Voters accepted Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's tax-hike measure, but it's pass time for lawmakers and education officials to think outside their conventional box and look at school models that deliver high performance at a lower cost. Luckily for California, such schools are already up and running and succeeding in the state.

Take, for example, Grimmway Academy, an elementary school in the rural town of Arvin in Kern County. The brainchild of Barbara Grimm-Marshall, co-owner of world-leading carrot producer Grimmway Enterprises, Grimmway Academy is a public charter school, independent of the local school district and not subject to many state and local restrictions.

During a recent tour of Grimmway Academy, Principal Jose Salas pointed out to me that the school – a beautiful facility in a quiet residential neighborhood – was constructed using pre-fabricated modular buildings rather than using traditional ground-up methods. Grimmway was built in just 69 days at a cost of $8 million. In contrast, according to Mr. Salas, a similar regular district school would take at least two years to build and would cost $24 million.

There are other cost savings as well. As a charter school, Grimmway has no bureaucratic central office to support. Thus, says Mr. Salas, even though Grimmway gets less funding than regular public schools, it can spend more dollars on its students than district schools can spend on theirs.

Perhaps the most exciting cost-reducing feature at Grimmway is its use of a "blended learning" teaching model, where students spend a majority of their day in regular classrooms and the rest in a computer-learning lab. For instance, third graders spend 100 minutes per day in the lab using a variety of interactive instructional software programs that teach and reinforce key concepts in math and reading. These programs allow Grimmway to staff the lab more flexibly and creatively than traditional classrooms.

One hundred students at a time use the learning lab during designated periods. The learning-lab staff consists of the lab director, who's a certificated teacher, and several lower-cost paraprofessionals. According to Mr. Salas, for every three teachers in the classroom, the lab needs just one paraprofessional plus the lab director. That ratio allows the school to save on personnel costs while at the same time improving student achievement.
Mr. Salas says that the computer programs in the learning lab allow the school to intervene with students performing poorly, push students who are on the margin, and challenge higher-performing students. Test scores prove that Grimmway's learning model is working.

On the 2012 state math exam, an amazing 74 percent of third graders scored at the targeted proficient level and only 8 percent scored below the basic level. Such test results are eye opening given that the school is 96 percent Hispanic, 87 percent low income and 64 percent non-fluent in English.

Teachers get added incentive to raise student achievement through the school's performance pay system, which bases teacher pay on lesson plans, test scores and other classroom performance indicators. Despite teacher-union opposition to performance pay, Mr. Salas says that he had 220 applicants for the eight non-union teaching positions at Grimmway, which shows that teachers want the freedom to do what works for students and be rewarded accordingly.

California has made it hard to start new charter schools and even more difficult to convert failing regular district schools into charters. Indeed, the recent Hollywood movie "Won't Back Down" is based on the true story of parents in Compton, California who faced red tape and vicious special-interest hostility when they tried to convert a failing district school into a charter. However, given the budgetary abyss facing state lawmakers and the success of cost-efficient charters like Grimmway Academy, the time has come for Sacramento to open up education to innovation and learning models that work.

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