As the first African-American woman ever appointed to the California Advisory Commission on Charter Schools, Corri Tate Ravare is well aware that she will soon begin feeling some extra responsibility.

For the next two years, the 36-year-old senior vice president at Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools, a UC Berkeley graduate and onetime field deputy for former Los Angeles Unified School District board member Genethia Hayes, will work as the parent and guardian representative on a nine-member group that advises the State Board of Education on charter issues.

Simultaneously, she will be working at the forefront of her own organization’s “education corridor,” a 45-square-mile region bound by the four major South Los Angeles freeways that will one day be home to 22 new public charter schools.

In an interview with The Wave, Ravare discussed the commission, charter schools and the impact they have had on the African-American community.

Do you feel any additional pressure being the first African-American woman appointed to the commission?

Not necessarily added pressure, but definitely added responsibility.

What influence have charter schools had on the African-American community?

The needs of African-American students are brought into the conversation whenever we are talking about charters. View Park Preparatory has been in the community for many years now. It was one of the first schools to really serve this part of the city. So, it’s been there but the opportunities for African-American students in charter schools has really grown. We have some great charters out there now in our neighborhood but it’s taken some years for that to happen. … Charters have really become a great option for African-American families that want a smaller school for their kids. It seems like in the past the only option was your local, traditional public school or private school. With the cost of living now, families can’t afford that. … For a lot of families I talk to it’s a life-saver because they just could not afford private school but for whatever reason they felt like the larger, traditional public school wasn’t best for their child.

What is the role of the commission?

The responsibility of the commission is to look at what are some of the broad issues that affect all charter schools and what can the state do to help alleviate some of those things. One of the other things we do is any charters who have been denied at their local district — anywhere in California — and they appeal to their county, if they continue to get denied by their local district and then by their county, they can appeal to the state. So, the CACCS is the first group that any charter group that has been denied would go to to kind of vet their charter to see if they can possibly be approved by the state of California. That’s a thing that I think is an awesome responsibility because as school districts grow more and more concerned about the growth of charters, we are going to see a lot more denials. And we are going to see a lot more denials not based on the legal reasons that you really can deny a charter. …  In addition, the commission will also be looking at some of the barriers that are in the way of some of the charters really being as high performing as they could be and one of them is around facilities because we don’t get facility support from anyone. Our facilities, we have to find ourselves, rehabilitate them ourselves, our lease payments or mortgage payments all come out of our ADA, our revenue from the students. So, we get no support from our school district, which is unlike traditional schools where they don’t have to spend any of their operating dollars on their facilities. They are housed in whatever building that they’re in but that doesn’t come out of the classroom. For us, the money that we get that’s suppose to be for instruction — anywhere from 12 to 16 percent of it — has to go toward paying for a facility. So, that’s a big impediment for a lot of charter operators and we have to do more around facilities, like getting public bond dollars to charter schools so that we can get facilities that don’t cost so much and take so much money out of the classroom. That’s a universal thing that the commission is going to have to work on extensively.

What is ICEF’s vision for the “education corridor”?

ICEF’s mission is really to transform South Los Angeles by creating a more educated community. That’s really our goal. We want students to be college ready and we want them to have the mindset that they can go to college because there are so many kids who are college material but they just don’t see that in themselves. … So, we’re expanding to 35 schools total. Once our plan is fully online, our hope is that we would each year produce 2,000 college graduates every year. [Right now,] 100 percent of our students graduate and 100 percent of them are accepted to college and the great majority of them to four-year colleges. We want the standard to remain that high even as we expand. We don’t want to expand to the point that we lose quality because of the quantity of growth. Success for us doesn’t just mean 35 schools, it means that all of schools are producing high school graduates and high school graduates that are prepared to not only get into school but get there and be able to compete.

How do you plan to influence charter school education under the commission?

The best way that I feel that any of us can influence public education is to have a commitment to quality and I think that’s what the commission’s biggest work is going to be around. … We can’t allow education to become over-politicized to the point where ‘Well, we just like this group so we want them to have a charter.’ As a charter community we’re going to have to say ‘we’re the accountability people, we are the excellence people.’ So, if there is a school that isn’t doing well, we have to say ‘you know what, that school should not be renewed?’ Because that is what we would like the public school system to do. If there is a school that’s been failing for years, somebody has to take action. I mean we cannot continue to look the other way. As a charter community we need to do the same thing. If there are failing charter schools, we have to be brave enough to find solutions to do something different.

How have charter schools been affected by the economic crisis?

It’s pretty tough. Most charters really operate on a lean budget as it is and all schools have taken a hit, I mean traditional public schools and charter schools. This economic crisis has been really tough on education. California is already in the bottom in terms of education funding. So, our organization, for example, had to cut $1 million out of a $30 million budget. The school district is talking about laying folks off. … Fortunately for our organization, we didn’t have to cut any teachers, most of the cuts that we had to make were either cutbacks in services, like maintenance or security, things that are very important but at least we didn’t disrupt the classroom. So, we agreed that we would cut non-classroom positions to try to preserve the classroom, but even still we had to cut about 20 employees and we had to cut back on needed services, like transportation and trips that the kids would have gone on. It hits us regardless even though it doesn’t hit the classroom directly.

How will the commission work with legislators to resolve funding issues?

That is really where the change needs to happen. We need to have the folks in the Senate and the Assembly make sure that they’re passing charter-friendly legislation because we’ve already been hit enough. We’ve been fortunate that the governor usually vetoes any hostile legislation that comes across his desk but we need more.

Coming from traditional public education, like LAUSD, to charter school public education, what differences and similarities have you seen?

The biggest difference that I would say between the two is that I feel like … [traditional public education is] so big that really getting to the heart of issues seems to be so difficult. … There are many faceted issues and it seems kind of hard to get at the heart of issues and make the appropriate changes because there are so many interest groups out there. Whereas, I feel like with the charter movement and the charter schools, that’s our concern and our passion as well. ‘What’s the heart of the issue? Why are kids not performing? What do we need to do to get students to perform at levels that will compete with some of these other countries?’ I feel like the charter movement and the charter schools are able to make decisions and put them into effect because we don’t have so many interests to feed. You can just do what we feel is best based on the data and the information that you have. So, you can be more creative with the teachers that you hire and more creative with your salary pay scale so that you are attracting more math and science teachers. You can just do that, you don’t have to go to any bargaining unit and say ‘can we do this?’ and then negotiate for 10 months. … Not that there aren’t people in our public school systems that really want to create change for the better, it’s just that they have so many interests to feed that it’s hard for people to really do what’s right.