Tom Humble, Principal of Raleigh Charter High School, on Creating a School and More

In our prior two posts, we have taken an in-depth look at the concept of a charter school. In our first post we presented an overview of what constitutes a charter school and the rationale for this type of public institution. In our second, we took a thorough look at Raleigh Charter High School in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We noted in the second post that our visit to RCHS gave us a chance to see one of the nation’s finest public schools. Simply stated, “Raleigh Charter High School appears to be everything a community could hope for, small, intimate, innovative, and most importantly, high-performing.”

Today, we wrap up our three-part series on charter schools with a Q & A with Raleigh Charter’s principal, Tom Humble. We were very interested in the process of creating a school from scratch, as well as the rationale for Tom’s move from traditional public education to a charter school.

Lastly, we also wanted to ask Tom one of the tougher questions regarding the charter schools movement, the idea that these new educational institutions will simply siphon off the better students and thereby leave traditional public schools with even greater challenges. We believe readers will find a wealth of information in Tom’s response to this conjecture.

As is our custom, we present our Q & A in its entirety, unedited.

My understanding is that you spent the majority of your career in what might be deemed traditional public education. What were some of your roles prior to becoming principal of Raleigh Charter?

I spent 15 years in conventional public schools in junior high and high school. I was an English teacher for those years, and I served as department chair for two of those years. In my latter years, I received both a principal’s license and a superintendent’s license, and I was preparing myself to become an assistant principal, when this opportunity arose. The founders of this school were looking for a principal, and I was looking for a teaching position with perhaps some leadership roles. We jointly arrived at my being named the principal.

During these years, I was also a College Board consultant for AP English Language and Composition. I conducted about 50 workshops for English teachers. I coauthored a manual to help teachers teach this course. And I worked for nine summers as an instructor in the Duke University Talent Identification Program. All of these experiences were quite helpful in my understanding the needs of a principal who would be supportive of an educational enterprise and of teachers, in particular.

What was the rationale for shifting to a charter school? What specifically attracted to you to Raleigh Charter and how did your selection as principal come about?

I first learned about charter schools in my education leadership courses at North Carolina State University. And I had the privilege of attending—as a participant in one of those courses—a session for legislators led by Joe Nathan, a leading innovator in charter schools in Minnesota, and thus the nation. I was attracted to this charter school—it was called Interconnections Charter High School in the beginning—and I believed that I could continue to develop my craft as a teacher as well as have input into programming for college-bound high school students.

As the story goes, when my wife, Sally Humble, who is also an advocate for gifted education and I showed up for the first convocation of potential (invited) teachers, one of the founders told the others that the school’s search for a principal was finished. Sally Humble and I met with the founders, on a volunteer basis, but at some point, because of the different type of jobs we held, we decided that I would apply for the director’s position (called the headmaster at that time). (If this venture failed, I could easily fall back to my teaching job; Sally was working as a curriculum developer for SAS inSchool at the time.)

As I continued to meet with the founders, I assumed the role of headmaster for a few weeks until the position was formally called “principal.” I continued, in a voluntary role to work at night—two nights a week, typically—for Interconnections, while I maintained my teaching job.

Starting a school from scratch (so to speak) appears to be a very daunting task. Can you talk about the process of starting a school? Are there inherent advantages to beginning a school rather than trying to reconstitute one already in existence?

If by scratch, you mean, out of nothing—it is a daunting task, but many charter operators have done so. The process appears quite simple: recruit students and recruit teachers simultaneously, while telling each group that the other group will be there in August! We had good people making decisions and solving problems. Sally Humble, a volunteer, played important roles: she wrote the three-page case for renaming the school “Raleigh Charter High School,” she organized curricular frameworks, and—this is, without question, the most important part—she found the connection to getting the school beyond the 80 or so students we had attracted through months of information sessions and little advertising: her efforts insured that the school would open and operate on a sound financial basis with 175 students in grades 9 and 10.

Mike Jordan, an experienced principal, was the Principal of The Magellan Charter School, the school from which our school grew (the two schools are not connected). Mike Jordan was invaluable in many ways: he had the experience to be a mentor to me; he knew how to conduct staff interviews, and he was involved in each interview in our start-up year; and he had the charter-school experience to offer wise and calming advice during this “exciting” period.

Finally, our school could not have existed, much less achieved so much without the vision and leadership of Pamela Blizzard. Pamela Blizzard is technically correct when she states that she was one of the founders of our school. In my mind, she is always “the” founder because she wrote the charter application, directed the enterprise to find a site and then directed the details of supplying that site, and managed all sorts of big and little items that were necessary to get the doors opened to our students in August 1999.

Of course, many other players contributed to the school’s beginnings.

