Sylmar students Briana Borunda and Alma Carrera.

When Principal James Lee learned that his students at Sylmar Charter High School had among the biggest jumps in state test scores in the local school district, he was thrilled but surprised, because they managed to pull it off despite a well-publicized lunchtime brawl that erupted on campus right in the middle of testing.

He credits the teachers who created their own data analysis to discover which type of questions students struggled with and then focused on those skills, as well as a new collaborative spirit that pulled the team together as they applied for and won affiliated charter status — the only LA Unified school to do so in the past two years.

• How Sylmar’s test scores stack up: See the 10 most-improved LAUSD district high schools.

“I’m delighted we are showing up as most improved, it’s just that we had a bit of an incident that was going on right in the middle of the testing last year,” Lee said. “Apparently all of the preparation and special planning we did to prepare for the testing ended up working out well, despite the incident.”

The “incident” became international news when a schoolyard brawl was caught by a cell phone camera and the YouTube video went viral. It was incorrectly characterized as a racial incident, set against a backdrop of demonstrations throughout the country and presidential rhetoric perceived as racist.

“The dispute was between athletes and non-athletes,” Lee explained, with one group predominantly African-American and the other mostly Latino. Six students were suspended, but they all were allowed to attend graduation ceremonies.

Sylmar Charter High Principal James Lee.

“I got a lot of criticism for allowing them to culminate, but for four years they were good kids,” said Lee, although the decision was ultimately made by the district. “Three were very academically strong.”

As TV crews staked out the campus for days and celebrities jumped in to talk about the incident, the school was taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests scheduled by the state. They were on the third day of testing, it was near the end of the year, and the principal couldn’t change or stop the tests if he tried.

“We did prepare a lot, and that seemed to pay off,” Lee said.

The students’ English scores rose 13 percentage points from 45 percent of the students meeting standards to 58 percent. The math scores rose 15 percentage points, to 27 percent meeting or exceeding standards. Districtwide, English scores rose to 39 percent and math to 29 percent.

“Ironically, students were SBAC testing in the midst of our highly publicized lunch altercation, town hall meeting and student walk-out,” Lee said. “Students demonstrated much focus and resiliency.”

Also, 80 percent of students enrolled in the Math Science Magnet on Sylmar’s campus met or exceeded standards in English, and 57 percent did so in math. That compares to 80 percent in English and 59 percent in math earned by Granada Hills Charter, a rival school.

The only schools in Local District Northeast that did better are Triumph PUC Charter, Arleta High and two of the Chavez Humanitas schools, district numbers show. There are 17 traditional and charter high schools in the local district. The Sylmar Magnet exceeded the scores of some local competition: Triumph, Arleta and Chavez, according to Debbie Steinert, Sylmar’s magnet school coordinator.

Sylmar’s test scores are among the highest increases of any schools that have 80 percent or more families eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Reclassification of English learners was also one of the highest, at 20 percent, compared to the district average of 11 percent.

“All of this can be credited to the hard work of teachers who worked much more collaboratively last year in the spirit of our charter petition, and having the right mindset on lifting up students regardless of socioeconomic status, a turn away from the student deficit mindset,” Lee said.

Math teacher Tony Nunez is one face behind the success stories. He identified the types of questions his students were having trouble with and focused on them, particularly the new Common Core standards that give questions in word problem formats and ask students to figure out how math applies to real-world situations.

Math teacher Tony Nunez.

“Those are the kinds of questions I like because it shows students how math applies to the world around them, but they are tougher questions,” said Nunez, who is a business technology teacher and has a degree in economics. “It’s not just filling in the bubble with multiple choices, they have to create graphs, fill in the blank or require multiple responses and do it on the computer.”

With their own data analysis, the teachers targeted the problems students had the most trouble with.

“There is happiness that we moved up, but it’s still only 27 percent meeting (math) standards and that shows that nearly three-fourths of the students don’t, and that means we have a lot of work left to do,” Nunez said.

The high school’s 15 math teachers did some unprecedented collaboration by sharing sample questions, going over problems and identifying common issues. An assistant principal who was also a math coach stepped in to help. The teachers and principal adopted strategies posed by educator Michael Fullan, used the CPM Educational Program and took advantage of some autonomies even before they officially became an affiliated charter school over the summer.

“We had been working on becoming a charter for years, so the mindset was already there,” the principal said. “Although we haven’t seen much flexibility in the funding yet, we do have some autonomy in the curriculum.”

Nunez said, “The principle benefits of being an affiliated charter gave us flexibility and autonomy for using the CPM book and not following the interim assessment plan. We decided as a group what the right direction is and what are the main benefits for success for the kids.”

The teachers also worked to get students used to taking the tests on computers, rather than with a pencil.

Briana Borunda and Alma Carrera earned top scores.

“The teachers really prepared me for the tests,” said 17-year-old Alma Carrera, a member of the Glee Club and softball team. “We did practice tests a few times, and it helped me with the concepts when we took the tests.”

Alma and her friend, Briana Borunda, also 17 and a senior, live near the school and were both witnesses to the lunchtime brawl.

“It was a strange time, I feel like the whole thing was over-exaggerated,” said Briana, who is also involved in many extracurricular activities and on the volleyball team. “People kept talking about it, but the teachers emphasized how important the tests were and calmed us down. I was worried about the math test.”

Both Briana and Alma were in the highest-achieving percentiles on the tests. Briana received a perfect score on her English test.

Both girls hope to attend UCLA, and few family members have been to college. According to Sylmar’s magnet school internal statistics, only 10 percent of their parents graduated from college and 37 percent of the parents aren’t high school graduates.

“I feel more self-motivated, but it also came from my teachers,” said Briana, who is leaning toward a career in criminology.

Alma, who aspires to be a pediatrician, added, “I feel pretty proud of myself and the skills I have, and I think it’s great that we did as good as Granada Hills.”

Sylmar Spartans see Granada Hills Charter Highlanders as competition in many ways. They battle for students, and even though this is the first year Sylmar has added “charter” to its name, the school population dipped to about 2,000 students.

“I think the lunchtime incident last year scared some of the new students away,” Lee said. “That is a shame.”

