A line forms Wednesday as speakers wait to voice their opposition to AB 1505 in Sacramento. (Photo: Lety Gomez via Twitter)

After a seven-hour hearing and in a room inundated with advocates in color-coordinated T-shirts, the California Senate Education Committee narrowly passed two bills this week that will more strictly regulate charters, including giving local districts greater leeway to deny charter applications.

The sharply contested bills split the committee 4-3, with state Sen. Steve Glazer, a Democrat, siding with the committee’s two Republicans in opposition. The committee, which covered 25 bills during its day-long session, took several earlier votes on the charter bills that deadlocked 2-2 and then 3-3 before all seven members were present.

The two bills tighten restrictions on charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently operated, and will now advance to the Senate Appropriations Committee before moving to the Senate floor for a vote.

AB 1505, the more controversial of the two, would grant local districts more discretion to approve or deny new charter petitions and narrow the existing appeals process for denied applications. The Education Committee vote came after compromise language put forth by Gov. Gavin Newsom was put into the proposed regulations. The Assembly’s version would virtually eliminate the appeals process and give sole authorizing power to local districts, which often see charter schools as competition.

The two witnesses who spoke in support of the bill at Wednesday’s hearing before the vote — Cindy Marten, superintendent of San Diego Unified School District, and Dana Dean, director of the California School Boards Association — argued that AB 1505 is more democratic by giving local districts more control over the schools that operate within their boundaries.

“The charter school laws are outdated. This bill strengthens local control by providing school districts with more tools to evaluate how new charter schools will impact all students in the district, including financial impact,” said Calif. Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell in a statement. O’Donnell chairs the Assembly Education Committee and, along with Assemblymember Rob Bonta, introduced the measure to the committee on Wednesday.

Appreciate the ongoing discussion on #AB1505 by @AsmPatODonnell & me. It's important we create the best possible solution for all CA students & allow strong local review of newly-proposed charter schools & their potential impact on a district’s programs & fiscal health. #CAleg pic.twitter.com/d88HIz04Pw

— Rob Bonta (@RobBontaCA) July 11, 2019

After the vote, the California Teachers Association, the powerful state teachers union that co-authored AB 1505 and made limiting charter expansion central to teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland earlier this year, took to Twitter to celebrate.

https://twitter.com/WeAreCTA/status/1149090621937684480

KIPP SoCal Public Schools, which operates 19 charter schools educating roughly 8,200 students in Los Angeles and San Diego, described the vote as legislators putting politics before students.

We are disappointed in today's 4-3 vote for anti-charter legislation AB1505. We hope that @DrPanMD @ilike_mike @SenatorLeyva @SenMariaEDurazo will focus on real solutions to fix public education in the future. Thank you @ScottWilkCA @Steve_Glazer @L2ChangCA #KidsNotPolitics

— KIPP SoCal Public Schools (@KIPPSoCal) July 10, 2019

Opponents of the bill, mostly charter school advocates and families, also spoke at Wednesday’s hearing. Carlos Marquez, representing the California Charter Schools Association, and Caitlin O’Halloran, representing the Charter Schools Development Center, argued AB 1505 could threaten the growth of high-performing charter schools. Both expressed caution at the bill’s allowance for districts to consider the financial impact charter schools would have on their budgets. This is despite a new amendment to the legislation that would restrict financial considerations only to districts already under economic strain.

The bill would also allow districts to deny charter petitions if they too closely resemble existing school programs. That’s a problem for charter advocates who argue that existing programs that are failing students should be subject to competition from other charters.

“We find it unacceptable that AB 1505 grants districts broad discretion to deny new charters on the basis of running a similar program with no regard of whether the program is failing kids,” Marquez said at the hearing.

On Thursday, Myrna Castrejón, president of the California Charter Schools Association released a statement, responding to the vote.

“We all agree that many of California’s students are not being well-served in our public schools today,” she said. “Let’s not sacrifice the needs of our most vulnerable students who are excelling in charter schools.”

• Read more: Commentary: When success is not enough — charter schools delivering better outcomes for low-income students still target of progressive ire

The version of AB 1505 that passed the Senate Education Committee has some notable differences from the legislation that passed the Assembly. Last week, representatives from Newsom’s office introduced several amendments to the bill that softened some of its most restrictive elements.