The largest inherent advantage in beginning a school has to do with the hiring of teachers who all come on board at the same time, in answer to the same call, and on the same page as far as the teacher profile (kind, caring, and intelligent) and the school’s mission (to educate college-bound students with a rigorous curriculum and engaging learning in order to become contributing citizens of the world). Having that starting place is a tremendous advantage over reconstituting a school.

In our tenth year, eleven of our school’s nineteen charter staff are still with us. We eleven understand something about the fragility of the inaugural enterprise and the energy and effort that transformed that fragility. I’d like to think of this school as continually in a start-up, experimental, innovating mode rather than achieving a set-in-stone institutional status. Anything except continuous improvement is a scary thought.

In your brochure, it states that RCHS offers only the North Carolina College/University Prep Track. What is your view regarding offering such a singular, refined focus? Is such a singular focus one of the reasons the school is so successful?

Raleigh Charter High School offers only the North Carolina College/University Preparatory Track toward the diploma. Larger, more comprehensive high schools can offer other tracks. We started with the idea that the school would be small with a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum. I was a teacher in Wake County Public Schools, now North Carolina’s second most populous district and the 23rd largest in the nation, when the decision was made that all high schools would become a certain size in order to offer a wide array of courses to their clients. So my little school of 670 students—where teachers knew more students than only the ones we taught—would become a school of 1400 and eventually crack the 2000 barrier. A school of 1600 can practically—that is efficiently and effectively—offer that array that is manifested in more than one diploma track. A school of 500 (currently we are at 525) has to have a focus.

The North Carolina law that establishes charter school has six purposes of charter schools. Here is the second purpose:

Increase learning opportunities for all students, with special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are identified as at risk of academic failure or academically gifted.

Raleigh Charter High School prepares students for college. Not all of our students are academically gifted. In fact, I would estimate that fewer than 30 percent have the state label. But a great number—and a greater number than our number of AG students would experience some “risk” in a conventional setting, a risk that we address, minimize, and, in most cases, eliminate. Of course, I am not talking about the risk that befalls a student who has difficulty in reading, composition, and calculations. I believe that college-preparatory students are at risk of being marginalized in a large public high school. The large school inevitably clogs their optimal progress. A large school inevitably creates barriers that hinder the stretching that makes the college-preparatory students ultimately prepared for college. A small school—and importantly, a small school that can turn on a dime to make decisions that would benefit students’ stretching and thus their success—can knock down barriers that would keep a student from important discoveries about self, in short, from soaring over and beyond those boundaries that might otherwise have limited them.

I do not brag about our school’s successes in national and state testing. When students have identified themselves as college preparatory, they ought to do well on these tests and examinations. We are not competing with other high schools; we are competing with our school.

In contrast, do you think the current practice in most public high schools to try to offer a variety of programming is one of the reasons that public schools are less successful (the jack of all trades, masters of none concept)?

I believe that choices are good in the educational environment. In order to offer a wide variety of programming options, high schools have to be a certain size. I do not know what that size is now, but around 1988, our system considered 1400 to 1600 to be the size that could efficiently offer career, general-curriculum, and Advanced Placement courses from which students might choose.

Still a high school of 1500 or 2000 or 2500 is a large high school, one where students can be lost and not known. I believe that being known by teachers is so important for adolescents. If a teacher has 145 students for a year or 95 for a semester, that teacher is not going to know those students well.

So, a number of high schools have developed the concept of the school within the school: for example, a so-called comprehensive high school can contain a specialized school in information technology, medical technology, science and engineering, or health sciences, to name some of the most frequent options. Students can feel a part of that smaller learning environment (say, fewer than 400 students), while the comprehensive high school benefits from the economies of scale to operate athletics, technology, other media resources, and administration of the school efficiently.

I am not qualified or informed enough to comment on whether public schools are ‘less successful.’ I believe that many large schools are doing the best they can. From my limited experience at Raleigh Charter High School, I know only that I appreciate the many benefits that a small school works well at lots of levels. It works so well for us that we’d like to be even smaller, say between 400 and 500.

What, in your eyes, are some of the advantages that charter schools have (by virtue of charter legislation) over the traditional public school structure (staffing, discipline, decision-making, other)?

I see the advantages that our charter school has in terms of staffing, disciplinary procedures, decision making, and budgeting. I’ll discuss these in hopes that readers can extrapolate from our small case.

Staffing. A discussion of staffing, for us, starts with our hiring process. Other schools could use this method, and I do hope that, in my ten-years of absence from the conventional environment, more schools are involving more teachers in the hiring process. A candidate for an opening submits a resume, a statement of education philosophy, and transcripts; the package is reviewed by the administration, by the department chair, and by members of the department. The department and the administrators decide on who will be interviewed. On the interview day, the candidate will teach a class of students, teach a class of teachers (including members of the target department), have an interview with department members that deal with both lessons, and have an interview with at least two administrators. Sometimes a candidate may observe another class during that day.

