CHARTER SCHOOL'S FAILURE REVERBERATES

The now-closed Chicago Preparatory Charter High School was perhaps the most
novel experiment in the charter school movement: It served mostly teens with
drug and alcohol problems, and its founder came from Mayor Richard Daley's
Office on Substance Abuse Policy.

But the school's academic and financial failure and the board's decision
last week not to award any academic credit to students there have raised
questions about how much oversight is needed for Illinois' 2 1/2-year-old
experiment with charter schools.

More pointedly, did the Chicago school board move fast enough to prevent
damage to the academic careers of teenagers whose lives were already
troubled enough with drug dependencies or criminal records?

Chicago Prep's collapse is the first charter closing among the 13 in
Illinois and one of only four among the country's 1,128 charter schools that
have failed because of poor academics, experts said.

The tension between autonomy and accountability for charter schools is all
the more complex because the charters are designed to free schools from most
school board and union rules -- including even the requirement that teachers
be certified. That independence is crucial, advocates say, if charter
schools are to offer innovative academic and instructional alternatives to
traditional public schools.

Yet the story of Chicago Prep -- which operated for a year and a half with
severe financial problems and virtually no academic record-keeping --
suggests a collision between philosophy and reality.

"It's a national issue because you are trying to define a very tricky line
of allowing for the autonomy of a charter school and yet allowing someone to
step in and stop them from doing harm," said Greg Richmond, the Chicago
school board's director of charter schools. "It's kind of a subjective
interpretation to define when to step in.

"The safer thing to do politically is for us to ignore the school," he
added. "They would still be running today. Nobody would have known there
would have been problems. Not even the parents would have to know there were
problems. But that was the wrong thing to do."

In the wake of Chicago Prep's failure, the school board is backing a
proposed law in Springfield that would give the board the power to intervene
in the affairs of a charter school and suggest a course of action for
improvement. Some advocates say the measure is reasonable, but others say it
calls into question who actually is running charter schools.

In the meantime, the school board is concerned that many of the 45 or so
Chicago Prep students still enrolled when the school closed in January have
dropped out altogether. Officials are seeking to ensure that they all
re-enroll in other high schools. The board's inspector general is also
investigating the school's administrators for financial improprieties.

At the same time, the Illinois State Board of Education is seeking
legislative approval to make charter schools report the data required of all
public schools, including test scores, demographics, truancy and graduation
rates. Several charter schools already disclose such information
voluntarily. Next fall, Illinois will have 21 charter schools.

Chicago Prep's inadequacies were startling even for Chicago Public Schools:
Kids smoked marijuana in the restroom; teachers passed out worksheets to
students and then just sat behind their desks; and administrators kept no
attendance records or grade transcripts, Richmond said. The curriculum was
unclear: One student went from "English 3" to "English 2" and then to just
"Reading." Another student received one credit for a course entitled "TA" --
presumably an office assistantship, Richmond said.

In March 1995, before being hired as principal at Chicago Prep, Judith
Riggins was fired by the Chicago school board from another school where she
was principal. She had hired her son as a ghost-payroller at Fuller
Elementary School on the South Side. But Chicago Prep officials were unaware
of that when they offered her the job, Richmond said.

Chicago Prep "sounds like one of the biggest bad apples in the lot," said
Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington,
D.C., which tracks charter schools nationwide.

The charter school, which never had a permanent building and last operated
out of the former St. Kevin's School at 10501 S. Torrence Ave., promised "a
high-quality academic program in a supportive learning environment." It
sought to customize every student's education program, officials said.

Chicago Prep's board included several prominent leaders: Peg Rider-Hankins,
a project planner in the city's Office of Substance Abuse Policy; lawyer
Philip H. Corboy; James Fair, media and communications director of BP Amoco;
and even a couple of school board officials. Rider-Hankins abruptly left the
board last year, raising red flags about the school's progress.

Several Chicago Prep board members were contacted but declined to comment,
and a spokesman for Daley, who is on vacation this week, also declined to
comment.

Said Fair, who gave his personal time to Chicago Prep: "I think everybody on
the board is disappointed that we were not able to keep the school open. We
entered into this with very high ideals and ambitions, and it proved to be
quite a challenge."

When to infringe on a charter school's independence is a matter that charter
school advocates disagree on, though they agree that the Chicago Prep
students were innocent victims of a failure by adults.

The difficulty lies in distinguishing routine problems of a start-up school
from deeper malignancies in an instructional program. In 1997, the creation
of Chicago Prep, with support from the mayor's administration, generated
much public enthusiasm because it dealt with hard-core problems. And while
problems with attendance and organization were publicly acknowledged,
supporters gave Chicago Prep the benefit of the doubt.

John Ayers, executive director of Leadership for Quality Education, a
business-backed reform group that works with charter schools, said the
Chicago school board acted in a timely and prudent fashion in forcing
Chicago Prep to close, but he blamed the charter's non-profit board for poor
oversight.

Ayers pointed out how the Chicago Prep board failed to do a thorough
investigation into Riggins.

"That's bad due diligence on the part of Chicago Prep, and shame on them,"
Ayers said. "This is a warning sign for the charter movement.

"The thing to remember is that they closed the school. There are very bad
public schools that don't close, not to say that this is a shining success.
But it is a success in the idea that a poor-performing school--a
disaster--was closed and it was closed pretty quickly in a public accounting
for a poor-performing school."

But Allen said a school board should know within a year whether a charter
school's academics are failing.

"Real indicators on whether children are succeeding are apparent after the
first six months," Allen said. "It sounds like to me that somebody at the
Board of Education wasn't doing their job or wasn't doing it quickly enough,
because the mess should have been clear from the beginning.

"You're going to have some bad apples, and we have seen a few," she added,
"and thankfully it's been less than 2 percent nationwide. I think that's a
pretty good sign of accountability."