Nunez started teaching at Sylmar seven years ago when the student population was nearly 3,000. He recalled how the school faced major issues after losing grants and major funding. Then Lee was transferred to the school, and they started working in smaller learning communities.

“It was a high-stress time with a lot of changes,” Nunez said. “But now we are working together with a lot of collaboration and looking at data to see how we can improve. Ideally, we want to get 100 percent to be meeting standards. That’s a goal, I don’t know how realistic it is with limited resources, but it is a goal we are striving toward.”

English teacher Ires Moxley at Sylmar Charter High.

Ires Moxley noted how her 16 fellow English teachers have a greater sense of collaboration in the three years she has taught at the school. Their regular meetings and sharing best practices helped with the improved test scores.

“I was very excited and very happy when the scores came out,” Moxley said. “We laid the foundation for the students, and I’m elated that it paid off.”

They are teaching students how to write using the Toulmin Method, and that helped in the essay part of the exams.

“We increased the opportunities to write and that helped with the testing,” Moxley said. “As soon as they come in to class we encourage academic discussions and if they can speak academically you can write it.”

Teachers incorporate writing with science, math, history, language and other classes. “With our emphasis on writing, it helps develop reading and listening and creates the building blocks so they can learn on their own,” Moxley said.

When the brawl happened, Moxley treated her students like a strict mom. She wanted to know if any of the students were distracted or bothered by the incident, but she talked it out with them and shut the door to the disturbances outside and got them focused.

“The kids just wanted normalcy, and the SBAC got them focused again,” Moxley said. “They were truly resilient and knew that this was important to them and their future. And we’re all on board with that.”

Principal Lee has a daily meeting with a school team to discuss issues.

Every morning, the principal holds a meeting with his team of assistant principals at 8:30 in his office to discuss issues around the campus. The administrators are involved with three different committees involving teachers, students and parents that are working on the marketing and promotion of the school and its programs.

“I never thought I would be involved in the marketing of the school, but that is something we are learning to do now,” Lee said. Their school is now open to enrollment throughout the district, but they want to make the school attractive to their feeder schools too, and not lose too many students to independent charters or private schools.

Sylmar’s first-ever promotional event is taking place this Saturday, Oct. 15, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. billed as a Town Hall and Resource Fair. It will offer a chance to connect with the local Neighborhood Councils and Neighborhood Watch groups, and the school will be all out to promote its programs.

Next year, Lee’s teachers plan to increase their test scores again.

Would another lunchtime “incident” help?

“Oh no, no please, not that again!” Lee smirked. “It would be nice to know what our test scores would do without something like that going on in the middle of the testing.”

For the second year in a row, LA Unified’s independent charter schools outperformed the district’s traditional schools on California’s standardized math and English language arts (ELA) tests, according to data released Monday by the California Charter Schools Association. The district’s magnets topped both. 

The district’s independent charters saw 46 percent of its students meet or exceed the standard on the ELA test, versus 39 percent for the district’s traditional schools. On the math test, 30 percent of independent charters met or exceeded the standard, versus 28 percent for traditional schools.

LA Unified has more charter students than any other district in the country. Last school year, when the tests were administered, the district had 101,000 charter students in 221 schools, making up 16 percent of the district enrollment.

Independent charters saw growth on the tests over last year, which was the first year the Common-Core aligned California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) was given. Charters were not alone in seeing growth, as both the district and the state also saw improvement over last year. The district’s independent charters had a 7 percentage point improvement on the ELA test and a 4 percentage point improvement on the math test, while traditional schools saw a 6 percentage point improvement on the ELA test and a 3 percentage point improvement on math.

“We are encouraged that charter schools increased the percent of students meeting and exceeding standards in both ELA and math from 2015 to 2016,” according to a CCSA statement.

Charters also demonstrated a high level of performance over traditional schools in some key subgroups. In some instances, charter subgroups outperformed the district’s overall traditional school average. (See graphic. Click the math button to change the numbers from English language arts to math.)

Demographically, independent charter students and traditional students who were tested matched up closely. The tests are given to students in grades 3 through 8 and in 11th grade. Of the students tested, 82 percent of charter students qualified as low-income, compared to 80 percent for traditional schools, according to LA Unified. Charters also match up closely on ethnicity with traditional schools, in particular for Latinos, with 74 percent for charters and 73 percent for traditional schools. Independent charters had 11 percent disabled students, compared to 12 percent for the district, and 19 percent English learners at charters compared to 18 percent at traditional schools.

As it did last year, LA Unified released numbers that showed its magnet schools outperformed the district’s independent charters, although the demographics on the two do not match up closely. Magnets had a lower number of low-income students (69 percent), students with disabilities (6 percent) and English learners (5 percent).

“This is another accomplishment to celebrate as we move closer to our goal of preparing all of our graduates for success,” LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King said in a statement. “We are working hard to identify strategies that support student achievement. We want all of our schools – no matter what model – to continue to make progress in helping students fulfill their potential. But what is great about LA Unified is that we believe in all of our schools and all of our students.”

Statewide, the results were more mixed for independent charters, the CCSA data showed. Although the demographics match up relatively closely, charter students trailed the state in the percentage meeting or exceeding the standard on the math test, 35 percent to 37 percent, but outperformed on the ELA test, 50 percent to 49 percent.

CCSA also presented numbers comparing LA’s independent charters to traditional schools, but removed affiliated charters from the equation. There were 53 affiliated charters in operation last year. The schools are primarily located in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, and while they have many of the freedoms granted charters in how the schools are run, they adhere to all district collective bargaining agreements and also receive their budgets directly from the district.

When affiliated charters are removed, the scores for the district’s traditional schools drop.

Joe Martinez, principal of Carpenter Community Charter School, is a sport for his school.

LA Unified has so many different kinds of schools it’s hard to keep them all straight. With such varied terms as affiliated charter, independent charter, magnet school, pilot school, continuation school, option school and others, it can be a challenge to understand what they are, what they offer and how they differ. 

This is the third part of LA School Report’s examination of affiliated charter schools.

Previous stories are:
• Affiliated charters: A successful model on its way out?
• Does ‘charter’ make you look smarter? Principal of LAUSD’s newest affiliated charter says yes

---

Principal Martinez at a Governance Council meeting.