While earlier versions of AB 1505 sought to eliminate the existing appeals process for denied charter petitions, the current version now allows an appeal to the county Board of Education and also to the state Board of Education — though only if the state determines other authorizers abused their discretion.

Some of the new amendments in AB 1505 also come from a report by the state’s charter task force that Newsom convened, including extending the timeline by which districts need to approve charter petitions from 60 days to 90 days. Some measures, including ones allowing a district to consider whether a charter petition would be redundant, and one imposing a one-year moratorium on virtual charters, also come from the task force’s report, although they did not receive unanimous support from its members.

• Read more: With new report from state task force, pressure mounts on Gov. Newsom to break silence on pending legislation that would restrict charter schools
  

The new version of the bill includes criteria for when districts can deny renewal applications for existing charter schools as well. Unlike traditional public schools, charters in California must seek renewal status every few years. The current version of AB 1505 would prevent districts from denying a renewal application if the charter program made it to the highest two levels of state academic indicators. On the other hand, denial of a renewal application must be weighed for charter programs that measure in the lowest two levels of state academic indicators.

AB 1507 would close a loophole in the state’s current charter policy that allows some districts to boost their budgets by approving charter schools outside their boundaries. While considered less controversial than AB 1505, AB 1507 also saw long lines of advocates expressing support or opposition to the measure. At just over 1,300 schools, California has the most charter schools and charter school students of any state in the country.

• Read more: Lawmakers are trying to end a weird quirk of California’s charter school sector. Here’s why the state is so unusual

While the passage of the bills in the Senate Education Committee represents a win for its supporters, both sides acknowledged continued discussion is needed to reach a universally supported deal. More revisions to the legislation are expected before the final vote this fall. The state legislative session ends in September.

Marquez outlined several points within the bill that are still unacceptable to the California Charter Schools Association, including the limited appeals process, and criteria for charter schools applying for renewal. But, he noted at the hearing, “the window of opportunity to seek greater protections for our families and the schools they so cherish has not closed and we will continue to work with the administration, author, and proponents over the coming weeks to resolve outstanding issues.”

O’Donnell echoed that sentiment, saying in a statement, “I look forward to continuing conversations with the Governor’s office and others on the passage of this bill.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Voices Academies, a network of high-performing dual-language immersion charter schools, serves about 1,100 students across three elementary campuses and one K-8 campus. (Photo: Facebook)

“Video games are bad for you; they’re distracting,” says one kid. “They’re too violent,” says another. It’s jarring to hear middle-schoolers talk down on-screen entertainment, but the boys in this Bay Area classroom are doing their level best — and in Spanish, no less.

To be sure, they’re practicing taking positions and marshaling evidence as part of a unit on persuasive essay writing. “Are you guys serious about this?” I ask. “Oh yes, sir, we’re good kids,” says one — and he winks.

Sixth-grade eye twinkles aside, he’s right. English learner students here at Voices College-Bound Language Academies significantly outperform their peers across the state in reading and math. The same is true for the dual-language immersion school’s Hispanic students and students from low-income families. Whether or not those guys still play FIFA 20 on the sly, it’s clear that Voices runs an excellent network of schools.

As charter schools, Voices use their public funding — and flexibility on staffing, curricula and scheduling — to provide academic instruction in Spanish and English. This helps them tailor their school model for their students, nearly three-quarters of whom come from low-income families. In addition, 92 percent are Hispanic and 42 percent are classified as English learners.

But success hasn’t protected charter schools like Voices from a growing wave of criticism. Ask founder Frances Teso about the future, and she says, “You’re catching me in this place where it’s pretty depressing and pretty pessimistic, at least from my sort of view … maybe I need to retire.”

Teso’s attitude is understandable. After years of relatively uncomplicated bipartisan support, charters like Voices are under fire in national progressive discourse. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign recently released a long list of education ideas, but his proposals to ban (relatively rare) for-profit charter schools and cut off federal grants supporting charter school growth attracted by far the most attention. Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently faced a cascade of criticism for the sin of simply being introduced at an event by a teacher who once worked for a charter school.

