The atmosphere was tense at the Nov. 9 meeting of the Baltimore City School Board of Commissioners, even in the lobby of 200 E. North Ave., the school district’s headquarters. At around 8 p.m., more than two hours into the meeting, a group of people milled around outside the doors of the commissioners’ board room talking softly and glancing every so often at an overhead television monitor broadcasting the meeting’s activities.

“Did they get to it yet?” one latecomer asked a man standing next to her.

“No, it’s coming up,” he replied, and both turned their attention back to the monitor.

While the nine-member board discussed union contracts, discipline policies, and creating more innovative high schools, the individuals standing outside in the hallway exchanged opinions and ideas on the one topic that drew them all here tonight: charter schools in Baltimore City.

Over the months prior to this particular meeting, the school district had been involved in negotiations with charter-school proponents who protested a policy adopted by the board that would have limited the number of new charter schools—public schools that operate with autonomy from local school boards—that would be permitted to open in the district over the first three years of its charter program. The city’s policy, adopted in November 2003 after the state legislature passed a law earlier that year permitting charter schools to operate in Maryland, stated that only three new charter schools would be allowed to open in the city by 2008. Charter-school proponents and organizers felt the policy was too restrictive and forced potential charter-school operators to compete against one another for approval.

On Aug. 9, Baltimorean Bobbi Macdonald, founder of the City Neighbors Charter School, filed an appeal with the state Board of Education, requesting that it examine the situation in Baltimore. Macdonald had applied for a charter spot in March 2003—which would make her first in line to open a new school under the charter law. She had hoped to open City Neighbors in time for the 2004-’05 school year but found herself stymied. District policy did not provide for new charter schools opening until 2005. And though state law tells school districts it must respond to applicants within 120 days, Macdonald says she felt the city School Board was dragging its feet. She contacted the School Board multiple times, she says, but did not get a response. She went before the School Board and pled her case. She wrote a song about her school to sing to the board. She wrote letters and made calls, but by August of this year she still had not received a response telling her whether her school had made the cut for approval, so she decided to appeal to the state for help.

On Oct. 6, Macdonald got her wish: The state Board of Education told the city school district that it must respond to Macdonald, and also that its “arbitrary setting of a limit on the number of charters that are granted” was “null and void.” By Nov. 9, the Board of Education ordered, the city must review the merit of all the charter-school applications before it and render a decision as to whether or not the schools would be granted charters to operate in the district for the 2005-’06 school year (“Charting a Course,” Mobtown Beat, Nov. 3; “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Appeal,” Mobtown Beat, Aug. 25; “Held Back,” Mobtown Beat, July 7; “Late Start,” Mobtown Beat, May 12).

So at the Nov. 9 meeting, the stakes were high for charter schools in the city: The School Board was set to vote on whether to give its approval for 10 schools—seven existing public schools seeking to convert to charter status and three brand-new schools, including Macdonald’s.

By about 8:30, the School Board began the discussion so many people had come to hear. City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell Jr. (D-4th) addressed the board on the matter and told the commissioners that charter schools were a “dream come true.” Councilwoman Catherine E. Pugh (D-4th) told the board that she’d like to see a “fashion charter school” opened in the future for kids interested in careers in the fashion industry. David Stone, the city’s newly appointed director of Charter and New School Initiatives, and Laura Weeldreyer, coordinator of the same, talked to the board members about the 10 applications before them.

Despite the overwhelming support the schools seemed to have in the audience, several of the board members expressed concerns.

“I’m concerned about the impact of [charter schools] on public schools,” board member George VanHook said. “We have no track record for managing these kinds of schools. . . . I want to make it very clear that we want to build a system that will work for everyone in this city. I don’t want to see something that works for a certain group of folks at the detriment of others.”

When Stone and Weeldreyer tried to reassure board members that the charter schools should not necessarily negatively impact the school system but actually strengthen it, board member James Campbell shot back: “How do you define ‘does not negatively impact the school system’?”

When it came time to vote, the board members approved the plan, with the exception of VanHook, who voted against it, and Campbell, who abstained on both votes. (None of the members of the board responded to numerous requests for comment left at the School Board of Commissioners office.) The seven schools seeking conversion to charter status are City Springs Elementary, Hampstead Hill Elementary, Collington Square Elementary, Empowerment Academy, Midtown Academy, Crossroads Middle, and KIPP Ujima Village Academy; the three new schools, which were conditionally approved pending some additional planning, were Patterson Park Charter School, Southwest Baltimore Charter School, and City Neighbors Charter School.

