Word: chan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...free breakfast and lunch. Four years ago, Vaughn was just another failing inner-city elementary school: test scores were among the lowest in the state, 24 of the 40-odd faculty members had quit in the previous two years, and the principal had resigned after anonymous death threats. Yvonne Chan, the new principal, was determined to turn things around...
Possessed of enough energy and drive to power a locomotive, Chan was nonetheless hindered at every turn by the inertial drag of school bureaucracy. California's education code runs to 6,000-plus pages. Most of it seems designed to generate more paper: local schools are required to send reams of forms to district offices before they can fix a broken window, change the school menu, take a class on a field trip or buy new textbooks. To make real innovations, Chan found herself perpetually fighting for waivers. In 1992, when California enacted a charter-school law, Chan...
Granted charter status last fall, Vaughn Next Century, with a budget of $4.6 million, became a case study in how to take the money and run -- in the direction of greater efficiency and higher student achievement. Chan totally revamped spending. She put services like payroll and provisioning the cafeteria out for competitive bids; she reorganized special education. By year's end she had managed to run up a $1.2 million surplus, which she proceeded to plow back into the school. She added new computers, an after- school soccer program and, most important, more teachers, so that the number of students...
...academic achievement, in the four years since Chan has been principal, test scores have risen markedly. She believes that with charter status, further gains will come fast. For one thing, Chan has far more control over her staff and their duties than do principals working under union and district rules, including the power to hire and fire. Teachers at Vaughn work longer hours than they did before the school went charter, but they are paid more and given more authority. Every faculty member serves on one of eight parent-teacher committees that meet weekly and essentially run the school...
...Sewell Chan and Adam M. Kleinbaum contributed to the reporting of this story...