There isn’t much Principal Joe Martinez won’t do for his school.

He gets soaking wet while washing cars to raise money for kids who can’t afford the annual 5th grade trip to Washington, D.C. He dresses up as a sheik or a gangster for the annual fundraiser. This year he donned a tiara and a cowboy hat.

He even takes part in the unpleasant home checks to ferret out families who have faked their addresses in order to enroll in his popular Carpenter Community Charter School in Studio City, one of the wealthiest per capita ZIP codes of Los Angeles. Then, he has to gently transfer them to their proper home school.

In 2009, when some fed-up parents came to Martinez, who has worked in LA Unified since 1991, to figure out how to improve their school’s test scores, he agreed to help them become an affiliated charter school.

All three dozen teachers voted for the affiliated charter model, which allows greater autonomy in how to use school funds, as they had tired of asking parents for donations for toilet paper and photocopy paper. For parent Michellene DeBonis, the last straw was seeing her daughter’s 5th grade class swell to 41 students. “That was a killer year — never again,” said DeBonis, one of the signatories on the petition to turn the school into an affiliated charter.

Sign changes of the school in Studio City.

“It’s so important that we can choose our own way to spend that chunk of money,” DeBonis said. “We now have a mandate that we want them to work in smaller groups and figure out ways to creatively manage the numbers in the classes. That’s an affiliated charter.”

It means the school has its own autonomy as far as curriculum goes, but it relies on a lot of parent involvement and a commitment from the teachers. The school is still connected to the district as far as union contract obligations, calendar schedules and testing requirements.

When it came time to renew the school’s charter last year, a new set of activist parents explored every other kind of model for LA Unified schools. They decided once again on the affiliated charter model — even though it’s one of the least-used but most successful models available at the second-largest school district in the nation.

“When our five years ran out we started looking at pilot, magnet and independent charter models, and our strategic planning committee visited all kinds of other schools throughout the district to look at the next step for Carpenter, and they determined the affiliated model was the best one by far for us,” Martinez said. “It has served us well.”

So well, in fact, that families have faked their addresses to get in. From the moment the school sign out front changed from Carpenter Avenue Elementary School, what it had been since 1924, to Carpenter Community Charter School, it became highly sought-after. The California Distinguished School’s last Academic Performance Index score was 943 out of 1,000. It scored a 92 out of 100 in the newly released California Office of Reform Education (CORE) data.

Carpenter is the largest of all the affiliated charter elementary schools at LA Unified, at 950 students, and it is always teetering at capacity. When they had nearly 1,000 students at one point, the district had to check addresses because people who live in the area get first dibs at going there. Nearly 100 students had to be turned away, and the complex system for address verification using the LexisNexis database became a model for other schools in the district that face similar issues.

“It’s flattering, but it’s not something I prefer to spend my time on,” said Martinez, who has had to hire a Public Attendance Service counselor to go with him to conduct random home visits to see if the student’s address is actually the home. Although the charter model requires that the school have open enrollment, if the school is at capacity, like Carpenter often is, local residents get first priority, and many families said they bought million-dollar homes nearby or found apartments in the area in order to get into the school. Now Martinez checks out new applications before the beginning of the school year and finds about 75 to 100 have falsified their home address.

Carpenter is among the first wave of affiliated charter schools that applied in the San Fernando Valley. Today, of the 54 that now exist (including the latest, Sylmar Charter High School), 44 affiliated charters are in the San Fernando Valley and most of those are in higher-income neighborhoods such as Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills.

FAMOUS FACES

Carpenter’s neighborhood — near one of LA’s oldest movie studios and peppered with familiar film location sites like the houses used in the Kardashian reality show, “The Brady Bunch” and “Malcolm in the Middle” — means many celebrities who send their kids to Carpenter end up getting involved with the school.

Carpenter parents Denise DaVinci, a New York City fashion designer, and Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants.

“I can’t speak for other schools, but Carpenter always had a reputation for a lot of parent involvement,” Martinez said. “We also have a lot of children working in the industry, and the biggest drawback to that is that our absentee numbers go up because they are off making movies.” (Carpenter at one point had more than a 10 percent chronic absent rate.)

Martinez vigilantly protects the privacy of the famous families that attend the school, but they include recognizable city officials and Grammy and Emmy award winners. One mom, Denise DaVinci, a New York City fashion designer, helped Carpenter come up with a new logo and a line of clothing, and for a few years she harnessed the famous talent among the parents for end-of-the-year school shows.

“We could never publicize the high level of quality talent we had performing at our school events because too many people would come from all around to see the shows,” DaVinci said. “Suffice it to say that if you drove by and heard some familiar song during one of our school events, it wasn’t a recording and it wasn’t a cover band, it was the real thing.”

For years Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, performed and hosted events at the school when his children attended, and he frequently brought along the SpongeBob Band, much to the delight of the students. Carpenter holds a regular golf tournament fundraiser and throws parties at the nearby CBS Studios. This year, their Denim and Diamonds Ball on the studio backlot attracted 650 guests and offered two-stepping and mechanical bull-riding.

RAISING MONEY

Families are asked by the fundraising arm of the school to donate at least $800 per child, but it is not required, nor can it be required. No school in LA Unified is allowed to require any amount of donation nor any amount of volunteer hours, charter or not. But that doesn’t mean the school doesn’t raise more money than traditional schools.

At Carpenter, the average gift was $948 per family last year, far exceeding the ask. More than 20 families gave more than $3,000. Carpenter has very different demographics from the rest of the district; it has a 4 percent socio-economically disadvantaged population while the rest of the district is at 77 percent.

“I think parents at non-Title 1 high-performing schools definitely need to contribute if the school community wants an enriched educational experience for their kids,” Martinez said. “So yes, I think it goes without saying.”

Carpenter not only has its standard PTA, but also a nonprofit Parents for Carpenter that has raised more than $600,000 in the last year. All of it goes back to the school.

“The reason why the community wants their kids to come to our school is that we can offer those enrichment activities you don’t find at your typical school,” Martinez said. “Having a PE coach, or a full-time music teacher, or a full-time dance teacher and a full-time science teacher is practically unheard of in any other elementary school campus,” Martinez said. “So if a school community identifies those areas that they really want to highlight or shine, and guarantee that all kids have access to it, they have to do fundraising for that, absolutely.”

