Boston's City on a Hill - City On A Hill Charter School in Boston, Massachusetts

Public Interest, Fall, 1996 by Sarah Kass

This systemic pressure is further compounded by the way the federal and state departments of education spend money. Urban school districts that serve poor and so-called "at-risk" youth are entitled to large sums of money from the federal government. Although students' demographics command where the resources go, school districts must still reapply each year. As charter schools are legally constituted as school districts, I recently had the pleasure of applying for our fiscal year 1997 entitlement dollars.

Fund code 640 is the "Teen Dating Violence Prevention and Intervention Program." Among its purposes are "to continue providing educational programs and strategies to prevent teens from becoming involved with dating-related violence and to offer safe intervention strategies" and to "implement school-based victim support groups and adolescent perpetrator intervention groups under the supervision of battered women's service providers." Fund code 346 is the "Health Protection Program," the purpose of which is to promote "a comprehensive interdisciplinary health education and human services program that is supportive, caring, and sets high expectations for all students." Its focus is tobacco-prevention education. Fund code 331, the "Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program," supports preventing "violence in and around schools," and "strengthening programs that prevent the illegal use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs."

As significant dollars are at stake here, school districts dutifully demonstrate how they will do what the funds require. And yet, the more violence-prevention training, dating workshops, and tobacco education we do in a given day, the less time students have to read and write. Similarly, the more energy that goes into managing these funds, the less there is to worry about true education. And so, even City On A Hill, a school with a clear academic mission, is pushed to replicate the one-size-fits-all public school, whose graduates cannot read. If we fail to get our entitlement money, we seem irresponsible; yet, our charter would seem to give us permission to test the hypothesis that the best violence or teen-pregnancy-prevention program is a good education. What the state gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

Farce and tragedy?

Lastly, there is another set of conflicting imperatives under which we operate. On the one hand, we are asked to produce better education for the same amount of money our students' sending district spends. If Boston spends $7,500 per student, and 90 percent of its graduates read below grade level, we are expected to spend the same amount but achieve better results. On the other hand, given our autonomy from a centralized public-school system, we have a chance to determine how much we need to pay to achieve excellence. This creates a tension between replicability and excellence, between our commitment to improve the system and our commitment to our own students.

If 75 percent of our graduates were able to read on grade level, would we have done our job? By the external standard, yes. But, by our own internal expectations (and by the standards of higher education and the economy), we would have failed. In 1995-1996, our basic education program cost $466,138, or $7,171 per student, which is comparable to the Boston per-pupil cost. But, considering that only 44 percent of our students are now reading at grade level, we will undoubtedly want to raise more money to provide even more resources to our students. Yet the more money we spend on each of our students, the more we put in jeopardy the survival of our school. Our political viability may be in conflict with our ability to prepare our students to compete.