Choosing Diversity

How Charter Schools Promote Diverse Learning Models and Meet the Diverse Needs of Parents and Children

Lance Izumi

• Publisher: Pacific Research Institute
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780936488066
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Choosing Diversity, Lance Izumi writes that one of the key traits that distinguishes charter schools from traditional public schools is the diversity of educational experiences promoted by the ability to choose.

He profiles charter schools that are as different from each other as one could imagine, from geography to student populations to teaching methodologies to technology use to curricula. But, together, they exemplify the diversity that is at the heart of the charter school ideal, which is to meet the needs of each individual student.

While test scores are an important consideration, Izumi makes the case that for many parents, non-test-score issues such as a safe learning environment, the ability to homeschool their kids, or a technology-focused curriculum, can trump test score performance when it comes to choosing a school, including choosing a charter school.

CHAPTER ONE

Charters for Children with the Most Special Needs

“I was always the kid that was picked on the most so that always made me defensive . . . Every day, just ready. Ready for something to pop off, right? Like everything, like every single day. And generally, I got my wish, like every single day something would pop off . . . Yeah, it’s destroying myself. But I’m telling myself, I’m destroying other people. . .Then, I got my head on straight . . . you’re gonna have to come back to Earth. And what better place than a school called Life Learning Academy that’s going to teach you how to make it in the real world, because what you’re doing now ain’t gonna cut it.

~ ALLAN PICKENS

LIFE LEARNING ACADEMY
ALUMNUS

Charters for Children with the Most Special Needs

LIFE LEARNING ACADEMY

ALLAN PICKENS’S LIFE was in a downward spiral. Not only had there been constant physical conflicts in his school life, violence was claiming those he knew. “The people in your life who are passing away because of either drugs or violence,” he told me, they “literally would be there one day and gone.”

“You know, I go to school, I’m fighting all day, I’m getting into it with people, I’m having all sorts of issues,” he says. In response, he would eat out of depression: “I used to eat out house and home, like I would tear the refrigerator down by myself, though back then I didn’t understand it.”

“I’m a black man,” he says, “so we have a lot of those ailments, the heart attacks, diabetes, stroke, things of that nature, but it had a mental effect.” Pickens’s weight ballooned: “Okay, 330 pounds would be a fair estimate.”

Not only was his mental and physical health in crisis, he had stopped going to school. After three months out of his high school, he met with San Francisco school district staff, and one of them told him about the Life Learning Academy charter school.

One of the stock arguments made by opponents of charter schools is that charters cream higher performing students from the regular public school system, leaving lower achieving students for the regular public schools to educate. This claim is not only false on a macro level, it ignores the existence of charter schools, such as Life Learning Academy, that explicitly target the most difficult-to-educate students.

Many studies show that the “cream of the crop” argument is a myth. For example, a 2018 Arizona study found that the average student transferring from a regular public school to a charter school in 2015 performed below the state average on the state standardized exam in both math and English. In contrast, students transferring from charter schools to regular public schools were the higher performing students.¹

If there is a charter school that truly busts the creaming myth it is Life Learning Academy (LLA). Located on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, LLA is housed in very humble facilities that from the outside are indistinguishable from the many abandoned buildings on the island, which had once served as a Naval Youth Center at a military base. Yet, within its walls, miracles are occurring.

Allan Pickens’s story and background is typical of the students who attend LLA. As the school notes:

Most students are involved in or at risk of involvement in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Many of LLA’s new enrollees report histories of physical and substance abuse, and more than half have parents known to abuse drugs or alcohol. Nearly half report current or past gang affiliation, and the majority have profound histories of school failure and truancy.²

In other words, LLA is the last hope for these students.

The genesis of the school occurred in the mid-1990s when then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown hired the non-profit Delancey Street Foundation to assess the city’s juvenile justice system and create a plan for reform. Out of this assessment process came recommendations for “an extended-day, structured, comprehensive school program that provided hands-on, project-based learning and school-to-career focus.” The ideal program would have small class sizes and target young people “with a multiplicity of problems including documented school and family problems.”³

Based on these recommendations, the Delancey Street Foundation developed LLA. Treasure Island, which is linked to San Francisco and Oakland by the Bay Bridge, was chosen as the site for the school because it was not part of any gang-affiliated territory in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The school opened in 1998, with a mission to create “a nonviolent community for students who have not been successful in traditional school settings.” LLA welcomes students into “an ‘extended family’ which motivates everyone to give and receive support, develop responsibility and judgment, and build the academic, vocational, and social skills necessary to be successful.”⁴

The force behind LLA is executive director Dr. Teri Delane. If there was anyone created perfectly to lead LLA it is Teri, as she is known to everyone. She understands her students because in her youth she was exactly like them.

When I sat down with her on a typically cold San Francisco summer day, she told me, “I never forget where I come from.” She grew up in Las Vegas and “everyone in my family on both sides, all the way back, were addicts.”