Parents cheered, school organizers breathed a sigh of relief, and Bobbi Macdonald and her daughter Sadie gave each of the School Board members flowers as a token, she says, of hope for the future of city schools.

Ever since Gov. Robert Ehrlich and the state legislature made Maryland the 40th state to allow charter schools, many parents, teachers, and community members have embraced charter schools as a way to give struggling city schools a much-needed boost. They say that charter schools will give parents who might otherwise feel compelled to send their children to private schools a reason to stick with the public-school system. They say that the schools’ independence will encourage innovation and unique educational opportunities for children. They say the schools will offer parents more choices in their children’s education.

The charter-school movement is not without its critics, however, who like to point out that the optimism about this particular form of public-school reform often outweighs the schools’ performance records to date. They say that struggling school districts, such as the Baltimore City Public School System, which found itself facing a $58 million deficit at the beginning of 2004, may be unduly taxed by the extra costs associated with opening new schools. Though public criticism of the Baltimore charter schools plan has been scant and community support of them has been strong, the concerns expressed at the Nov. 9 meeting by Campbell and VanHook echo those who warn that charter schools are not a magic cure for public education’s ills.

 

“Our persistent educational crisis shows that we’ve reached the limits of our traditional model of education. Given our present and foreseeable demographic, economic, social, and educational circumstances, we can expect neither greater efficiency nor more equity from our educational system. That statement is dramatic, but it also seems obvious. After all, there seems to be widespread agreement that we must do things differently in our schools.”

So wrote Albert Shanker (1928-1997), educator, union leader, and former president of the American Federation of Teachers. It was Shanker who, in 1988, promoted the idea that teachers should be given a contract or “charter” from their local school boards to carry out particular educational innovations for limited periods of time. (Though Shanker is known as the “father” of charter schools and given the credit for bringing the idea to the forefront, it should be noted that a New England educator named Ray Budde suggested that groups of teachers be granted contracts to create their own schools in the 1970s.) Shanker recognized that public education in the United States was stagnant and not particularly successful at providing a sound education for thousands of students (especially in low-income areas such as inner cities), and he felt that these independent schools would be the best way to create curriculum diversity and higher standards for education.

He called public education “the glue that has held this country together,” and he believed that if done correctly charters could invigorate and transform education systems: Teachers would be attracted to different charter schools based on their personal interests, parents would be excited by the new options available to them, and students could thrive on the new and unique curricula and teaching methods the schools would offer. Shanker did not want to see school districts sacrifice standards to achieve the vision: He felt that the new schools should be closely monitored, and that renewal of any particular school’s charter would depend on evaluations by the school district. If the model was developed correctly, Shanker told a journalist in 1996, “then as far as I’m concerned every school should be a charter school.”

The very first charter schools were established in Minnesota in 1991, followed by California, which passed its charter-school law in 1992. The movement grew rapidly—in the less than 15 years since Minnesota made history by passing the first charter-school law, 41 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have adopted their own charter laws and more than 2,600 charter schools have opened, serving some 685,000 students.

Charter-school laws vary from state to state, with some states giving the schools complete freedom to do as they please as long as education quality does not suffer, but the theory behind many of these laws differs slightly from Shanker’s vision, in that they rely on market forces to determine whether a school will remain open or not. If parents, the customers, are not pleased with a particular school, they will not send their children there, the theory goes. So when enough dissatisfied customers leave, the school will be forced to shut its doors. (According to a May 2004 report from the Center for Education Reform, an organization supportive of charter efforts, 311 charter schools across the nation have been shuttered since the charter movement began. Many of those closures have been as a result of inability to find appropriate facilities, the report notes, while others have been forced to close by teachers unions or school boards.)

Still, critics say that many states have set charter schools up to compete with public schools, which may do more harm than good for the greater public education system. They say that the schools run the risk of completely undermining what is good about public education by starving “competing” public schools of scarce funds, drawing the best students out of the traditional schools, and creating a two-tier system of education that serves some well but others horribly. Ironically, it is the American Federation of Teachers, Shanker’s own erstwhile organization, that is one of the harshest critics of charter schools.