Carpenter’s Governance Council

Such decisions are made by a Governance Council made up of an equal number of parents and community members (eight) and staff, teachers and the principal (eight). Sometimes the meetings get contentious when the parents seem to have priorities that are different from the teachers, but they always get ironed out. And the affiliated model’s autonomy allows them to be a bit more creative when it comes to what is being taught, and how.

For example, this past school year, LA Unified said Carpenter could hire another teacher, but instead the Governance Council decided to take the $41,000 from the district and use it for other programs. They made it work out so it didn’t translate into larger class sizes because the teachers agreed to do split classrooms and share students.

TEACHER SUPPORT

“As a teacher, in an affiliated charter school you are not shackled by what the district gives you,” said Nick Glover, a teacher who serves on the Governance Council and introduced some of the innovative programs offered at Carpenter. Glover was among the teachers at the school six years ago who all unanimously agreed to try the affiliated charter model. He doesn’t regret it.

“From a teacher’s perspective we still have union coverage and benefits — everything is still the same — the basic thing we are gaining is to explore other avenues with less constraints than we would have with the district,” Glover said. The school can decide what to use block grants for, and Glover promoted programs like the unique Singapore Math style of teaching that is being rolled out in the school at different grade levels. They don’t use the district’s textbooks, and there was training for teachers in Las Vegas, and so the school had to figure out how to pay for it.

“We could pilot something new, and if it doesn’t work, we can work out the kinks,” Glover said.

“We know our clientele, our families here, don’t want a run-of-the-mill curriculum, so we can supplant and supplement wherever possible,” Glover said.

Another teacher, Christine Shahine, brought the relaxation technique of MindUP started by Goldie Hawn; the actress herself trained Carpenter’s teachers in the technique. It’s a research-based training program for educators that teaches children how to relax and concentrate, and aligns with Common Core.

“This is one of the new programs we brought in while reapplying as an affiliated charter, and it introduces meditation during the school day where kids focus on their emotions and their words,” Martinez explained. “It’s almost like your mother said, ‘Think before you speak.’ There’s a series of exercises we do every day with the kids when they come in from recess or lunch and everyone is hot and sweaty and arguing about what happened on the handball court. The teacher can ring a bell, have the kids close their eyes and go through a mental exercise of just focusing on their own breathing and letting go of the stress they have just brought into the classroom from the outside world.”

Carpenter is one of 20 pilot schools in the district trying the MindUP technique, and Martinez hopes to see test scores improve this year because of it.

The school also started the Write from the Beginning writing program and Engineering is Elementary, a program out of Boston.

“Our population is unique, we do not have a high English learner population, so we do not have the same needs as most of the schools in the district,” Glover points out.

Carpenter has a 4 percent English learner population while the average school in the district has 22 percent. Carpenter is 76 percent white and 8 percent Latino. LA Unified is about 10 percent white and 74 percent Latino.

“This affiliated model has allowed us to unify all the groups on campus and have a greater transparency,” Martinez said. He knows he cannot ask the teachers to work more, but many have seen what goes on in the Governance Council and want to be a part of it.

“You have to be very involved, everyone does,” Martinez said. “There’s no question about it, it’s tough. But ultimately, it’s worth it.”

And for that reason, he’ll put on a tiara or a cowboy hat and ride a mechanical bull to help his affiliated charter school thrive.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/does-charter-make-you-look-smarter-sylmar-high-principal-says-yes/ Thu, 02 Jun 2016 20:36:37 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=40053 This is part of an LA School Report series taking an in-depth look at the different categories of schools that exist within the massive LA Unified school district.

(Read more on affiliated charters: A successful model on its way out? and The elementary school-turned-affiliated charter that became so popular parents fake their addresses)

(Read the series on magnet schools.)

The vote seemed insignificant, almost procedural. But for one man sitting in the back row of the LA Unified Beaudry auditorium, it was a major victory and he breathed a sigh of relief. Sylmar High School can now add the word “charter” to its name.

“I am elated,” said principal James Lee after the school board approved Sylmar High as an affiliated charter school by unanimous consent at the May board meeting. He blinked away tears and added, “It’s been a long process.”

Lee meant not only the six hours sitting at the school board meeting to hear his application was approved, but the four years of struggle he was involved in before that, and two more years of false starts before he even got there to turn around the high school in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

Sylmar High School was once considered a failing school. After four years of restructuring the staff, improving test scores and involving the parents, Lee won approval for it to become an “affiliated” or “dependent” charter, which is a unique hybrid that allows some autonomies but still keeps the school connected to the larger district and retains union contracts.

And yet, with a fresh crop of new independent charter schools —which are publicly funded but independently operated and mostly non-unionized — ringing the 55-year-old school in the heavily Latino and low-income section of the San Fernando Valley, attendance was still dropping and Lee needed something else to make his school attractive.

Becoming an affiliated charter was it, he decided.

“Yes, just changing the plastic signage honestly will help change the perception and allow parents and the community to give us a second chance and take a look at us,” Lee said. Psychologically, adding that word to the school name will bring a whole new attitude and sense of pride to the school and the community, Lee predicts.

When he mentions the school becoming affiliated, he hears parents react with, “Well, it’s about time” and “Now maybe I’ll send my kid there.”

“This is the first school in two years that has even applied to become an affiliated charter school,” said Jose Cole-Gutierrez, chief of the Charter Schools Division that approves the applications. “We don’t see schools seeking that model very much anymore. We believe that Sylmar is on the road to success.”

The same week that Sylmar became an affiliated charter, the school made national news when a brawl broke out during lunchtime that went viral on YouTube. It was incorrectly characterized as a racial dispute and the school has since quieted down, but Lee said he thinks that when students return in August, there will be a renewed sense of pride in the school.

On July 1, the newly named Sylmar Charter High School will become the 54th affiliated charter of all LA Unified’s 1,274 schools. It joins an elite group of schools that test higher than the district’s magnet schools and the local independent charters.

