chapman's and Busby's are leading that trend — black families with enough income to make school choices easily.

More than half of all black students enrolled in DPS last year did not attend their neighborhood schools, edging out Anglo students by a slight margin and Hispanic students by substantially more, the study found.

And in exercising that choice, black students in DPS are twice as likely as Anglos or Hispanics to pick charter schools over other options such such as magnet schools.

Thirteen percent of all black students in DPS now enroll in charter schools, compared with 5.9 percent of Anglo students and 5.6 percent of Hispanic students, according to the Rocky analysis.

Add income to the mix and the numbers go up, with 15 percent of all middle- or higher-income black families choosing charters.

Chapman isn't surprised that black families aren't settling for the schools closest to their homes.

"As African-American families move up the socioeconomic ladder, as income increases, as educational attainment increases, I think our demands in terms of education increase accordingly," Chapman said.

Colorado lawmakers, led by former Gov. Bill Owens when he was a state senator, paved the way for charter schools in the state in 1993. DPS now is home to 20 charters, with more planned.

Charter students account for about 9 percent of the district's 73,000 students, a figure seen as likely to increase in coming years. A survey of parents commissioned by DPS found that, by a 3-1 ratio, respondents thought charter schools were better than other DPS schools.

"I think parents have become very savvy," said Deborah Blair-Minter, principal of Omar D. Blair, the largest charter school in Denver, with 763 students. "They will shop around until they find the right school for their kids."

Denver charters also pull in students from outside the district. A DPS analysis found that a third of the 3,900 students who come into DPS each day from the suburbs go to charter schools.

Some parents want the specialized curriculum offered by a charter, such as the popular Core Knowledge or Edison. But some Denver charters also have proven to be academic powerhouses.

The Denver School of Science and Technology Charter is one of only two high schools in the city rated excellent by the state. And KIPP Sunshine Peak Academy, a middle school, is outperforming its DPS peers with similar populations of children in poverty.

Yet the district hasn't always welcomed charters. Under Colorado law, DPS passes along to charters an average of 95 percent of local and state per-pupil funding for each student they enroll.

So some educators have seen charters as competitors for scarce financial resources, rather than partners in teaching kids. Superintendent Michael Bennet, who took over DPS in July 2005, sees them as both.

"The financial effect is not the charter schools' fault," he said, noting that DPS has tried to operate the same number of schools while serving thousands fewer children in the past few years.

"The big effect is that the fixed cost per kid goes up," he said, referring to expenses such as building utilities and maintenance. "That's the financial cost, but that's the district's issue."

Bennet said the politics of charter vs. traditional schools can obscure the real issue: Are kids learning?

"What we need here are a lot more good schools," he said. "That's what I'm interested in, whether they're DPS schools, charter schools, contract schools. Whatever they are, we've got to make them better."

Charters by neighborhood

In some Denver neighborhoods, the percentage of children in charters is much higher than the district average of 10 percent.

More than 30 percent of school-age children in the Cole neighborhood in northeast Denver attended charters last year, largely because Cole Middle School was converted to a charter after failing to meet performance levels mandated under state law. The nearby Clayton neighborhood also had high percentages of charter enrollment.

The Cole conversion aside, Green Valley Ranch posted the highest charter enrollment rate, nearly 19 percent.

There, Omar D. Blair Charter, named for the first black president of the Denver school board, has become a beacon for professional families who want an alternative to struggling neighborhood schools.

Every elementary school in far northeast Denver is rated low by the state, except for Blair's elementary school, which is rated average. Blair's elementary school serves kindergarten through eighth grade.

Its enrollment is 48 percent black — more than double the DPS average — and 40 percent low-income in a district with a poverty rate of 67 percent.

Blair-Minter, the daughter of Omar D. Blair and a DPS graduate and 20-year DPS teacher and administrator, carefully chose her words when asked why black parents are the most likely to exercise school choice.

"I think sometimes they feel like we haven't gotten the education for our kids we really want," she said, "and we are going to keep looking for it until we're really satisfied."

Hancock's travels

Charters may be attracting many students in far northeast Denver because of the perception that schools in Green Valley Ranch and adjacent Montbello are not up to par.