“We have a very nuanced position on charter schools,” says Celia Lose, spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers. “Charter schools vary widely, you can’t say that they are either good or bad. That’s like saying all restaurants are either good or bad. There is a lot of variation.”

In August 2004, the American Federation of Teachers distributed a report on charter schools, based on data obtained from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a project of the U.S. Department of Education that is known as the “report card” for the nation’s schools. The report revealed that, on the whole, charter schools are not exceeding the performance records of traditional public schools.

“Compared to students in regular public schools, charter school students had lower achievement both in grade 4 (six scale points lower in math, seven scale points lower in reading) and grade 8 (five points lower in math, two points lower in reading),” the report notes. “These differences were all statistically significant, except for grade 8 reading, and translate into about a half year of schooling. . . . In grades 4 and 8 and both in math and reading, the percentages of charter school students performing at or above Basic and at or above Proficient were lower than the corresponding percentages for regular public school students.”

Further, the report determined, in inner-city areas, students in all schools fared poorly on standardized tests, but in general, “charter school achievement was worse.” For example, the report notes, 58 percent of inner-city children attending charter schools scored at or above the basic level in math, compared to 68 percent of fourth graders enrolled in traditional public schools. In fourth-grade reading tests, 50 percent of inner-city charter schoolers scored at or above basic levels while 52 percent of students in regular schools scored basic or higher.

The report was lambasted by charter-school supporters, and it was assailed in the Wall Street Journal in August as being “dishonest” and containing “bad information.” The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, defended charter schools against the report by saying that “things are not as bad as reported—far from it in fact,” noting that charter-school students tend to progress more quickly than students in traditional schools, pointing to a Brookings Institution study that found that many charter schools are at a “systematic disadvantage” during their first year or two of existence. Once they have established themselves, the Brookings researchers found, charters caught up with more established schools.

In November, however, another report was released, this time from the U.S. Department of Education, that surveyed charters in five states and echoed some of the American Federation of Teachers’ results. “More than half the charter schools in Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and North Carolina were meeting state-performance standards,” the report noted. “However, charter schools were less likely to meet performance standards compared with traditional public schools.” The report does note an “analytic weakness,” however, that applies to both its own findings and the findings of other organizations, including those of the American Federation of Teachers: It does not take into account differences between charter schools and their traditional public-school counterparts.

“While the knowledge base is growing about charter schools,” the report concludes, “more research is needed to illuminate the possibilities and limitations of this educational reform.”

Ed Muir, assistant director of research and information services for the American Federation of Teachers, calls the arguments over charter-school success or failure “data food fights,” and he says the American Federation of Teachers report was put together not to skew public sentiment against the schools but to paint an accurate picture of whether they are truly improving education in the United States. Muir says that charter schools in and of themselves are not the problem—the problem is that despite evidence that many schools are not exceeding the performance of traditional public schools, they are not being scrutinized closely enough.

“We are an organization that is fairly skeptical of charter schools,” he says. “But we have tried to build our critique in the data and out of the data. There is a sense that the market will allow you to decide which schools will survive and which schools won’t. I think a lot of people put too much hope in that concept. Sometimes the markets work. Sometimes they are very inefficient. If a school is not working in a market-based system, either the operators will fix it or the school will close. If you wait for the market to handle it, there will still be parents sending their kids to the school, despite evidence that it’s not working. You form attachments to your choices, so that becomes a hard choice. There are an awful lot of charter schools that are on low-performing lists that parents are not transferring their children out of.”

Muir has studied the Maryland charter-school law—and testified on it before the General Assembly—and he says that although it is considered by some charter-school proponents to be too weak because it does not give school operators enough autonomy (all teachers must be certified and also be part of the teachers union, for example)— he calls it “a good law” as charter laws go, providing for a good deal of accountability on the part of both the school board and charter-school operators. But still, he says, he finds it troubling to see a struggling school district like Baltimore’s saddled with the additional expense of administering to startup schools.

“Evidence suggests that [with charter schools] you get lower dropout rates and higher achievement expectations. Those are good things,” he says. “But it also costs much more. The cost is more per pupil because what is happening is you are trying to do, for the more independent schools, this serious and demonstrably more costly reform with the same amount of money.”

