By Julie Hubbard - The Tennessean -

Charter schools are flourishing nationally, frequently hailed for doing what regular public schools cannot: raising disadvantaged students’ test scores.

But the 2011 statewide report card shows that’s not the case for all of them in Tennessee. Those scores, released this month, come as the state is launching an ambitious plan to turn over management of some of its lowest-performing public schools to charter organizations.

National studies have struggled to determine whether charters outperform their traditional peers because they tend to serve low-income students coming out of low-performing schools. In Tennessee, those students’ applications get precedence, but anyone can attend a charter.

The report card shows fewer than 5 percent of Smithson-Craighead Academy Middle School students passed math, a weaker performance than its closest Metro public school in North Nashville. It’s now on the state’s list of the bottom 5 percent for achievement, a status its founder pins to the type of students the school serves.

And while two charters — KIPP and LEAD academies — showed significantly higher learning gains than their public school peers, none hit the federal performance measures known as adequate yearly progress. That means, according to their contracts, all are on probation, said Alan Coverstone, Metro Nashville’s director of charter and magnet schools. Any that miss testing goals in spring 2012 can be closed at the end of the year.

“Overall, the (state’s charters) are improving, just not fast enough,” said Matt Throckmorton, executive director of the Tennessee Charter Schools Association. “When measured by students improving, we are headed in the right direction.”

He cites the federal No Child Left Behind law as part of the problem. Under it, more students have to perform on grade level each year until 100 percent do so in 2014. National education leaders have called that impossible, but so far Congress has failed to revise the law.

Tennessee is seeking a waiver to measure schools its own way. The state also will allow three charter school organizations to run low-performing public schools next school year, hiring their own teachers and administrators and using their own scheduling and curriculum.

Charter schools receive taxpayer money but are free from most local government rules. If they fail to fulfill their contracts, granted by school boards, they can be closed.

15 missed goals
Forty-one charter schools operate in Tennessee, with six others granted approval to open. Statewide, of the 23 charter schools open since fall 2009 or longer, 15 missed testing goals. That’s 65 percent, as compared to half of the state’s traditional public schools and more than 70 percent of Metro’s.

But measuring test scores doesn’t always give the clearest picture of success, one charter operator argues.

At Smithson-Craighead Middle, fewer than 5 percent of students were proficient or advanced in math and 27 percent in reading. At neighboring Brick Church Middle, a regular Metro school, 12 percent scored proficient in math and 28 percent in reading.

“The middle school has had its problems, and I know that,” Smithson-Craighead founder Sister Sandra Smithson said. “Part of that is we did not get the right leadership to begin with. We have that now, and she has one semester to turn it around.”

Students have dealt with an inadequate facility, fewer resources and a part-time principal because the school had not found the right person until recently. The school also focuses less on standardized testing and more on a student’s worth, she said, because some of her students are homeless, from broken homes or often expelled from traditional schools.

The charter school also has clashed with the district as well, citing what she calls Metro’s favoritism to larger charters such as KIPP, part of a national organization, and Nashville-based LEAD.

“What’s happened is they are trying to get rid of the small local, black operators and make room for the young white males to take over the charter school community,” Smithson said. “(We) could do a whole lot better if we did not have that bias.”

Coverstone dismissed that criticism. The district won’t lower standards for students with difficult lives, he said.

“Test scores, whether we like them or not, are a huge part of access to real opportunity for higher education and jobs. So, just taking kids who are behind or who have tough situations to overcome — we shouldn’t lower the bar there,” he said.

The state’s Achievement School District recently selected LEAD to convert a second, as yet unnamed low-performing Metro middle school into a charter — as well as start up a new middle charter. At LEAD’s charter middle school in North Nashville, 30 percent of students scored proficient or above in math and posted 3.6 percent math gains this year, compared with 19 percent proficiency in math and 1.8 percent growth gains at nearby McKissack Middle.

“We haven’t done the neighborhood type of comparisons, but we are very pleased with how the school is performing and the gains we are making,” said Shaka Mitchell, LEAD’s director of external affairs. “We were in the top 5 percent in the state for gains, so we are excited about that.”

To stay competitive, Metro is introducing innovative programs in its traditional public schools.

Metro placed its lowest-performing schools into an “innovation cluster” and gave them more attention and resources. It launched a teacher-run school, additional magnet schools and more partnerships with the community.

A partnership with Lipscomb University helped 92 percent of the sixth- through eighth-grade teachers at Cameron Middle School meet their teaching improvement goals last school year. LEAD Academy runs the school’s fifth grade this year and will take over management a grade at a time, possibly hiring the teachers being trained by Lipscomb.

The university provides an on-site teacher coach at Cameron, and doctorate-level professors come weekly to help teachers with classroom management and strategies.

U.S. enrollment up
Charter school enrollment nationally surpassed 2 million students this school year — up from 1.8 million last year, according to figures from The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That’s 5 percent of the public school population.

Many states lifted caps on how many charters could open, including Tennessee, which increased its limit from 50 to 90 in 2009 and then, in the last legislative session, removed the cap entirely.

In Tennessee, there are 9,050 students, fewer than 1 percent of the state’s public school population, in charter schools. There are 1,900 students in 11 charter schools in Metro, about 2 percent of the public school population.

Some studies point to higher charter school performance, such as one in 2008 by the University of California that shows charters are outperforming traditional public schools in elementary reading and middle school math, although high school performance varied.

But most reports are highly contested, with researchers wrestling with how to compare charter schools, whose students are largely minority and low-income, to public schools that have engaged and affluent families mixed in, said Jeffrey R. Henig, a Columbia University professor who researches charter schools.

There are big network charters, more attentive to their business models and growing their programs, Henig said. Some are sincerely trying to provide options to parents, while others simply want to earn a buck.

Then there are mission-oriented charters, whose operators may mean well but get in over their heads, or some who take more hardship students and need more resources.

“Comparing percent proficient or their annual gains can be misleading if charter schools attract families whose parents are more invested, or if charter schools cater to families whose kids had trouble with the public schools,” he said. “But with that said, most studies that have tried to do that more seriously have come up with a mixed bag.”

Contact Julie Hubbard at615-726-5964, jshubbard@tennessean.com or on Twitter @JulieHubbardTN.