A group of teachers tried to get Sylmar turned into an affiliated charter before Lee arrived in 2012 from John C. Fremont High School in South-Central LA where he was an assistant principal during a time of rigorous improvements at the school. Sylmar’s application was denied at the time, and Lee decided he had to make some major changes at the school before trying it again.

He wasn’t a popular principal at first. His first mandate was to cut 22 of the nearly 100 teachers and cut the eight-class schedule back to six, which didn’t allow for as many electives. He did not cut staff by seniority. Instead he focused on keeping those more likely to step up to be part of the small learning communities he was creating.

James Lee at Sylmar High’s front office.

“There were a lot of teachers who were upset,” Lee said. “It created a lot of tension. Grievances were filed; some thought it was unfair.”

By the spring of his first year, Lee displaced 22 teachers and worked toward another plan to restructure the school. The school lost $3.5 million a year because it didn’t improve its API (Academic Performance Index) score and lost the state’s Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA) money, which was provided as an incentive for failing schools.

“Some of our staff thought it was the end of the world when we lost that money,” he said. “We worked with what we had and graduation went up, the API scores went up from 677 to 709, suspensions declined and attendance went up. I attributed that to a group of teachers who worked in the small community models, kept things kid-centered and focused on how they could succeed.”

Teachers worked collaboratively to change the teaching habits and climate in the school, he said, and they became only one of three schools in the district to shake the underperforming label during that period.

Now, 30 of his 79 teachers are new since he joined the school—a full 38 percent. The teachers are already trying new things, but the school still has the reputation of being an underperforming school, Lee said.

Then came the competition. The new Partnerships to Uplift Communities Lakeview Charter High School opened two miles away, drawing some of Sylmar’s students. The first conversion charter school in the nation, Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, is nearby, as is PUC Triumph Academy and the Chavez Learning Academies magnet schools.

“We realized that our own school program was doing much better now and what we were doing was comparable to the other schools, but our attendance was dropping, so we needed to do something,” Lee said.

Sylmar Spartans have a long history of victories.

Sylmar’s fall enrollment is expected to be 1,950 students, and the new charter contract states they have a capacity of 2,150 students. Lee said he thinks he can fill the 200 spaces with students who want to come back to their home school, and attract more students from other areas of the city.

Sylmar had been in a Zone of Choice of three high schools, meaning students in those three neighborhoods could attend Sylmar, Pacoima or San Fernando high schools. Now, under its new reorganization, Sylmar must accept any student in the state and is no longer a Zone of Choice school.

“I believe we should have 200 additional kids in the area that hopefully will come back,” Lee said.

Of the teachers, 52 percent voted to become an affiliated charter; more than half of the full-time teachers had to agree to make that transition. Lee said there were a lot of fears. Some teachers thought that they would lose their UTLA union benefits or their LA Unified retirement benefits, or they would have to move to another school in five years. An affiliated charter school has the same union agreements and follows the same rules as any other traditional school in the district. Some teachers checked with other teachers at the three affiliated charter high schools in the Valley —Chatsworth, Taft and Cleveland — and teachers at those high schools reported that they didn’t notice any differences from traditional schools.

Parent participation also seems to be a key in successful affiliated charters, and Lee’s Parent Advisory Group gets 30 to 40 participants a month. He holds a regular breakfast with parents, and he knows that his parents are more active than at the neighboring traditional high schools. Five of the 16 elected positions on the School Leadership Council are reserved for parents and five seats on the School Site Council.

“The parents heard so many bad things about charters and I explained things and told them it was just a different model,” Lee said. “Then they saw some of the benefits.”

When charter schools first came on the scene, block grants for an additional $400 per student were added for affiliated charters. Now, a new affiliated charter school doesn’t get that additional money although other affiliated charters were grandfathered in and still receive the funds.

“We didn’t become an affiliated charter to get more money, that’s not what it was about,” Lee said. “That goes against the purpose of why a school becomes a charter. You use the money you have.”

Sylmar gets an additional $475 per student because it is a Title 1 school in a low-income area, and the school uses that to supplement some new programs.

“It’s less palatable to become an affiliated charter, and so of course there were more schools doing it when there’s money attached to it,” Lee said. “But there is a reason for doing it without the extra block grant money. It’s a form of us branding ourselves in terms of being autonomous and independent as we design our educational curriculum and meet the needs of the parents and kids.”

Lee has been able to lower some class sizes while keeping other classes such as PE larger, at up to 42 students. Math and history classes are at 34 students per class.

Sylmar is a School for Advanced Studies now, which offers more rigorous classes, as well as special academies within the school, including a Leadership, Arts and Media Academy, a school of Business Technology and Design, and a Math and Science Magnet School.

Lee also wants to be one of the first LA Unified schools to start an ethnic studies program.

Jose Navarro, who teaches social studies and U.S. history and developed a mentoring program for at-risk students that helped improve test scores, recently won a $1,000 cash prize. “I was a less-than-good student, experiencing problems most of my students are,” Navarro said.

Coordinating with the community is also important for an affiliated charter school. Sylmar worked out partnerships with Cal State Northridge, UCLA, Los Angeles Mission College and other schools to make it easier for students to transfer there. They now have a full-time college career adviser on campus. The school works with MS Aerospace, a Sylmar-based manufacturing company, to provide graduating seniors with work experience. The school gardening students provide plants for local elementary schools with the help of state and local horticulture groups.

Lee also said he works to keep the community connected to the school, which has a long history of tradition and involvement in the community as the Home of the Spartans. Now the school hosts the Sylmar Neighborhood Council, which meets on their campus monthly. The Automotive Program services cars in the community, and the Culinary Arts program partners with local professional growers in feeding the homeless and bringing produce to local fire stations.

In their latest School Report Card, 89 percent of the parents said they “felt welcome to participate” at the school, but only 39 percent communicated regularly with their teachers about their children’s homework. Lee plans to change that. He is working on encouraging teachers and parents to work together in programs with a goal of getting nearly one-fourth of the students to achieve SAT scores of 1,500 or more. (Currently, only 13 percent score 1,500 or more.)

“I don’t mind competition, competition is good,” Lee said about the charter schools not far away from his school. “If there’s no competition, there’s no reason to change. Now Sylmar is facing a big change. It’s exciting.”