These national dynamics are feeding — and feeding on — similar political trends in California. New governor Gavin Newsom has moved quickly to shift regulations governing charters, and state legislators are exploring ways to slow, or cap, the growth of charter schools in the state. For the moment, Teso says that Voices’s plans to expand to serve more of “the kids who need us the most” have largely been shelved. At present, the school serves just over 1,100 students across three elementary campuses and one K-8 campus.

• Read more: Controversial bill that would make local districts sole authorizers of charter schools moves to a public hearing in the California Senate

Schools like Voices weren’t always so controversial on the left. For years, many progressives saw charters as a means of giving historically underserved families options outside of the neighborhood schools they could afford to purchase through the real estate market. They also worked to make that possibility real. Charter school performance varies across the country, but research suggests they tend to do best in places defined by progressive politics — the District of Columbia, Boston and Newark, for example — where these schools face strong oversight and accountability for student outcomes.

To that end, Teso launched the first Voices school in the same school district that she attended as a student — and where she worked as a teacher — because she was frustrated that students like her were not being served well. She’d arrived in college feeling betrayed. “I was so unprepared, I was not set up for success, I had moments of resentment,” she says. “Why wasn’t I prepared, why was I tricked? Why was I told that I was a good student and here I am in remedial classes and struggling?”

As an English language learner from a low-income family, Teso had a slim margin for error. Her mother was a teenager who’d dropped out of high school, and her father was a Mexican immigrant who’d left school in third grade. “We checked all the boxes,” she says. “I went into kindergarten, I spoke only Spanish.”

Teso’s narrative, her schools, her life’s work — they’re suddenly out of fashion with progressives. Critics argue that, unlike charter schools, district schools have little control over which students enroll at their campuses; districts simply receive the students who happen to live nearby.

This critique is concerning, but charters are the wrong target. No single district school is required to serve all students in its community; unlike charters, district schools’ enrollments are usually filtered by race and/or socioeconomic class through the real estate market. Traditional public schools regularly engage in additional efforts to curate their student bodies. They frequently establish academic “tracking” systems and/or launch selective school programs that sort struggling students from their peers. These initiatives often exacerbate existing patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation.

What’s going on? Teacher strikes in Oakland, Los Angeles and Sacramento focused attention on charters in California. Teachers union leaders have argued that charter schools, which are generally not unionized, use education funding that would otherwise go to (generally unionized) district schools.

And yet, this zero-sum framing isn’t just empirically suspect. It also brings up the most important question: Why do families leave district schools in the first place? Juan Carlos Villaseñor, principal at Voices’ Morgan Hill campus, says that Voices appeals to different families for different reasons: Many first-generation immigrants send their children because the Spanish-language instruction makes it easier for them to connect with the school and community. Many second- or third-generation immigrant parents who lost their Spanish during California’s two decades as an English-only state see the school as a way to give their children access to Spanish language and Hispanic culture.

I asked a few Spanish-speaking parents at Voices about this. They agreed to speak with me, but they asked me not to use their full names, after referencing the present state of immigration politics. Luis says, in Spanish, that he sends his children to Voices because they’ll have more opportunities: “[they’ll have] more jobs, better careers, more money. But it’s also the culture, the connections to our culture.” Voices understands children better than other schools, he says. “They treat them like they’re important, and they also expect more of them.”

Diana and Natalí each have a first-grader at Voices. Diana says, in Spanish, that she chose it “because it was our only bilingual option here.” Natalí jumps in: “Oh, and the schedule! They are here a few hours more each day, and it helps them progress.” Charter parents across the country frequently make similar arguments — they see their children’s schools as opportunities, as lifelines.

“These big debates, charter versus non-charter, I sometimes lose track,” says Villaseñor. “I became an educator because I like being around kids and seeing people learn.” Working at Voices, he said, was an “opportunity to keep learning and keep growing. If something doesn’t work, we change it. That’s the mentality in this school. Our communities deserve that.”

Various campaigns now see policies targeting charter schools as a political opportunity. But it’s also clear that Democratic criticism of charters splits along racial lines — majorities of Democrats of color support them. A party that increasingly relies upon a diverse base of voters should be careful about catering to white Democrats who oppose charters. After all, what could be more progressive than successful, hardworking schools led by educators of color and organized around affirming students’ language and cultures?

