After a dizzying 2 1/2 -hour discussion, a divided Los Angeles school board Tuesday postponed a vote on whether to close a Pacoima charter school that has been beset with low test scores but claimed a near-perfect record of getting its low-income minority students into college.
The delay on the future of Discovery Preparatory Charter School came after a compromise plan to extend the charter for a year unraveled under a barrage of conflicting legal opinions and last-minute developments.
"I'm kind of baffled," school founder and Executive Director Matthew Macarah said. "And I'm exhausted."
More than 200 students, parents, teachers and school supporters filed quietly out of Los Angeles Unified headquarters afterward, many not exactly sure what had happened.
Before the meeting, district staff already had postponed for two weeks the day of reckoning for another school: Pacifica Community Charter in West Los Angeles. Pacifica, like Discovery, enjoys broad community support and also was expected to fill the board room to contest a staff recommendation to close the school.
At the start, the school district's charter school division recommended closing Discovery, citing the campus' lagging test scores and state requirements that charter schools must either improve low student achievement or maintain achievement levels that are at least middling.
The test scores of Discovery, instead, had been heading in the wrong direction. Macarah explained that his student population had changed; it used to come from a high-achieving charter middle school. But in 2004, that campus opened its own high school and lower-achieving students from regular district schools replaced them at Discovery.
Macarah's experience with a shifting student population is a real-world illustration of research released today. Charter middle schools in California significantly outperform traditional middle schools, even after adjusting for students' ethnicity, family income and other factors, concluded researchers with EdSource, a Bay Area nonprofit that reviewed student achievement in California.
Those outcomes are flipped for elementary schools -- where traditional schools have higher scores -- and mixed for high schools, with charter schools owning perhaps a slight edge.
Macarah said he expects to do considerably better on this year's testing now that he has overcome serious management problems that he concedes had much to do with his inexperience at starting and running a school.
