Taking It Slow

By Lee Sherman

An Alaska educator urges caution in starting charters

Seattle native Dr. Gordon E. Castanza, a retired teacher and an administrator with more than 22 years of experience in Boston and Alaska, is the author of Alaska's Charter Schools: Freedom and Accountability, published in 1999 by Publications Consultants in Anchorage. Northwest Education Editor Lee Sherman spoke with him recently. That conversation is distilled below.

NORTHWEST EDUCATION: You've been superintendent of two districts in Alaska — Chatham and Hydaburg. Are they remote districts?
GORDON CASTANZA: Well, I guess by Oregon standards, yeah, they are remote. Hydaburg is located on the southwest tip of Prince of Wales Island about 45 miles west of Ketchikan. But at least there were grocery stores, gas stations, Burger Kings, and pizza places, and they were connected by paved roads. So by Alaska standards, it really wasn't very remote — especially when you compare it to Chatham on Admiralty Island where I was for four years. It was only accessible by ferry and small plane. You had to go into Juneau all the time if you wanted to get anything. They had a Fred Meyer and a Costco and that sort of thing in Juneau, but it was a 12-hour ferry ride.

NW: How did you get involved in the charter school movement?
CASTANZA: The concept appealed to me, particularly since at the time charters appeared on the scene I was implementing site-based management in my district. Site-based management was a brand-new concept that kind of dovetailed into charter schools as the school choice movement started to pick up some momentum. It kind of led the way, at least intellectually and emotionally, for folks to say, "Well, gee, if it's OK for us to manage our own money, then maybe we can handle our own governance."

NW: What was it you liked about the charter school concept?
CASTANZA: I liked the fact that it allowed folks who had children in the schools to have a say in the way the school was being operated and what kind of curriculum would be taught and so on. Prior to that, you had a bureaucratic system — very hierarchical, top-down — and the parents were sort of an adjunct.

NW: The parents didn't fit into the picture very well.
CASTANZA: Right.

NW: How do you compare charter schools to other choices people have, like vouchers, private schools, open enrollment. A lot of different options have been popping up. Do you see charter schools as the best of the bunch, or just one of many choices that should exist?
CASTANZA: I think the charter school concept is fraught with lots of problems. Not the least of these is what Seymour Sarason talks about in his book, Charter Schools: Another Failed Education Reform? — the lack of preparation, even among the most zealous of the charter school founders. They haven't a clue how to put together a school. They're trained in a subject area or in elementary ed. My experience with educators is that they don't know how to run a business. And a school definitely has a business side to it — there's the roof that needs to be fixed and the contractors to be dealt with. By and large you have people who don't know how to use the resources or what's available, even in their backyard. In spite of their desire to do something brand-new and experimental and the enthusiasm that comes with that — "Oh man, we can go out and do something really great" — they don't know the infrastructure that is needed. And they don't understand all of the education theory that's behind it. They think all they need to do is go on the Internet and buy something off the shelf, and OK, this will work in our classroom and we can call ourselves a charter school.

NW: So you're seeing people jumping in who are unprepared for the rigors of the job?
CASTANZA: What I've seen happening in Alaska is that a lot of the original charter school founders are being ousted. It's almost like a domino effect — you know, after the revolution, the revolution begins to eat its young. How many of us are really groomed for positions of power, and know how to deal with it very well? You just don't jump into a position of power by somebody handing you the keys and saying, "OK, now you're going to run the state of Oregon." There's a lot that goes into it — knowing how to manage change, dealing with disparate points of view, seeking not only compromise but moving the ball forward, and creating a sense of mission. These are attributes of leadership that very few of us have. Yet, one of the assumptions charter schools make is that everybody is coming out of the seashell fully formed and understanding how to handle a position of power and how to interact with their fellow human beings in order to get something done.

NW: This idea of freedom for accountability is at the heart of the charter school movement. Yet you're saying that in reality, not all charter schools are built solidly on that foundation.
CASTANZA: Well, of course, my research is just focused on the state of Alaska. But that's what I found — that charter school founders were long on the rhetoric for freedom but short on accountability. Thank you very much for the money, but we don't want to have to answer to you, or a school board, or anyone else, about how we're spending the money.

NW: My understanding is that that is the fundamental trade-off in charter schools — that they would have to show results, they would have to have a plan. They had to have specific goals that were measurable, and they had to be able to show at the end of five years or whatever that they had actually accomplished those goals. You're saying that's a nice theory, but it hasn't happened consistently in Alaska?
CASTANZA: That's right. And I lay a lot of the fault at the feet of the legislature. Alaska's charter school law was very poorly crafted. It was probably one of the worst pieces of legislation I've ever seen come out of the state.