“At ten, I was already drinking,” she said, and “at fourteen I had a needle in my arm—from fourteen to twenty I was shooting heroin.” Kicked out of school in the ninth grade, her friends were her family, and like Allan Pickens, she saw many of them die. Of the four young friends with whom she grew up, “three of them all died before age twenty-one from heroin overdose.”

“The last time I shot dope,” she recalled, “I was in a gas station bathroom with two friends, I overdosed, and they thought I was dead.” The friends left her, but “one of them had a conscience and said, ‘What if she’s not dead,’ and called 911.”

She woke up in the hospital and an older male friend was there and he told her, “We need to do something,” and “I said, I don’t know where it came from, I don’t want to die.” She was just twenty years old when she moved from Las Vegas to San Francisco, and into the care of the Delancey Street Foundation. “It was there that I learned about family,” she said, “and it was there that I learned about community.”

“I had to basically start from scratch,” she said, “because I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with meeting someone and cussing him out . . . so, I had to learn basic things that people take for granted that you’re taught when you’re a kid in your family.”

In a miraculous turnaround, she got her life together, “I went back to school and I graduated, I got a couple of master’s degrees, and I ended up getting a doctorate in clinical psychology.” Most important for Teri, “It has always been my mission in life to give back what was given to me.” “I always want people to understand,” she emphasized, “that whatever your background, whatever has gone on in your life, if you get the right people in your life, you can change.”

Teri says that LLA does well with three types of students: 1) hardcore criminal-justice kids but who have a level of maturity, 2) bullied kids who just drop out and are invisible, and 3) kids who just do not fit in well in a big school system.

Oddly enough, she observes, the hardcore kids protect the kids who have been bullied. The school has a strict nonviolence policy, and “nobody bullies at this school, period.” “We’ve never had a fight,” she notes, “we’ve never had an act of violence at this school for twenty years,” which is amazing considering a “majority of our students grow up in environments where they witness violence on the streets where they live and inside their homes.”

Teri described one of her invisible kids. A friend of Teri’s told her about a girl who had not been in school for three years. Teri went to the girl’s house and “found this quiet, shy, beautiful, artistic young girl who just dropped out.” The girl’s mother was never at home so “she is basically by herself.” Teri invited the girl to come to LLA:

She came and that was six months ago, and she came every single day. Now she is only seventeen, so I’m keeping her in high school until she’s twenty. What I’m going to do is get her a job during summertime. She’s doing online courses and we’re going to help her get her GED . . . So, every kid is different. They come at different levels and we’ll meet them where they are.

All potential students have a one-on-one interview with Teri. She says, “I don’t want anybody else’s opinion in that room.” “What happens,” and she does not know why, “is that they open up and they tell me about what’s going in their lives, in their homes.”

A prospective student may open up, but that does not mean that Teri is automatically going to give them hugs—quite the opposite. She will give the students her unvarnished opinion of how they have lived their lives. Many students are shocked.

Allan Pickens, for example, recalls sitting down with Teri, “and I basically gave out my life story.” “Now at that point in my life,” he says, “I’m thinking, oh, here’s this lady, she’s going to, you know, pat me on the back and say okay.”

“I give her this 45-minute sob story about how I’m the victim,” he says, “and the first thing she says to me was, ‘you’re nasty.’”

Shocked, he remembers, “I’m looking around like, what are you talking about?” “I see your type,” he remembers Teri telling him, “you think everything is everybody else’s fault, you don’t take responsibility for the things that you do.”

So, “like this woman I’ve never met before, who I told my life story, is literally telling me I’m full of it and that I need to change,” said Allan. “And it was like, whoa, but she broke it down and told me what the school was about, if I work hard this can work.”

The interview with Teri may have been shocking to Allan, but he had noticed that when he came to LLA for the interview, “no one’s fighting, no one’s cussing, no one’s using drugs.” He came away impressed thinking “this really is a community that promotes a non-violent drug-free environment.”

Allan was not the only one who reacted to Teri’s in-your-face honesty with amazement. Teri remembered a student named Tony whose father was a gang member “who really beat him up.” His mother was married to another gang member. When Teri first went to Tony’s house, she met him in the dining room. Tony had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a red rag—a gang symbol—hanging out of his pocket.

Years later, Tony recalled to Teri, “you came over and snapped the cigarette, threw it on the ground and pulled that red rag out and threw it on the ground, and you said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you think you are, but this is not what we’re doing here.’” And Tony looked at Teri, and Tony said, “I just thought to myself, wow, no one has ever done that with me before—yeah, and I loved it.”

Tony graduated from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Charters for Children with the Most Special Needs
• Chapter Two: Diversity Within Diversity
• Chapter Three: High-Tech Charters
• Chapter Four: Classical Charters
• Photos of Schools Featured in this Book
• Chapter Five: Meeting Needs in Rural America
• Chapter Six: Urban Charters—Controversies from Coast to Coast
• Chapter Seven: Successful Urban Schools
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About Pacific Research Institute