Meanwhile: Will Teso retire? She pauses, then says she plans to continue doing the same work for students while trying to “stay under the radar.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

The state capitol building in Sacramento. (Photo: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

California legislators are considering a change to education law that would address a peculiar and controversial feature of the state’s charter school sector. The proposed fix is dredging up long-standing issues around how the state permits and oversees schools of choice.

At present, California school districts have the option to authorize charter schools that don’t fall within their geographic boundaries — in fact, the schools sometimes operate inside other districts that had previously thwarted attempts to form a charter. AB 1507, a bill that has been approved in the state Assembly and is now being considered by the state Senate, would forbid that practice, partially as a response to angered local authorities who have complained of charter schools opening within their boundaries that they expressly opposed.

The proposal is one of two aimed at reforming California’s charters, which, at just over 1,300 schools, make up the largest statewide sector in the country. AB 1505, the more sweeping and controversial of the bills, would grant more leeway to districts in deciding whether to approve or deny charter applications; two others, which would have capped the total number of charters across the state and imposed a two-year moratorium on new openings, were withdrawn earlier in this legislative session but could be up for reconsideration next year.

• Read more:

Controversial bill that would make local districts sole authorizers of charter schools moves to a public hearing in the California Senate

Two of the strongest anti-charter bills fail in the California legislature, but two others move ahead as both sides claim victory

AB 1507 is the more targeted of the provisions, addressing a practice that has proven divisive in the past few years. Charter critics say that allowing school districts to authorize schools far from their normal zone of oversight is a recipe for abuse and profiteering. Even skeptics of the bill agree that some bad actors are taking advantage of a loophole in the state’s charter school law, one of the nation’s oldest.

“Certainly newer charter laws have very different authorizing structures,” said Colin Miller, a senior adviser at the California Charter Schools Association. “It’s a section of law that really wasn’t that thought-out, I think, when we initially enacted the Charter Schools Act [in 1992].”

AB 1507 isn’t the first attempt on the part of California lawmakers to address the practice referred to as “remote authorizing.” In both 2014 and 2016, the legislature passed bills to tighten restrictions on where charter schools could be authorized. In both instances, then-Gov. Jerry Brown — an avowed charter school ally who founded several in Oakland — vetoed the legislation.

All the while, concerns grew that some districts were approving charter schools nowhere near their own boundaries, solely to bring in money.

The most publicized case was that of Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District, a tiny district in northern Los Angeles County that began authorizing new charters outside its borders in 2013. Its first approval was the Albert Einstein Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences, a charter whose application had been rejected by multiple other districts. Albert Einstein opened that fall 20 miles away — in Newhall School District, which had previously rejected its application. Within a few years, Acton-Agua Dulce had increased its enrollment by thousands of students and reaped millions of dollars in authorizing fees from the state.

That led to lawsuits, as well as a 2017 audit of remote authorizing, which found that the phenomenon “allowed districts to increase their enrollments and revenue without being democratically accountable to the communities that are hosting the charter schools that they authorize.” Most Albert Einstein charters in California have since closed, including those authorized through Acton-Agua Dulce Unified, after struggling with enrollment and financial difficulties.

John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at UCLA, echoed the audit’s concerns. He said he supports AB 1507 as a means of bringing charter expansion back in line with the intent of California’s original charter school law.

“It aims to advance what seems to be a fairly commonsense, small-d democratic proposition: that the decisions relative to school governance and programs should be made by elected representatives of the community in which those programs are being operated,” he said. “That’s extremely commonsense, but since we’ve had a structure that has stretched beyond that, I think it’s a useful corrective.”

The problem, many believe, grew from the state’s unusual approach to charter school authorizing.

For background: Each charter school answers to a charter authorizer, which approves its application, supervises its performance and finances, and decides whether to reapprove the school’s charter at the end of a set length of time. Different states maintain varying standards for authorizing and designate separate institutions as eligible to act as authorizers, but experts tend to agree that responsible authorizers adhere to scrupulous oversight practices around contracts, staffing and financial auditing.

California’s charter laws set the state apart from many other states, which restrict charter authorizing to either a single statewide entity (such as the state board of education) or other trusted institutions (often universities). Instead, every school district in the state is eligible to authorize charter schools, resulting in a remarkably decentralized authorizing sector: Each charter authorizer in California presides over an average of 3.5 schools, just half the national average.