Muir also notes that in Baltimore, there are already several different educational programs available, and he wonders whether the system shouldn’t concentrate on one plan and stick with it.

“You already have the Victory schools and the Edison schools,” he says, citing schools managed by for-profit education-management companies. “Now you are adding this on top. The idea of who is responsible for what and to whom and how to get that right is a complicated one once you have your governance arrangements so diffused.”

When asked about the American Federation of Teachers’ report indicating that charter schools underperform many public schools, Laura Weeldreyer, coordinator of the city school district’s New Schools Initiative, says that the data can be misleading.

“One of the criticisms of the AFT’s response was that you don’t know anything about those schools you are putting side by side,” she notes. “Is it the charter school’s first year, fifth year? Do we know what the demographic of the schools are? It’s really comparing apples and kumquats.”

Weeldreyer notes that for the past seven years Baltimore has already been working on its own innovative schools measures with the district’s New Schools, which are similar to charter schools in that the operators have more freedom to implement their own curricula and decisions. The New Schools experiment has been a success in the city, and seven of the new charter schools approved for 2005 are actually New Schools converting to charter status.

“What I can tell you about in Baltimore is that a number of the new schools have performed beautifully,” Weeldreyer says. “One measure is test scores, and that’s the main measure people will look at, but there’s also a measure of satisfaction and adding the concept of choice to a school system. That does something for the educational atmosphere overall that can’t necessarily be quantified.”

 

On a Monday afternoon at the Midtown Academy in Baltimore, there’s a healthy din just outside director Elizabeth Allen’s office window. It’s recess, and kids rush outside into the courtyard to play ball, tag, and jump rope after a morning of math, reading, social studies, and science. The kids burn off their excess energy in the shady Bolton Hill playground while a monitor with a whistle oversees their activities.

Sound like a typical scene from a school playground?

Not necessarily in Baltimore City public schools where large classes and rigid instruction are the norm, teachers say, and having time for leisurely recess sessions is the exception rather than the rule.

“Kids here really enjoy school,” says Allen, who has been director of the Midtown Academy for four months. “I have been at other Baltimore City public schools, and the kids did not really enjoy it. . . . At one school [I worked at] the feel was like being in a concentration camp. Everything was so regimented, so structured, and it was as if the philosophy was the more you keep children’s noses to the grindstones, the greater success you will have, even though research has proven that not to be the case.”

Midtown, a K-8 school with about 180 students, has the luxury of a little more freedom than the average city school—it’s a public school, but it is one of 10 New Schools from a class of schools established by the school district in the mid- and late 1990s as a result of a court-mandated effort to improve education in Baltimore. New Schools, not unlike charter schools, are given greater autonomy and authority to determine their own educational programs, staffing, budget, and governance. In return, the schools each sign three-to-five-year contracts with the school district agreeing to meet established performance standards and individually determined goals.

The schools are carefully monitored by the district’s New Schools Advisory Board, and when a school’s contract comes to an end it is evaluated and eventually reviewed by the School Board of Commissioners and the New Schools Advisory Board to determine whether its contract will be renewed for another five years. Since the establishment of the New Schools effort in Baltimore, several schools have been shuttered due to problems or inability meet their goals. (The Youth Education Academy, for example, closed its doors in 2000 when its operator, the Woodbourne Center, declared bankruptcy. Calloway Elementary School ended its contract in 1999 over irreconcilable differences between parents, school staff, and the school’s operators.)

New schools are funded the same way any other public school is funded (unless the school operates in a building not owned by the city school system—then the New School must pay for its own facilities upkeep), and if you ask most teachers, administrators, or parents affiliated with them, the schools have been a success. That in and of itself gives many educators in Baltimore hope that converting some of these schools to charters will deepen their positive impact on the school system and offer even more students an opportunity to get a better education in the city’s public schools.

Allen says that the Midtown Academy’s kids get individual attention, and parents are heavily involved in their kids’ education. Classes are small (about 20 children per class, compared to 20 to 30 per class in regular public schools), and teachers enjoy the freedom to teach without the strictures of School Board-approved curricula. At Midtown, Allen says, the teachers try to teach on a theme—for example, she says, one theme the school adopted was the Civil War, and teachers integrated Civil War themes into science, math, reading, and social studies.