A reputation for violence has plagued some schools there. A fatal stabbing in the school cafeteria at Montbello High School in 2005 only added to safety concerns some parents had about the school.

And years after a national TV news show depicted discipline problems at what is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Early College, some parents still cite it as a reason to avoid the school.

"I have never stepped foot into the school, but I don't need to send my kids into no kind of wild environment," said one Montbello mom who mentioned the show. She asked not to be identified.

Denver City Council President Michael Hancock, who represents far northeast Denver, also was hesitant about neighborhood options when he and wife Mary began looking at schools for Jordan, 11, and Janaé, 8.

"We couldn't find a school we had confidence in then in Montbello," he said.

So the Hancocks, who are black, enrolled Jordan in the private Union Baptist Excel Institute for kindergarten and first grade. Then they switched both kids to Knight Fundamental Academy, a back-to-basics DPS magnet program.

Both schools were academically rigorous and, because most of their students are black, they focus more on African-American history. That was particularly important for Michael Hancock, who says DPS did a poor job teaching him black history.

He remembers sitting in a class at his mostly white small college in Nebraska and hearing his classmates talk about black leaders he did not know.

"I sat there and told myself, 'never again,' " he recalled. "We want our kids to have some sense of their history."

But the school bus ride from their Montbello neighborhood to Knight in the Belcaro area southeast of central Denver took 45 minutes to an hour each way.

Then they heard about Blair charter, opening in fall 2004 only a few blocks from their new home in Green Valley Ranch.

Mary Hancock said they liked the rigorous Edison curriculum, a national model that requires a longer school day and year and assesses kids' learning monthly. That, and the promise of smaller classes, spurred the Hancocks to switch to Blair.

"I don't know if all charters are like that, but I know in a regular Denver Public Schools setting you're going to have a lot of kids in the classroom," she said. "It's just not enough teachers."

Diversity or academics?

For some minority couples in Denver, choosing schools requires a balancing act with competing values.

Do they want their kids in the toughest possible curriculum, even if most of their classmates are white, as is the case with some honors or International Baccalaureate programs in DPS?

Or do they sacrifice academic rigor for a more diverse neighborhood school?

It's a dilemma that Peter Chapman, who attended elite private schools growing up in Manhattan, knows well.

"From the time I was extremely young until I was 12, I was one of just a handful of children of color," he said. "There is something you miss in private schools."

Before the move to Denver, his son, Evan, had been in the same position in his suburban Boston school, a district respected for its academics.

For now, Chapman and Busby said, Blair offers the happy combination of diversity and rigor.

"I am very encouraged by the fact he brings home tons of homework and he complains about too much homework," Chapman said. "I've looked at a lot of his assignments, especially the math, and I'm pleased."

But the couple also said Blair must deliver on some promises made when the school opened — offering world languages, including Spanish, and instrumental music.

Their bottom line is academics.

"You have wonderful opportunities to expose them to culture and other experiences on the weekends, when they're not in school," Busby said.

And yes, they would consider private school for Evan, now 10, and his younger sister, Alana, who's 3, if they become dissatisfied with Blair.

"We know, absolutely, it's an option," Busby said.

Top DPS charters by enrollment

1. OMAR D. BLAIR EDISON CHARTER

• Grades: K-8 in far northeast Denver

• Enrollment: 763

• Approach: National Edison Schools curriculum, including monthly assessments and longer school days

2. WYATT-EDISON CHARTER

• Grade: K-8 in north central Denver

• Enrollment: 660

• Approach: Edison curriculum

3. RIDGEVIEW ACADEMY

• Grades: 9-12 in Watkins, chartered through DPS

• Enrollment: 491

• Approach: State's first charter school for juvenile offenders

4. HIGHLINE ACADEMY

• Grades: K-8 in southeast Denver

• Enrollment: 452

• Approach: Popular Core Knowledge curriculum created by University of Virginia emeritus professor E.D. Hirsch Jr., which defines what students should learn at each grade level.

5. DENVER ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY ACADEMY (DATA)

• Grades: K-8 in northwest Denver

• Enrollment: 448

• Approach: Combines classical education with technology, managed by Mosaica Inc., an international charter company