NW: What was wrong with it?
CASTANZA: Well, it didn't lay out any parameters for what a school had to do. It said, "OK, you go to your local school board, and if they'll give you the blessing, fine, then you send it up to the state and if it looks like a duck, we'll call it a duck. But there was nothing built into the law for any kind of oversight — no revisitation of it. I mean, you take a look at Massachusetts' charter school law. Now there's a model of how to get it done. They have an accountability team that goes out to the charter schools and checks on them. The team is made up of a broad cross-section of people from Massachusetts: businesspeople, industries, parent groups, the education department, other school districts. It's like an accreditation team.

NW: Like an audit.
CASTANZA: Yes, that's right. And they're very careful, too, about granting charter schools. There's a lot more t's and i's that need to be taken care of before you can get a charter approved in the state of Massachusetts. And they had the first real handbook on accountability of charter schools.

NW: If you had a chance to create the ideal charter school plan, what elements would you insist on?
CASTANZA: Well, first of all I'd want leadership that has some seasoning behind it — you know, show me the beef. If you went to a bank and said, "I want to open a school," the first thing they're going to ask you is: "Have you had any experience in running a school? Do you understand what it takes to run a business?" Typically, a small business folds up its tent within five years. We've got boneyards full of small businesses that come and go. Remember when the rage was yogurt places? Now it's espresso houses. That's the great American experiment in free enterprise.

NW: Well, and opening up a school is infinitely more complex than opening an espresso stand, just in terms of the knowledge required.
CASTANZA: Right. And then the next thing is a well-defined curriculum. And next, some definite outcomes, quantifiable outcomes. And then some very strong language having to do with checking up — the accountability side. Most charter school legislation doesn't have that. In Alaska, I think charter schools are by and large a political phenomenon, not an educational phenomenon. There are elements that go into thinking about charter schools that have nothing to do with sound educational theory and practice. I went to the legislature and I told them why they shouldn't jump into this charter school movement too soon. And the reason is the kids. I said, "Would you experiment with taking a thousand gallons of crude oil and dumping it into Glacier Bay, just as an experiment to see how quickly the superintendent of Glacier Bay National Park could react and respond?" Well, of course not. I mean, that's a rhetorical question.

Well then, if you aren't going to do that, then why would you let somebody experiment with your children? Aren't they as valuable to you as the sea otter or the humpback whale? Maybe we can take a look some of these test spots and see how it works out first. Let's not rush into something because of political expediency and to quiet some voices. Our children are too valuable to us to do that. When these charter schools get started, what if they go belly-up, as many of them have? What are you going to do with those kids? Well, they go back into the public school system. So you've created something that you havenprepared yourself or the legislature for the eventualities. You're trying to create a Band Aid and silence these voices, and taking the money from public education in order to do it. Because according to Alaska legislation, the money follows the child.

NW: So, you said these things to the legislature, and what was their response?
CASTANZA: Well, other people had also come to them and said: "Wait a minute. Anchorage School District already has umpteen alternative schools for at-risk kids — everything from teen moms to kids on drugs, in prison, in and out of reform school, and so on. They're trying to take care of a lot of different students' needs." But other voices were saying, "Everybody knows that the public school system is in a shambles and that public schools are the worst thing going for kids." These are people who, by the way, were themselves educated in the public school system. Weird, isn't it? And they were also listening to things like international test scores that showed that America's math and science scores are third-rate, and so on and so forth.

NW: I can't decide if you're a charter school supporter or a critic. Do you think we should abandon this concept, or do you think it can work with the right ingredients?
CASTANZA: I am an advocate of charter schools, and I think they can work. But having been both a practitioner in education and having run school districts and managed large budgets, I know what it takes to run a school. And I don't see charter legislation that provides people with the proper tools.

NW: So you think there's still a long way to go in making charter schools a viable piece of the school reform puzzle?
CASTANZA: There've been some really good thinkers in the area of charter schools. But you know what's odd about their writing? They don't get at the underside. They get the nice theory and the romance of going off and doing this bright and beautiful thing. But they're really out there romancing the stone. They don't have any idea of the work that's going to go into doing this. And I look at the studies that are being done at the national level by RPPI (Research, Policy, and Practice International), and their work is superficial. I mean, it has appearances of being in-depth, but you look at the results, and they're not plowing any new ground. They're going after the low-hanging apples — you know, counting the number of Hispanic kids, the number of kids in special education, and things like that. But what nobody wants to touch is student achievement — how well are these kids doing? They say, "Charter schools haven't been around long enough." But then, why do we have 1,600 of them? If they haven't been around long enough, why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars? I mean, the Clinton administration just kept throwing money at charter schools because they're crying: "Nobody gave us any start-up expenses. We're not getting any money to build a school." So we're going to give you some money to start a school with no research base to substantiate that this is what we ought to be doing. For at least 30 years now, going back to the work of educator and researcher Ronald Edmonds — one of the first guys who started to look at education as a research laboratory — we've slowly started to build a research base. Now we've got researchers like Lawrence Lezotte and David Berliner and Linda Darling-Hammond. Why don't we take a look at these folks and see what they're saying about education? Let's get our research base first. Let's substantiate and look at what we know before we go out and try to do something we don't know.

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