“Kids learn in terms of connections,” Allen says. “At the school I just came from, the teachers had to follow the MSA [Maryland School Assessment] format in terms of structure. We try to be less rigid and formal. Lots of hands on, lots of field trips. . . . We don’t have to go through all the red tape [a traditional public school does], we just have to provide the rationale for what we want to do.”

No two Baltimore New Schools are alike. Compare the informality of Midtown Academy, for example, to the highly structured rigor of the KIPP Ujima Village Academy, also a city New School. The Northwest Baltimore middle school is part of a network of college-preparatory public schools located in what KIPP calls “underserved” communities. KIPP schools around the country, many of which are charter schools, are based on five pillars of achievement: high expectations, choice and commitment, more time spent in school (the schools operate longer hours, school weeks, and school years than most traditional schools), power to lead, and a focus on results. The ultimate goal of the schools is to demonstrate that even kids in the poorest households, toughest neighborhoods, and poorly performing school districts can achieve if given the proper tools and instruction. And discipline.

Under director Jason Botel’s watch, KIPP Ujima and its 160 students are nothing if not orderly. Botel walks the halls reminding students to tuck their uniform shirts in, cover up bright jewelry, and pay attention to their lessons. In class, students are not only polite and well-behaved, they are also engaged and attentive to their lessons. In one math class, teacher Brad Nornhold instructs “freshman” fifth and sixth graders in multiplication and division via a game in which a child holding a globe travels from student to student, each of which must call out the answer to a problem displayed on a flashcard. When a child answers incorrectly, he or she must hold the globe and traverse the classroom. It’s not exactly teaching to the test, as many say public schools do too much of in order to meet standardized achievement score goals, but it’s fun, and it’s clearly working—the kids are eager to call out the answers to 144 divided by 12 and 11 times 15 to prove they know their stuff.

The KIPP teaching staff work longer hours than many traditional public-school teachers (the school day starts at 7:15 a.m. and ends at 4:30 p.m., plus all teachers have cell phones on which students may call them at any time), but they also get the freedom to exercise the craft of teaching, much more so than in a traditional public school.

“We have a team of very dedicated teachers,” Botel says. “Our teachers have a great deal of authority and flexibility in terms of curricula and modifying it.”

Without the autonomy afforded by the New Schools Initiative, Botel says his school would not be able to operate in Baltimore. In order for unique educational concepts to be successful, it’s imperative that every move not be micromanaged, every decision not be second-guessed. The formula has worked for the students at KIPP, nearly all of whom are African-American and nearly all of whom are eligible for reduced-price lunch programs. In 2004, the Maryland School Assessment Report proficiency tests showed that students at KIPP Ujima scored well above other comparable Baltimore public-school students in both reading and math: For example, only 9.7 percent of fifth-grade children in the city were reading at advanced levels; at KIPP that number was 16.9 percent.

So why, if the New Schools are so successful, would they need to convert to charter schools? As with anything else, money is a key motivating factor. While traditional public schools in the city struggle to get enough money to remain viable, funding has been made available from the federal government to develop and nurture the new charter schools. As regular public schools, neither KIPP nor Midtown was eligible for a share of that funding pot.

New Schools Initiative’s Weeldreyer points out that of the 10 schools slated for charter status, Midtown, Ujima, and five others are already in operation as New Schools and have been budgeted for over the last seven years, so they will not pose any new hardships on the city school district’s already tight budget. But they will be able to tap into the nearly $4 million the federal government awarded Maryland in June to implement its new charter law. “It’s only money that lasts for a few years, but it’s up to $350,000 over the course of those three years—36 months,” Weeldreyer says. “It’s a significant amount of money that they have not been eligible for before because they did not have the specific moniker of ‘charter school.’”

“Charter status means we will be eligible for grants, more money,” Midtown’s Allen agrees. “Additional funds will get us additional field trips, speakers, textbooks, maybe equipment for a science lab. It affords us more resources.”

Ujima’s Botel says he does look forward to the additional independence charter status would bring to his school.

