COMMENTARY
Lack of money, support killing charter schools
By Drake Beil
Keola Nakanishi is not chained to a rock like Prometheus and tortured daily by an all-powerful Zeus.
Advertiser library photo • Aug. 26, 2002
Heroes go on sacred quests, and just as Prometheus gave fire to mankind and suffered the consequences, Nakanishi gives the same fire of knowledge to his 70 students and anyone who comes in contact with him, despite the treatment from the state Department of Education.
Students from Halau Ku Mana New Century Public Charter School chant in ceremonies welcoming Maori exchange students at the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
He is an unlikely Hawaiian hero, but his name is on the dotted line where it says:
"Principal/Director" of Halau Ku Mana New Century Public Charter School.
Charter schools are semi-autonomous public schools operated by parents, educators, community groups or private organizations under contracts with the Board of Education.
In his late 20s, with a master's degree in Pacific island studies from the University of Hawai'i, Nakanishi is in his third year as principal and director. His school serves an unusually high number of Native Hawaiians (98 percent Polynesian) and a high number (27 percent) of students with special educational needs.
In his academically rigorous culture-based school of choice, more than 80 percent of his 70 students tested four grade levels below average in reading and math when they entered his care.
He has a high number of students from subsidized-lunch families and the majority witness drugs, violence, abuse, gambling, and gangs in their homes and neighborhoods. Their main concentration of students reaches into Papakolea, and they also include students from Windward and Leeward O'ahu, and East and West Honolulu.
But tests are not always measures of true student potential. Here are two additional measures of success to note:
• Attendance.
Halau Ku Mana has a longer-than-normal school day, with classes going from 8 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. Yet with students who had extremely poor attendance records at their previous schools, Halau Ku Mana saw 92 percent of its students decrease absences compared to previous years.
"This is the first time I've actually enjoyed going to school every day," said one 17-year-old boy.
• Community involvement.
In a more personal way, Nakanishi smiled and said, "It's been extremely difficult, to say the least, but we've seen a remarkable turnaround with our students. It became real when we connected to the community. Now our waiting list is larger than our enrollment.
"Along with community involvement, we feature project-based learning. For example, three days a week, 15 students spend time making a double-hull Hawaiian canoe. They make connections and get grounding in Hawaiian culture, language and values. They learn math and science as they plot courses, physics in sailing dynamics.
"Others are out at the fishpond learning the science of water quality as they develop fish, crab and have limu projects. The island is our classroom, but we're actually limited by space and money. Instead of support it's been a nightmare from the DOE."
He continued, "As charter schools, we are public schools but have no facilities and get less money than all other schools per pupil. It has been many years now of this inequity, and we're not getting the funding, nor the services."
Perseverance amid pain
Advertiser library photo
There are 25 charter schools in Hawai'i by law, and that law isn't changing this year. By comparison, the number of charter schools operating in the United States in 2003 grew from 2,687 to 2,996.
Voyager Public Charter School in Kaka'ako is among two dozen charter schools across the state. They are part of the state Department of Education but are free to experiment on spending and curriculum.
Charter schools are serving disproportionately high numbers of low-income, at-risk, and minority students. The schools use a wider variety of innovative curricula, are smaller, give more instructional time, attract more students than they can serve, and still receive fewer dollars per student than noncharter public schools.
Halau Ku Mana's primary location was the Atherton YMCA on University Avenue, where students have access to classrooms, office space and a large multipurpose room. Last year, a secondary site was the Kamakakuolani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
The school also just signed a one-year deal with Paradise Park as another temporary location, but most learning takes place at auxiliary sites like Loko i'a o He'eia, a traditional fishpond, where students study marine resources, fish and seaweed cultivation, ecosystems, land resource management, math and Hawaiian culture.
Last, they work and play on a voyaging canoe that helps students learn traditional sailing skills. The school's canoe is the Kanehunamoku.
This article is a call to action for support for Keola Nakanishi and others like him in the charter schools who have taken the punishment and yet persevered in their pioneering breakaways from the Department of Education on the path to freedom and educational excellence in our public schools.