It means a great deal that we can have invested staff members becoming more invested in the managerial duties of hiring. And it means a great deal to the new hire to be substantially known by future colleagues.

Finally, a charter high school in North Carolina is able to hire up to 50% of its teaching corps without licenses. We follow this rule closely, but we are also aware that we can hire the best teacher possible for our students, whether licensed or not.

Disciplinary procedures. I would like to think our disciplinary procedures are like those in other public schools. Because we are small and because our clientele is college-preparatory, we have fewer issues with students being undisciplined. There are two features of our program.

First, the relatively small size of the school and the consistent work over the years on consistent principles has resulted in a “peer pressure” that works in a very positive direction. Students know that the adults on campus—all adults—care about their safety and security and well-being. Students are entrusted with a good deal of autonomy on the assumption that they will use that autonomy wisely and in the best interests of our learning community.

Second, code violations are addressed as problems for the community. Honor violations, attendance violations, and other infractions are treated with consistency and respect and hopefulness for a better future. Administrators try to take a positive attitude in working with students who have not complied with rules or expectations. We couch our discussion in terms of what serves the learning community and what is owed the community when a student breaks the rules. We try to be as “therapeutic” as possible, by focusing on the definition of school and of our school in particular, on causes and effects of behaviors, and on the requirements of a school to achieve its goals. We aim for buy-in.

Decision-making. A charter school administration has the unique opportunity to make local and timely decisions that affect the school. If the charter school board empowers its administrators and the administrators act in a reasonable, appropriate, and communicative manner, then decisions can be made quickly and problems can be solved efficiently. The charter school structure gives us local control.

Obviously, the principal has to make the final decisions in the life of a school. Having smart and talented colleagues on an administrative team and being open to ideas from other school leaders (department chairs) are important to the life of our school. I am blessed with such colleagues.

It is our public intention to have as flat an administrative model as possible. The administrators are still in charge. But departments have a great deal of say in hiring staff, designing curriculum, and selecting texts for students. Teachers at our school are given a lot of autonomy, and the administration trusts them to make proper decisions in the best interest of the students. Administrators monitor these processes.

Budget. Being able to have a lot of say in the dispensing of funds is another area where charter-school principals have an advantage over conventional principals. Instead of being tied to line items from above (or having to perform skillful financial acrobatics to work around them), a board and a charter-school principal have a lot of flexibility in budgeting. And we need it.

Budgeting functions as a prediction of programming at the beginning of a fiscal year and a history of programming at its end. At our school, the principal works closely with the finance officer to plan, recommend, and amend line items when necessary. Departments have input when they request educational programming funds each year. Most of our budget—about 60%—goes to staff salaries and benefits.

There are some who insist that the majority of charter schools, particularly ones like Raleigh Charter, simply siphon off the better students and ultimately just leave the public schools with even greater challenges. How would you respond to this assertion?

I would say that Raleigh Charter High School offers students in our area a choice. We have offered a choice in high-school education to students and parents from nine different counties in our ten-year history. Wake County Public Schools is the second largest system in the state, and to have a high school that serves 525 students means that that school system does not have to build one-fourth of a high school. A Wake County high school costs about $69.4 million for 2,223 students; thus, $16.4 million are saved by a school of our size.

Students in Wake County have many options for very good high school educations: the Wake County system is one of the best in the nation, a number of fine independent schools serve students in the Triangle, and many charter schools are serving students of all ages, including high-school students in several charter high schools. We do not believe that we are siphoning off the better students from the public schools.

But I can imagine that there are less populous areas where the charge may be laid, and at first thought, the charge may seem to be valid. I think that the charge, though, is flawed. First, by law, any conventional school district could establish a charter school to serve the needs of clients who require service. I am not aware, in North Carolina’s twelve-year history of charter schools, that a school district has done that. Second, in order to obtain a charter, an application has to show that the school’s presence would not have a deleterious impact on the existing system. For a school district with fewer than 600 students, for example, a charter school with even the minimum size of 85 students, may well have such an effect. I wonder if such a charter would be granted in North Carolina. And third, there is the element of choice and competition. Charters that succeed have met a public need with their public school. Parents and students vote with their feet to support the school of interest. Not every charter school in North Carolina is working with better students, though many have seen that better students have not always been well served in conventional schools and should be considered “at-risk.” Charter schools are part of the greater reform in education that, I hope, will eventually result in improved educational opportunities for all students.