“The school system has largely been supportive of our school,” he says. “It’s been a positive relationship, but there have been challenges working within the bureaucracy. Getting transportation, getting things repaired.” As a charter school, Botel says, the school will have the state to act as a mediator should it ever need to advocate for itself with the city School Board.But like Midtown’s Allen, Botel’s school could make good use of an infusion of grant cash, which would help the school grow.

“Right now we have waiting lists of about 30 students per grade,” he says, noting that just this year “we’ve grown by 100 students, and we’ve added one new [teaching] position. We have applied for grants [in the past] and been turned down as a result of not being an official charter school.”

 

David Stone used to be a member of the city School Board of Commissioners. At the end of November, he accepted a position as the director of the district’s Charter Schools Advisory Board. As such, he has a unique view of the impact that charter schools will have on Baltimore’s schools—while he supports the implementation of the charter law and says he is excited about the change it will bring to the district, he is well aware of the difficult financial position the school district is in.

“The school district has a $58 million deficit,” Stone says. “When you talk about opening small schools there are a lot of additional costs and a lot of hidden costs that you absolutely can’t anticipate. I know the School Board was concerned with opening up new schools—we have the greater good to think of. This is a good idea, everyone is very gung-ho about it, but we have many more students to think about.”

Stone says that the city is fortunate in that, with the New Schools Initiative, it already has experience and data about how experimental educational opportunities work and how much they cost—the fact that seven of the schools opening next September are already in operation will help insure their future success as charters. The three new schools being opened are the ones that will come with some “unknowns.”

“And many of those unknowns are fiscal,” he says. “With the wholly new schools, let’s say there is citywide enrollment and you take one student from 100 schools in the district. That doesn’t lower the cost at any one school. Even if you took five kids from 20 schools, it won’t change the cost. But you will need to staff the new charter schools. You will need new administrators, teachers, cafeteria workers. It’s not cost neutral. I think a lot of people had a lot of misunderstanding about [the board’s three new schools policy]. It was not about being anti-charter school.”

Stone says now that the city School Board has given conditional approval to the new schools, the advisory board will be working on budgeting, facilities issues, and enrollment with them. And when the time comes, he says, “it will be my job and my office’s job to make sure that any of the concerns that the community has will be brought up in upcoming presentations.”

Despite the concerns, he thinks the long-term payoff will be significant for the district.

“There will be more different curricula, there will be different focuses. Parents will have choices,” Stone says. “The choice piece is really exciting—if you can choose a school for your kids to go to, that’s really exciting if you’re a parent.”

Or, if you’re the prospective director of one of these new charter schools, like Bobbi Macdonald. If anyone embodies the enthusiasm and optimism of the charter-school effort in Baltimore City, it is this 38-year-old mother of three who for the past year and a half has put her heart and soul into building an elaborate plan for City Neighbors Charter School.

Her mass of bouncy, curly dark hair and her springing step as she walks down 36th Street in Hampden are reminiscent more of a grade-school girl than a school administrator. But she holds a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Maryland and has become one of the most active and vocal community advocates for education reform in Baltimore. Her story started, as most education-reform stories do, at home. She and her husband moved to Baltimore from Chicago in 1994, and Macdonald was quickly enamored.

“I fell in love with Baltimore,” she says. “I love this city, I love the Waverly Farmers Market, I love the bookstores. I love the people.”

She was not, however, so in love with the troubled Baltimore City Public School System, and her young daughter Sadie was preparing to enter school.

“I started a scrapbook,” she says. “And on the front, I wrote, ‘The Search for a Great School for Sadie.’”

She applied to Roland Park Elementary/Middle School (a public school) and the GreenMount Academy (a secular private school) but wondered about her chances of actually obtaining a spot in one of these two sought-after places. She looked into different private schools and agonized over methods of instruction, racial integration, and the dreary thought of turning her back on the public-school system altogether. Eventually, she enrolled Sadie in the Glenmount School, a public elementary school on Northern Parkway in Northeast Baltimore.

While she says “there are a lot of good things happening in the public schools, a lot of good teachers and good families” at Glenmount, she was still disappointed with public education. “At Sadie’s school, for example, there’s no art, no recess, no music,” Macdonald says. “Can you believe it? No art, no recess, no music in school. The public schools are ridiculously underfunded.”