It is no longer acceptable to say they succeeded despite the efforts of the DOE. The charter schools are the brightest ray of hope we have in public education today, and we must help them before they are bureaucratized to death.
There are others like Nakanishi.
Little money, little support
What are the facts and key issues as we look at the quest of the charter schools to improve public education?
First, the schools do not receive an allocation or even a set percentage of facilities money even though they have the same responsibilities to provide them as the regular state-run schools.
State law recognizes only one chartering authority, the BOE. Hawai'i is the only state where the single board responsible for the operations and management of every traditional school is also the sole chartering authority.
Many see this as a clear conflict of interest, and multiple chartering authorities are being considered, with the UH College of Education as a likely candidate. "Multiple authorities lead to more and healthier charter Schools," the Center for Education Reform said in a paper titled "Lessons Learned About Enacting Charter Laws."
Second, charter schools do not receive a fair or appropriate share of per-pupil expenditures. In the first year that the DOE gave money to charter schools, the allotment was $2,997 per student. Slowly it has risen to $5,355 per student this year.
"None of us came asking for more per student, but what we expected was equity," said Ku Kahakalau, principal at Kanu 'o Ka 'Aina New Century Public Charter School. "The lack of funding and lack of support literally caused nightmares for the first couple of years.
"The only reason we're still here is that it works for the kids. I see the smiles, the glowing eyes, the growth in reading scores, and knowledge of their culture. How can they continue to deny us the funding? Where is the pono in it all?"
That $5,355 is 64 percent of the $8,374 the DOE says it spends per student annually in other public schools.
Now, the Cooper-Ouchi study pegs the per-pupil expenditures at $8,148. But that was before things like special-education funds, federal funds, capital expenditures and facilities monies were included, which brings the total to $10,422 per student.
If you use that number, charter schools receive only 51 percent of the monies allocated to every other public school.
Another way to look at per-pupil costs is helpful for perspective. There are slightly more than 180,000 students in public schools K-12 in Hawai'i, and that number has been reasonably stable for 30 years. We now spend roughly $1.8 billion annually on the system. Divide that by 180,000, and you have about $10,000 per student.
Why give the charter schools around half of what is fair? Especially when many are dealing with our most challenging groups of students?
"The big thing is that 'fringes' for employees are paid out of our per-student allocation. Nowhere else in the entire system does this occur," Kahakalau said. Another example: Charter schools like Wai'alae Elementary and Lanikai Elementary (which were converted to charter schools) not only receive less money but also pay for their electricity, water, sewer, gas and food costs.
Too much to afford?
"My biggest worry," said Laura H. Thielen, a member of the BOE, "is that under the current majority package of school-reform bills, charter schools would get the same or similar per pupil allowances, no federal funds, no special-education monies, and the reality is, after all the expenses forced on them, they'll actually get less."
The governor's CARE Report recommended "that public charter schools receive a per-pupil allocation equivalent to the allocation in traditional public schools with the same students. In addition, the fact that public charter Schools do not receive any allocations for facilities should be addressed."
Addressing the facilities issue, state Sen. Norman Sakamoto, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said: "The problem we face is that we may spend up to $23 million to build a new school facility, and we can't give that amount to each startup."
State Rep. Roy Takumi has been chairman of the House Education Committee for two years. He said, "It looks like we'll be passing out a bill to change the distribution of the monies to the charter schools so they can budget better. However, the amount of per-pupil funding is unchanged."
The inequitable status quo is not progress.
Nakanishi stated emphatically on April 13 that "in regard to (the House education bill), please urge your legislators to fund at least the amount approved by the BOE, $28.3 million. The current figure amounts to barely over $4,000 per pupil for charter schools, and they are currently struggling to survive at $5,355 per pupil, which already represents major inequity versus the spending on (other) DOE schools.
"We need tons of people calling, because if we don't make noise, all charter schools will face even greater financial challenges next year. ... Please kokua. ...
E ho'omau ana no kakou," Nakanishi said.
Drake Beil, Ed.D., CMC, is president of Solutions Inc. Reach him at drake@drakebeil.com or (808) 587-5832.