LA Unified has so many different kinds of schools it’s hard to keep them all straight. With such varied terms as affiliated charter, independent charter, magnet school, pilot school, continuation school, option school and others, it can be a challenge to understand what they are, what they offer and how they differ.

This is the next part of an LA School Report series taking an in-depth look at the different categories of schools that exist within the massive LA Unified school district. 

Today we examine affiliated charter schools.

(Read more on affiliated charters: Does ‘charter’ make you look smarter? Principal of LAUSD’s newest affiliated charter says yes and The elementary school-turned-affiliated charter that became so popular parents fake their addresses)

(Read more about magnets and their expansion in our series, including profiles of Bravo and King/Drew medical magnets.)

One of the most successful school models in LA Unified is also one of the most under-used, and it’s becoming even more scarce. Only one school in the last two years has even applied to become one.

The unique “affiliated charter” schools — coined and developed locally at the nation’s second-largest school district — achieve higher test scores than either the district’s prized magnets or independent charter schools. They also have lower absentee rates than the district average.

But only 53, or 4 percent, of LA Unified’s 1,274 schools use the affiliated charter model. The schools are located in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods — nearly half of the student population is white in affiliates—and exist in communities where parent involvement has pushed the school administrators into more creative and innovative methods of teaching.

“Some may see it as the best of both worlds,” said Jose Cole-Gutierrez, the executive director of the district’s Charter Schools Division that oversees all charter schools connected to the district. “They are semi-autonomous schools of the district very much connected to the district’s collective bargaining, district staff and more, but each school also has its own governance council.”

Affiliated charters can choose their own curriculum, opt to reduce class sizes or adjust classroom scheduling, offer more professional development and exercise more control over budgeting, hiring and school site decisions. But they adhere to all district collective bargaining agreements. And the district receives most of the state money that goes to an affiliated charter and funnels it to pay for teacher and administrator salaries, although there’s some spending freedom with the rest of the money. A school, for example, must teach basic standards and can buy its own textbooks that are different from what the district uses, but must figure out how to pay for them.

In the past year, affiliated charters have ranked significantly higher in the English and math scores than either magnet or independent charter schools. And their California Office to Reform Education’s (CORE) scores from the past year have averaged 79.8 while the district average is 60.

Yet this successful school model is on the decline in LA Unified because fewer school principals are choosing the model.

“Like pilot schools, this is part of the diversity of options in our district,” Cole-Gutierrez said. “This model allows for innovation and still keeps the school in the family, so to speak.” He notes, “The number of schools applying for affiliated charter status has dropped significantly, and that could be for a variety of reasons.”

One reason is that a majority of the full-time teachers at a school must support the move, and the principal has to initiate the process. Also, the block grant funding that used to flow to affiliated charters was dropped two years ago after the state switched to the Local Control Funding Formula. Finally, the affiliated model depends on a highly committed teacher population as well as an active parent community because the school’s governance board must be made up of equal numbers of both.

The idea for affiliated charter schools caught on when it was first introduced in 1993, especially in smaller schools that couldn’t depend on big chunks of money coming to the school because of a larger population.

Schools that have become affiliated charters are almost all located in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside and in predominantly whiter and wealthier neighborhoods. That’s partly because those schools lost their Title 1 money when the district raised the percentage of low-income students needed to qualify.

This unique school configuration, which is not even outlined in the California Education Code, now seems to be on its way out. Statewide, 26 percent of schools use the affiliated model, according to the California Charter School Association. Most of the affiliated charters are concentrated in the Northeast and Central Valley region of the state (44 percent) with a small portion in Southern California (12 percent). CCSA considers affiliated charters as “charter schools in name only” compared to independent, autonomous charter schools.

AFFILIATED CHARTERS BY THE NUMBERS

Of the 53 affiliated charter schools in LA Unified there are three high schools, five middle schools and the rest are elementary schools.

Of the nearly 650,000 LA Unified students, 41,555, or about 6 percent, attend affiliated charters.

That’s compared to 107,000 enrolled at 221 independent charters, which are publicly funded and independently operated public schools.

Affiliated charter students are not included in the district totals as charter school students, even though the school may have “charter” in its name. They are included among the “regular school” totals because the funding still comes through the district.

A total average of 58 percent of LA Unified’s affiliated charter students met or exceeded the standards in the 2015 Smarter Balanced English Language Arts test, compared to 55 percent of the magnet students, 44 percent for the state, 39 percent for independent charters and 33 percent for the district.

In the math standards, 51 percent of the affiliated charter students met or exceeded standards compared to 44 percent of magnet students, 33 percent for the state, 28 percent for independent charters and 25 percent for the district.

Only 32 percent of the students at affiliated schools qualify for free or reduced-priced meals, compared with 83 percent at independent charters and 77 percent for the district overall. Some of the schools, like Canyon Charter in Santa Monica and Marquez Elementary Charter School in Pacific Palisades, have 3 and 6 percent socio-economically disadvantaged students, respectively.

The overall district’s demographics are 74 percent Latino, 8.4 percent African-American, 6 percent Asian and 9.8 percent white.

In the affiliated charter schools, 28 percent of students are Latino, 6.8 percent African-American, 9.5 percent Asian and 47.6 percent white. Statewide, as well as within the district, Asian and white students and those who are not from economically disadvantaged households scored significantly higher on the tests.

AFFILIATED CHARTERS BY LOCATION

Pick the wealthiest neighborhoods in the LA Unified borders, and you’ll likely find an affiliated charter school there. When broken up by neighborhoods, eight are in Woodland Hills, seven are in Northridge and five are in Sherman Oaks. A total of 43 are in the San Fernando Valley and nine are on the Westside, with one located near downtown.

That one affiliated charter school, in the Central district, is Dr. Theodore T. Alexander Science Center School, which ironically is named after the man credited with creating LA Unified’s magnet schools. Not a magnet, the Alexander Science Center does have the highest amount of socio-economically disadvantaged students of any affiliated charter (at 81 percent), and it has the lowest scores at 25 percent for English language arts and 13 percent for math. It has a CORE score of 45.

