This charter school was left behind

Charter schools are all the rage, the darlings of the education reform movement, the stars of the buzz-generating documentary "Waiting for Superman."

They're increasingly popular with parents and politicians who are sick of immovable, unaccountable public school bureaucracies.

So in Nevada, with its struggling education monopolies creating fertile ground for school choice advocates, charter school openings in the 2010-11 school year totaled exactly ... zero.

Nada. The big bagel.

California, as beholden to the public education establishment and teacher unions as any state, saw 114 charter schools open this year, giving it 941 such campuses. Seventeen opened in Arizona, according to the Center for Education Reform, bringing its total to 581. Florida welcomed 56 and now has nearly 500 charters. Nine other states added at least a dozen.

Although Nevada boasts having the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, perhaps the country's greatest charter school success story, the state has just 26 other charters. Only nine states have fewer.

It's not for a lack of trying -- on the part of dedicated citizens, anyway.

Gary Vause, owner of the Lit'l Scholar Academy preschools and child care centers in Las Vegas, was behind one of 12 applications seeking to open a charter school this year. His experience with the state Department of Education left him convinced the process is rigged to protect failing schools.

"It's a big slap in the face," Vause said. "They make you submit 2 inches of paperwork just to give themselves more chances to pick it apart and deny it."

Charter schools are public schools. They receive roughly the same amount of per-student funding from the state as public schools but have the freedom to innovate and operate under their own vision, values and educational focus. The state provides oversight to make sure tax dollars aren't squandered, but isn't supposed to micromanage what goes on in the classroom.

Charter schools can have longer school days, can more easily expel students who behave poorly and can get rid of teachers who don't perform. For parents who aren't happy with their neighborhood schools and can't afford private schools, charter schools are a godsend.

Creating a campus is the really hard part. Charter schools get no tax money for construction or renovation, and they typically have no collateral against which to borrow from private banks. Where public schools are built with funds segregated from operating budgets, charter schools must use state per-student funding (or private fundraising) to cover facility expenses. For a lot of charter applicants, it's a deal breaker.

So Vause proposed putting the Scholarly Choice Charter School inside his business on South Rainbow Boulevard, in rooms completely separate from his preschool and child care operation. He believed providing a top-notch elementary school in the same location as affordable, engaging before-school and after-school activities would appeal to lots of working parents.

The elementary school would get a smokin' deal on rent and utilities, and Vause planned to use some of those savings to beef up compensation for his instructors. "We were going to cherry-pick the best teachers from the Clark County School District," he said.

But the state wouldn't allow the charter school's landlord to serve on its formation committee. The Department of Education denial, which said "it appears this application is inappropriately influenced and driven by the landlord of the facility the school would use," demanded that Vause and his preschool operations manager have no role in the charter school "because of conflict of interest concerns."

Vause responded by distancing himself from the start-up campaign and recruiting Beverly Mathis, principal of Booker Empowerment Elementary School in Las Vegas, to the formation committee. Mathis, a Milken Educator Award winner and bona fide miracle worker, reviewed the application and snarky denial and thought the school deserved reconsideration.

Mathis wrote to state Superintendent Keith Rheault last year, saying she sincerely found "no undue or inappropriate influence of any kind ... by any potential leasing agent or facilities owner," adding that Vause's business and lease offer "provide exceptional opportunity to fulfill the school's educational mission" and were "highly economical."

Vause said Rheault never responded to Mathis' point-by-point rebuttal to the state's nitpicking.

Nevada's charter school applicant class of 2009 is officially 0 for 12.

Steve Canavero, director of Nevada's new Office of Charter Schools, says he hears such frustrating stories all the time, and he intends to do something about it. Canavero started his job -- and his office -- this past June.

Canavero, a former charter school principal, obtained a grant to have the National Association of Charter School Authorizers audit how the state processes applications and assess its overall charter school environment.

"This is a game-changer for us," Canavero said. The association could release its findings as soon as this week, and will present them to the State Board of Education next month.

A culture change within the state Department of Education is a first step. The helpful climate Canavero hopes to create would do a lot more to expand educational opportunities than the open hostility Vause encountered.

But Nevada's charter schools can only be as good as its laws, and a report released last month by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ranked the state's statutes 23rd out of the 41 states that have them.

Among Nevada's glaring weaknesses: collective bargaining and licensing requirements that prevent charter schools from hiring teachers out of the private sector or from college campuses, and a prohibition on charters taking over the campuses of failing public schools.

Meanwhile, a report released last week by Bellwether Education Partners found that governments routinely discriminate against charter schools by denying them their rightful share of state money, forcing campuses to operate on margins that can dip below 1 percent. A Ball State University study from last year had a similar finding, concluding that charter schools' average per-student funding is 19 percent below that of public schools.

Most of these protectionist obstacles are the result of opposition from teacher unions, and the Legislature's majority Democrats have never been open to changing them. Republicans have a fairly ambitious school choice agenda that includes cleaning up and toning down charter school regulation.

There is good news for the short-term: Canavero says as many as eight charter schools could open in Nevada this fall -- provided they succeed in jumping through the rest of the state's required hoops.

As Vause learned, that's nowhere near as simple as it seems.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.