Quantity hasn’t necessarily translated to quality. Many school districts — particularly small ones short of both staff and funding — have a hard enough time overseeing the traditional public schools under their purview, let alone new charters. In a 2018 paper, Harvard University education professor Martin West called for changes to the state charter law that would boost authorizers’ capacity and make them more accountable for the performance of charters under their oversight.

In an email, West said that AB 1507 could play a “constructive” role in improving the situation in California.

“Barring districts from authorizing charters outside of their boundaries could be constructive. It is obviously more challenging for an authorizer to provide effective oversight remotely, and the sheer number of districts in the state increases the risk that one will embrace authorizing as a money grab without any interest in ensuring the growth of high-quality options for students.”

But others aren’t so sure. Veronica Brooks-Uy, director of policy at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said that “substantial changes” were necessary to correct California’s authorizing culture. (The organization published a 2016 report condemning “inconsistent and ineffective” practices.) But she also warned that AB 1507 only remedies one aspect of a complex problem.

She wrote in an email that even though AB 1507 “attempts to address the bad incentives for smaller districts to authorize schools, without addressing the others simultaneously, it is likely to create negative, unintended consequences for existing good charter schools. This includes many charters that would face closure when they went up for renewal, not because they aren’t serving children well but because their new local district authorizer may not want to authorize at all.”

The CCSA’s Miller agreed that California’s charter authorizing issues were so “systemic” that dealing exclusively with remote authorizing could prove shortsighted.

“Some of these schools have operated at or near where they intended to be,” he said. “And over time they have ended up across the street, in the perfect facility, which is technically in another district. In those situations, there’s really no question about the quality of the schools or the ability of that district to do the oversight — it really is a matter of the geographic line where the district is relative to where the charter school can get a facility. And in some of those cases, those schools have been operating for 15, 20 years.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Parents advocating against AB 1505 and the other bills it was packaged with await the state Assembly’s public hearing on April 10. (Photo: Speak Up)

A controversial charter school regulation moving through the California legislature will take its next step Wednesday when the state Senate Education Committee holds a public hearing that’s expected to draw crowds of supporters and opponents of the state’s large charter school sector.

Assembly Bill 1505 would grant local districts sole authority to approve or deny petitions for charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently operated and often seen as competition by local school districts. Under the current system, both the county and state boards of education can approve petitions denied by districts on appeal. The state Assembly narrowly passed AB 1505 last month, although with a stipulation that a final version of the bill will retain some kind of appeals process extending beyond districts.

• Read more: Charter school showdown in Sacramento: Assembly moves forward with package of powerful regulations as proponents and teachers unions clash

The legislation began this spring as part of a package of bills rewriting state charter policy. The state Assembly ultimately only passed two. The other item, Assembly Bill 1507, closed a loophole some districts were using to boost their budgets by approving charter schools outside of their boundaries. The Senate Education Committee is considering both bills but Wednesday’s hearing will only cover AB 1505.

“I’m proud to co-author AB 1505, which will finally allow our local school boards to factor the financial, academic, and facilities impacts that charter schools will have on their districts,” state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, said last week. “Our locally elected boards are in the best position to determine whether a proposed charter school would negatively impact their district.”

In April, the state Assembly held its own public hearing on the bill amid a throng of advocates at the capital. Three witnesses for each side gave extended statements.

• Read more: Lawmakers are trying to end a weird quirk of California’s charter school sector. Here’s why the state is so unusual

The speakers in favor of AB 1505 comprised leaders from both the Oakland and San Diego Unified school districts, as well as a traditional public school advocate from the San Bernardino County District. All described their frustration when charter petitions their districts denied were approved by the county or state on appeal. In these cases, enrollment at traditional public schools fell as students moved to charters.

“The financial oversight and management challenges are complex and need to be supported by state law in order to be better addressed and best addressed locally,” said Oakland Unified board President Aimee Eng. At 27 percent, Oakland has the highest ratio of charter school students of any district in the state. Since the 2006-07 school year, nine charter schools in Eng’s district have opened after appealing for approval from the county.

The witnesses in opposition to the bill featured the CEO of a charter school network, a representative for the Sacramento County Board of Education, and Lety Gomez, a founding parent of a charter school in her East San Jose neighborhood. She voiced the concern among many critics of AB 1505 that the legislation would make it too easy for districts to close high-performing charter schools.