Most affiliated charter schools are in wealthier neighborhoods in part because the principals and teachers want to expand their curriculum to something more than what the district teaches, and their students are much different than those in the rest of the district.

“We don’t have as many English learners, and some of the district lessons don’t apply as much to our population,” said Joe Martinez, the principal of Carpenter Community Charter in Studio City, which has a 76 percent white population and 4 percent English language learners, with only 4 percent qualifying for free or reduced lunch. He has a school where people have faked their addresses so they can get in as a resident to the 92-year-old school that is surrounded by $1 million homes and within walking distance of the homes of George Clooney and Miley Cyrus. “We have found that being an affiliated charter has allowed us to try different and unique things, and it seems to be working.”

At more than 950 students, Carpenter is the largest affiliated charter elementary school and one of the oldest in the Valley. Parents and the principal applied for its charter in 2010. It was approved for renewal last year for another five years. The parents and teachers on their Governance Council explored other options before re-applying but chose to stick with the affiliated model.

“We have not found any drawbacks so far,” Martinez said. “When our five years ran out, we started looking at pilot and magnet school options, independent charter or even returning to the district. We looked at the next step for Carpenter and determined the affiliated model was the best one by far for us.”

Tamar Galatzan, the former school board member for District 3, helped Carpenter with its application at that time. She actively promoted the idea with dozens of other high-performing schools with Academic Performance Index scores exceeding the state’s target score of 800. (Carpenter had 943 at its peak; the tests were discontinued in 2013.) Most of the affiliated charters, 32 of them, are in District 3 and the next highest is 19 in Steve Zimmer’s District 4. Galatzan, who lost last year to Scott Schmerelson, encouraged small elementary schools to go the affiliated charter route and take advantage of block grant funding that was available at the time.

“A lot of these schools came together at the same time to apply and they had a strong record of performance and wanted to continue to be creative and continue to grow,” Cole-Gutierrez said. “The schools and their community wanted to continue to provide an innovative curriculum different from the rest of the district.”

WHY ISN’T EVERY SCHOOL AN AFFILIATED CHARTER?

Former LA Unified school board member David Tokofsky said he coined the phrase “affiliated” charter. Most other school districts call such a hybrid a “dependent” charter.

“No one wanted to be called a dependent school, so in some executive session at some point I suggested calling them ‘affiliated’ and it stuck,” Tokofsky recalled. Why wouldn’t every school want to become affiliated? Tokofsky said, “Not all schools are aggrieved. Not all schools need or want to change.”

Schools have to commit to the affiliated charter model, more than half of the teachers have to approve the idea, and the application process can take months if not years. Often, parents who are lawyers and grant writers volunteer their time to fill out the necessary paperwork to become an affiliated charter, which is another reason why fewer school communities in underprivileged neighborhoods with parents working multiple jobs seek to convert to the affiliated charter model.

Four years ago, the school board changed the Title 1 qualifications for schools to get extra funding for underprivileged children. It created a big dent in many school budgets, and schools in wealthier neighborhoods had to seek other ways to replace the steep loss of funding. Millikan Middle Affiliated Charter School in Sherman Oaks recorded a loss of $600,000 in one year.

Affiliated charter schools also received about $400 to $500 per student as a block grant when they were approved. But that state funding source changed and the block grants stopped two years ago. Many principals no longer saw the advantage of becoming an affiliated charter.

“When I submitted the application, the comments I would get from the district is ‘Why are you doing this, the funding is not there anymore?’ and I said we wanted to have more control over our curriculum,” said James Lee, the principal of Sylmar High School, which is the only school to apply to become an affiliated charter in the past two years. No other schools are even in the process of applying to become one. “We cared more about having the autonomy and didn’t do it just because of the money.”

Sylmar’s application was approved by the school board on May 10, and it will become an official affiliated charter school in July. Lee sees it making a big difference in the community’s perception of the school, especially in light of this month’s widely publicized schoolyard brawl.

“Just having the name ‘charter’ to the school will help us,” Lee said. “Even before the approval I’ve been getting estimates on changing the sign in the front of the school to add the word charter to it. I think it will bring a whole new attitude to the school to have that on the sign.”

Lee doesn’t understand why more principals don’t look at the affiliated charter model.

“I think the loss of the block grant funding has made it less palatable to become an affiliated charter,” Lee said. “But we have worked with what we have for a long time. Becoming an affiliated charter is a form of us branding ourselves in terms of being independent and able to design our educational curriculum and services to meet the needs of parents and our kids.”

For Sylmar, it has been a laborious four-year journey. It’s a far cry from when the principal came to the school in 2012 when it was considered an under-performing school. Already twice, the district had turned down the application for the school to restructure itself, and at one point before he came to the school, its affiliated charter request was denied.

“We had to be ready for the change, and this is the right time,” said Lee, who is following a Small Community Learning model that the teachers have adopted.

Affiliated charter schools must renew their application every five years, just like charter schools. Cole-Gutierrez cannot recall an affiliated charter ever failing to be renewed. The schools also have the option to convert back to a traditional school, but that only happened once. Only two schools, El Camino Real Charter High School and Pacific Palisades Charter High School, ever converted to an independent charter from affiliated.

When Sylmar High first discussed becoming an affiliated charter with the teachers, many were afraid it would affect their retirement or status with the district, but that’s not the case, as all UTLA agreements remain in place. At Sylmar, the initial vote was close, about 60 percent, but then the teachers did some investigating on their own.

“I gave them names of schools that were affiliated charters, like the other high schools, Chatsworth, Cleveland and Taft, and a couple them talked to teachers at the school and they didn’t even know they were affiliated charters,” Lee said. “Everything was essentially the same.”

In fact, the schools could use their discretionary money to pay the teachers more for extra work, some of the principals said.

But the common thought is that families also have to raise more money per student at affiliated charters to help the school, and that is another reason why they are in wealthier neighborhoods. At Carpenter, according to their Governance minutes, the school has raised $350,000 so far with an average gift of $948 per family. More than 20 families gave more than $3,000. A big fundraiser at the CBS Studios lot nearby every year, where they auction items from many of the celebrity families, and an annual golf tournament also raise money.