Macdonald and other Glenmount parents have taken measures to help enrich their children’s school experiences. Macdonald, for example, goes to Glenmount once a week with her guitar and “walks around the hallways, singing, stopping into classrooms” to give them at least a bit of musical enrichment. But as an unempowered parent with little control over the administration of a school, radical change or reform, she says, were pretty much nonexistent.

“Then the law was passed in 2003,” Macdonald says. “One of my neighbors called me and said, ‘Bobbi, did you know that the charter-school law in Maryland has passed? You should start a charter school. You are the only person I know of who could really do it.’ I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m too busy, I can’t do that.’ But in the middle of the night, literally, I woke up and went, Yeah! I have not stopped thinking about it since. Not just for my kid, but for the kids in the whole city.”

City Neighbors Charter School’s curriculum, she says, will be inspired by an Italian method of instruction that treats children as researchers, focuses its teaching on projects, and places a great emphasis on the arts. The school, Macdonald says, will be based on three pillars: innovative curriculum, parent participation, and community outreach and involvement.

“Our philosophy is inspired by this town in Italy called Reggio Emilia,” Macdonald says. “This town has this amazing preschool that’s entirely arts inspired. . . . Our teachers will learn to teach in the Reggio way, and they will get to know the individual learning styles of students and base the curriculum on it.”

Macdonald could go on forever about the plans for her new school. She counters the arguments and criticisms of the charter-school movement by pointing out that those involved in it are not interested in hurting the rest of the public-school system—rather, she says, they seek to become more involved in it. When some school administrators see charter schools as taking money, resources, and students away from public schools, Macdonald sees them as bringing more money, more children, and more parents back to a system many have given up on.

“Every year in the budget for the school system they estimate how many kids they are going to lose,” Macdonald says. “Last year it was 2,600 kids. That’s more money from the state and federal government they are going to lose. For the first time ever, I bet that statistic is going to be changing. Instead of that number increasing, it will be decreasing. It will be how many kids are we gaining who want to go to these schools.”

She says her hope is to make a ripple in the school system that will eventually reach even the most stagnant of the city’s public schools.

“You can’t remain what you are if you are going to aspire to be something better,” she says. “We want the school system to be something better. . . . This is an effort not just for my kid, not just for my family, but for families all over the city.”

 

While critics—and, privately, some supporters— question the risks and gains of introducing the charter model to the troubled school system, charter schools will soon be a reality in Baltimore. Among the many questions yet to be answered is whether or not the opportunities charter schools offer will ultimately benefit all of the city’s students.

“I think there is this perception that they are serving either an elite population or are in some way damaging the public-school system,” Weeldreyer says in trying to sum up what makes some public-education advocates dislike charter schools. “They think of the big ‘P’ public-school system, the big-picture education system in this country, as opposed to seeing charter schools as one end of a continuum of education services offered to students. And if you look at the data offered from the Department of Education, charter schools are serving students of a lower socioeconomic background or students of color.”

Midtown Academy’s Allen agrees: “People who don’t support charter schools think we are taking money away from the strapped public-school system,” she says. “That’s not what we want to do, though it is an unfortunate by-product. There are definitely going to be some pluses and some minuses to this. But there are also endless possibilities, and hopefully there will be more pluses than minuses.”

Right now, Weeldreyer and Stone say, they are in the middle of helping the newly approved schools like City Neighbors establish their facilities plans, budgets, and contracts. And at the next city School Board meeting on Dec. 14, Stone says, the Charter Schools Advisory Board actually plans to recommend one more new charter school, sponsored by Sojourner Douglass College, for approval for 2005. Stone says he has not felt “significant resistance” to the charter-school concept; rather, he says there have been many “thoughtful questions” about how charter schools will impact the city. For some, the future induces some anxiety. For others, like Weeldreyer, it’s giving a little bit of light on the horizon for a school district that’s been in the dark for what feels like a very long time.

“One of the things I love about the charter-school movement is it brings a huge shot in the arm of hope, enthusiasm, and energy into a school district that has had a really awful 18 months,” she says. “People are working tirelessly on behalf of students, saying, ‘Please, let us do this.’ I think that’s wonderful. I think it’s great to have all this energy go toward thinking and planning what is the best way to educate our kids. As a parent, I don’t think there is any one answer. I have three kids, and for them I think there may be three different answers.”