“This bill is trying to take away [from] communities of color the right to school choice and equal opportunity. I cannot afford private school for my daughter. And with the current cost of living, I cannot afford to move in order to find the school that best supports her,” she said.

That tension has come to a head across the state. In addition to restricting the appeals process for denied charter school applicants, AB 1505 also allows districts to consider the financial impact of charter schools on their budgets when making the decision. District school officials argue that charter schools siphon away badly needed funding, while charter proponents say their schools are being scapegoated for the fiscal mismanagement of district schools.

In a statement from February, when AB 1505 and its companion bills were first introduced, California Teachers Association President Eric Heins called for “significant changes in the decades-old laws governing charter schools that have allowed corporate charter schools to divert millions away from our neighborhood public schools.”

Pro-charter forces are worried the bill would essentially cut off charter school growth in the state. California has just over 1,300 charter schools, more than any other state in the country. Myrna Castrejon, president of the California Charter Schools Association, said in May that the bill would lead to “closing down the charter schools that are helping [vulnerable communities] learn and thrive.”

Should the Senate pass AB 1505, the measure would go to Gov. Gavin Newsom for approval. In June, representatives from two prominent civil rights groups, the National Action Network and the National Urban League, met with members of Newsom’s staff. Both oppose AB 1505 and argue it would harm California’s students of color, who tend to be among the lowest-performing in the state.

Newsom has so far been reticent to take a strong position on charter regulations but during his campaign he received the support of California teachers unions. Charter schools are typically not unionized and curbing their growth was at the heart of teacher strikes this year in Los Angeles and Oakland.

Adding to the complexity is a report released last month from the California Charter Task Force. Newsom assembled the group and charged it with studying the impact of charter schools on state education funding. The unanimous recommendations the task force published countered the goals of AB 1505 by stating “no changes were recommended to the [charter schools] appeals process.” But the report also included several measures that did not reach unanimous support advocating big changes to the charter appeals process directly in line with the bill.

• Read more: With new report from California task force, pressure mounts on Gov. Newsom to break silence on state legislation that would restrict charter schools

At the state Assembly hearing in April, AB 1505’s author, Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, said that the results of the task force would likely be reflected in the bill. But in advance of the Senate vote, it isn’t yet clear to what extent that will be true. The Senate Education Committee will decide whether to advance the bill to the full voting body on the same day as the hearing. The current legislative session ends in September.

California’s years-long debate over school choice has taken a decisive turn over the first few months of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tenure — and the shift has come at the expense of charter schools.

In February, Newsom convened a panel of experts to investigate whether charters siphon funding from school districts. The next month, he signed a law — repeatedly vetoed by the previous governor — establishing greater transparency requirements for the schools and their leaders. All the while, attention-grabbing teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland put the issue of charter growth at the top of the state’s education agenda, alongside teacher pay and school funding.

Now bills are moving through the state legislature that could dramatically curtail the charter sector’s growth. The most contentious of the package, Assembly Bill 1505, which would grant local districts greater leeway to reject petitions for new charter schools, has passed the state Assembly and now faces consideration in the state Senate. Others, including a measure to cap the total number of charters in the state, have lost momentum.

In the most recent development, the task force convened by Newsom released a report Friday unanimously recommending that districts be given leeway to factor in “saturation” and demand when considering new charter schools. Newsom and the legislature will now decide whether to implement the panel’s report, which includes majority recommendations to reimburse districts for one year of state tuition loss when a student transfers to a charter school and to strip prospective charters of the right to a second appeal to the state board of education.

In a statement, Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, said the report contained “elements that are deeply concerning and require more work ahead.”

Taken together, education observers have seen the last five months as signs that California’s long period of virtually unchecked charter expansion may be ending. Foes of the privately operated public schools, most notably the state’s teachers unions, would relish the possibility.

But for the students who gain the most from charters, a slowdown or reversal of the sector’s recent growth might not be cause for celebration. Those students, studies show, are disproportionately black, Latino, and low-income children from the state’s biggest cities; ironically, they’re also represented by some of the sector’s most prominent critics — including Newsom himself, formerly the mayor of San Francisco.

The state of California’s public charter schools

To understand how controversial charters are in California, you have to get a sense of just how prominent a feature they are in the state’s education landscape.