“I think there is more commitment to fundraising at an affiliated charter school, it comes with the territory,” Martinez said. “Of course, we never would or could require any family to contribute.”

Cole-Gutierrez said that all schools raise money to support their school programs, whether it’s for a full-time PE coach, more books for the library or supplemental art classes. “You cannot depend on family donations to be an affiliated charter, but the schools that are affiliated tend to have more engaged communities from the outset,” Cole-Gutierrez said.

Although it’s rarely chosen as a model, the schools that have gone affiliated don’t seem to want to change.

“When we first voted, 100 percent of the staff wanted to go affiliated charter,” said Martinez about his Carpenter teachers. In fact, two of them left to form their own independent charter schools after seeing the success. Now the faculty is learning to teach the students Singapore math and are trying innovative writing programs and even a daily relaxation exercise created by Goldie Hawn.

“I think the affiliate model has allowed to unify all the groups on campus and have greater transparency,” Martinez said. “It allows us to teach our children well.”

Coming next: profiles of Carpenter Community Charter School and the new Sylmar Charter High School.

The Los Angeles public school landscape is undergoing an unmistakable shift, with schools adopting new models that ultimately will result in students getting more choices. In a review of non-traditional public schools, LA School Report has found they make up almost one third of all schools in the District. A combination of funding pressures, a push by Superintendent John Deasy to find innovative ways raise academic achievement and a desire by local school sites to gain more control has led to a big jump this year in schools adopting new ‘autonomy’ models. The number of so-called Pilot Schools, for example (see below), has risen 41 percent this year. As a result schools are popping up all over LA Unified with a focus on everything from gaming to applied medicine to entrepreneurship to social justice. Will this have an impact on student achievement or teacher job satisfaction?
That remains to be seen. In the meantime, here is a rundown of the options.

Independent Charters
First permitted by the California legislature in 1992, Independent Charter schools are public schools run by non-profit organizations. Typically, they receive funding directly from the state but are authorized by the LAUSD Board of Education, which oversees their performance and has the ability to renew or deny their charter every five years. Charter schools are open to students district-wide with enrollment conducted by lottery. Unlike other models, charters must pay for their own school facility – but increasingly are sharing space with other public schools, thanks to the enforcement of a ballot measure. Most LAUSD charter schools operate without unionized labor and are exempt from most District policy.  For a list of Independent Charters, click here.

Pilot Schools
First launched at 10 LA school sites in 2007 with the support of UTLA and modeled after namesake schools in Boston, the Pilot School model is based on granting local sites autonomy in terms of budget, staffing, governance and curriculum. The school leadership operates with broad local control, exemptions from District policies and some waivers from the teachers union contract, including the unique ability to replace staff at the end of each school year. Considered the most flexible model, pilot schools are typically small (around 500 students) and are most often adopted at newly-minted school sites. The number of schools was capped in 2009, but as part of District negotiations in 2011 with the teachers union, the cap was lifted, leading to 14 new pilots just this year. For a list of Pilot schools click here.

Local Initiative Schools (LIS)
This new model was the result of the 2011 labor agreements between UTLA and LAUSD and has the potential for significant collaboration between teachers, parents and administrators. LIS schools have broad local control and exemptions from District policy. But they are unique one key respect: the concept of “mutual consent” hiring is contractually embedded in the LIS model. This requires that both the school and teacher agree to placement at the school site, a departure from traditional LAUSD schools, where placement is decided by the central office. LIS schools may elect to waive some union contract provisions if there is agreement at the school site to do so. Click here for a list of LIS schools.

Affiliated Charters
Affiliated charters are existing, traditional LAUSD schools that opt to convert to charter school status. These schools resemble traditional schools more than charters: LAUSD, not an independent nonprofit board, retains governing control of the school; all employees are paid by LAUSD and subject to union agreements; and the schools’ funding flows through LAUSD rather than from the state as with most Independent Charters. Affiliated Charters have become popular with non-Title 1 LAUSD schools as a mechanism to retain greater funding on campus and for branding purposes. Otherwise, Affiliated Charters offer similar levels of flexibility as LIS and ESBMM schools. For a list of Affiliated Charters, click here.

Expanded School-Based Management Model
The ESBMM model is based on a teacher-led approach formulated in 2005 when Woodland Hills Academy Middle School almost converted to a Charter school. ESBMM provides school sites with autonomy from certain District policies and emphasizes shared decision-making, with greater teacher input. All provisions of labor agreements continue to apply. With the strong support of union leadership, the number of schools has expanded rapidly, even as the flagship school in Woodland Hills has bowed out. For a list of ESBMM schools, click here.

Network Partner Schools
These are LAUSD schools run as collaborations between the District and non-profit organizations, which serve as the day-to-day managers of the school. Network Partner schools have waivers from some District policies and operate under existing union contracts. They include former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools,  launched in 2007; L.A.’s Promise, which has focused on a neighborhood-based turnaround model in South LA; and the troubled Greater Crenshaw Educational Partnership, which once oversaw Crenshaw High. The LAUSD school board voted unanimously early this year to break up Crenshaw into three smaller magnet schools.

Previous posts: Charter & District School Alternatives,Teachers Flocking to “Pilot” School Model,Public School Choice 4.0

Carpenter Community Charter

In early October, LAUSD board member Tamar Galatzan told us about “middle-class schools that don’t qualify for Title I anti-poverty dollars,” and that a lot of them “are becoming affiliated charters in order to get access to additional funds.”  (See: Board Member Galatzan Tells (Almost) All.)

There are 42 “affiliated charters”, schools which operate within the UTLA contract, but have more freedom as to how they spend their operating budget. LAUSD Charter Director Jose Cole-Gutierrez says that affiliated charters don’t necessarily get more money per pupil than district schools, but that they have greater flexibility on how the money they get is spent.

The lion’s share of the affiliated charters are in Galatzan’s San Fernando Valley district. Galatzan’s chief of staff Hilary MacGregor, says her office is getting a lot of calls about converting to affiliated charters: “The schools that are nervous are trying to move the process faster.”

The recommended date for a school to apply for affiliated charter conversion is March 15. For more on affiliated charters, see this page from the California Charter Schools Association. See also our explainer on the different types of public schools.