Page 11 - School Planning & Management, April 2018

Charter Schools MAKING A DENT IN EDUCATION
BY Sarat Pratapchandran
In May 2015, I attended the commencement ceremony at one of Arizona’s most celebrated charter schools, BA- SIS Chandler. Dr. Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, executive vice president of Arizona State University (ASU), congratulated students for their achievements and asked them to consider ASU as their first choice for college.
Any BASIS student wearing the graduation gown that night could get into ASU with their eyes closed.
Named the seventh-best high school and the fifth-best charter school in the nation, BASIS Chandler students are homogeneously Asian with a sprinkling of white students, hardly reflecting the demographics of the city where the school is located. Hispanics and blacks form a minority’s minority here, but you see the reverse in a public school just a few miles away.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools defines charter schools as “independently-operated public schools that have the freedom to design classrooms that meet their students’ needs.”
Charter schools are not for everyone and are meticulously designed for their student populations even though they claim they are open for all. BASIS thrives in Arizona, with an affluent and highly educated parent base that pushes children to excel in a rigorous, metrics-driven, test-based environment.
Compare this to Houston’s KIPP Public Schools, a charter group with 14,700 students across 11 schools, with 89 percent of students coming from low-income families. Here, the data is strikingly different and 50 percent of students from KIPP Houston graduate from college compared to 10.6 percent of Houston-area 8th graders from similar economic backgrounds.
As conservative school choice activists argue for greater funding for charter schools, like public schools,
PHOTO © BILLY E. BARNES