According to state data, over 650,000 kids attend charter schools in California, or roughly 10.5 percent of all pupils in the state. Those numbers are huge both in absolute and relative terms: It is, by far, the largest statewide charter enrollment in the country, larger than the total populations of Wyoming or Vermont; it’s also proportionately larger than the average statewide charter enrollment across the U.S., which is about 6 percent.

The sector has also reached that impressive scope rather quickly, gaining over 100,000 new students in just the last five years. That head-snapping pace of expansion came even as California’s total K-12 enrollment saw persistent declines.

In other words: A shrinking pool of enrollees, and the state funding that goes along with them, has put downward pressure on school district budgets at the same time that charters emerged as new competition. In an added wrinkle, California law actually prevents school districts (which authorize the vast majority of charter schools in the state) from rejecting new charter petitions on the basis that they pose a threat to local finances (AB 1505 would revoke that prohibition).

The growing clash for kids and dollars explains why the political battle around the sector has gotten so hot — and expensive.

The last few election cycles have seen record spending from both teachers unions, which adamantly oppose further charter expansion, and the deep-pocketed philanthropists who tend to support it. The money wars erupted again in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary, which pitted charter-friendly former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa against then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who won the endorsement of the California Teachers Association. Newsom ultimately raised an unheard-of $58 million on his way to earning his party’s nomination, including $1.2 million in donations from the CTA; once that race was decided, the education-related spending migrated to the race for state superintendent — a largely ceremonial job with little statutory power over charter schools.

In that election as well, the union-backed candidate, Tony Thurmond, prevailed over his more reform-oriented opponent. Thurmond, who said during the campaign that he wanted a “pause” on new charter openings, chairs the commission that released Friday’s report on the impact of charter competition on traditional public schools.

So how good are they?

The increasing focus on charters’ financial effects inevitably leads to the question of their academic effects. But, much the same as charter schools throughout the country, California’s sector has yielded mixed results.

“The charter sector in California looks like a microcosm of the charter sector nationally,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard. “That’s not too surprising, since California charter schools make up a non-trivial segment of the national charter data.”

Indeed, a comprehensive 2014 study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attended California charters performed a bit better in reading, and a bit worse in math, than their peers attending traditional public schools. That nuanced picture dovetails with charter performance nationally, which is roughly as good, on average, as the public schools run by local school districts.

But tucked beneath the topline results, the data show that charters perform better for the state’s least advantaged citizens. Specifically, CREDO found that poor black students at charters gained an average of 36 extra days of learning in literacy, and 43 extra days of learning in math, than those in traditional public schools; poor Latino students gained 22 extra days of literacy and 29 extra days of math. In general, charter schools in urban areas, where many of those students are clustered, were measured as much stronger than those in suburban and rural areas.

Credit: Center for Research on Education Outcomes

Those findings were echoed in CREDO’s 2014 study of Los Angeles charters, released the same year, which found even stronger results for minority students than were measured statewide. In yet another paper, this one released the next year and directed at 41 different urban areas, the research group found that a majority of charter schools in the Bay Area (encompassing the large districts of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose) outperformed traditional public schools in both reading and math.

In a 2018 research brief intended as an update on previous research, CREDO Director Macke Raymond cast the charter results for traditionally underperforming student groups as evidence that academic improvement can be achieved in every educational setting. In an interview with, she did observe that enough time has passed since the original studies that “[she couldn’t] really tell whether the trends are holding fast or whether they’re changing.”

Still, the existing research base strongly suggests that the primary beneficiaries of charter schools in California are historically disadvantaged populations in big cities like Los Angeles and Oakland. But nowhere have the calls for curbing charter growth been louder than in those very cities, where striking teachers demanded official support for a statewide charter moratorium as a condition of returning to work.

Preston Green, a professor of education at the University of Connecticut, has warned that the lack of tighter regulations has complicated the financial state of small districts, potentially leading to a bifurcated school system resembling that of the Jim Crow South. While he said he understands the appeal of charters as an option for black and Latino families, he also said that he supported a temporary moratorium on new charters.

“We really need to think systematically about how to permit charter schools to exist in a way that won’t deleteriously impact school districts,” he said. “So understand that when I’m calling for a moratorium, I’m not calling for a backdoor closure but, rather, really thinking deliberately about how they can exist and be situated in a way that their inefficiencies are lessened.”

Harvard’s West, who examined California’s charter authorizing practices in a paper last year, found that local districts often struggle to act as truly capable authorizers for charter schools — a deficiency made worse by the meager funding provided by the state to act in that role. But while greater resources and oversight might improve the sector’s performance, he said that such proposals have been absent from the debate raging in Sacramento.

“That’s a different set of issues … animating the debate in California at the moment. It seems to me that in California, you’re seeing a much more concerted attempt to prevent charter expansion, at least in districts that don’t welcome it, by empowering districts to deny new charter petitions. More than anything else, that’s what’s going on here.”

Raymond, while lamenting that the data on California’s charter sector isn’t more current, called for more reliance on data during the policy-making progress.

“I’ve spent 25 years studying what happens when monopolies face competition — and I’m on the record here — I’ve never seen any other industry that allows the monopolist to determine the fate of the new entrant.”

Black students are 50 percent more likely to be assigned to a black teacher in a charter than in a traditional school. (Source: Fordham Institute)

This article is from The 74’s ongoing ‘Big Picture’ series, bringing American education into sharper focus through new research and data. Go Deeper: See the full series.

Over the past few years, education researchers have coalesced around a striking, if somewhat unpalatable, observation: Kids learn more from teachers of their own race.

A decade of studies from Tennessee, Florida, and North Carolina has shown that K-12 students perform better academically if they’ve been assigned to a same-race teacher. Though the effects have been observed in white students, they are especially pronounced in their black classmates, who are less likely to drop out of school and more likely to complete a college entrance exam if they are exposed to even one black instructor in elementary school. Black educators also issue fewer suspensions to black students, and more referrals to gifted education classes, than white educators.

A study released today from the conservative Fordham Institute adds a notable new facet to the existing research, finding that black students are much more likely to encounter a same-race teacher in a charter school than a traditional public school. And the study’s author, American University Professor Seth Gershenson, says that the greater likelihood of racial matching might help explain charters’ success with minority students.

The study examined all North Carolina public school students between grades three and five, in both district and charter schools, between the 2006-07 and 2012-13 school years. In total, it gathered 1.8 million observations of students, including their race and student year, their teacher’s race, and their score on end-of-year assessments in both math and English.

Those data indicate that, while charter schools enroll a similar percentage of black students as traditional public schools, they employ more black teachers — about 14 percent of their teaching workforce, as opposed to roughly 10 percent of those in district schools. Partly as a result of the greater abundance of black faculty, black students are 50 percent more likely to be assigned to a black teacher in a charter than they are at a traditional public school.

(Source: Fordham Institute)

As in previous studies, students in both charters and district schools received a measurable academic benefit from being assigned to a same-race teacher; on average, the effect size was about the equivalent of eliminating 10 teacher absences over the course of one school year. But the boost in test scores for racially matched students was about twice as large for charter students as for traditional public school students.

Though the race-matching impact was nearly doubled for charter students, the difference was not deemed statistically significant, in part because the number of charter students featured in the study was relatively low (just 30,000 observations were made over seven academic years, versus over 1 million such observations for district schools). But in an interview with The 74, Gershenson said that he believed the distinction would have been preserved over a larger sample size.

“Twice as big of an effect is still twice as big of an effect, and that’s a big deal,” he said. “If we had as many charter schools as we did traditional public schools, I suspect that we would have more precisely estimated that difference.”

National research has indicated that teacher demographics at charter schools tend to be more heterogeneous than those in traditional public schools. A longitudinal report released earlier this year by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 29 percent of charter teachers were black, Hispanic, or Asian, compared with 19 percent of those in district schools.

Gershenson said that the higher rates of teacher diversity is a largely unremarked-on feature of charter schools, and one that might go a long way to explaining their relative success with students of color. Though practices differ by jurisdiction, charters are generally allowed to hire employees without conventional teacher certifications; the requirement to attain a teaching degree, which can come at substantial cost, has been cited as a hurdle to achieving a more representative teacher workforce.

“This is an important finding in its own,” he said. “And I don’t think the research world or the charter policy world pay enough attention to this point, precisely because we don’t have a great idea of what makes effective charters effective. You can view racial representation among teachers as a measure of teacher quality, and that’s a dimension of teacher quality that charters have an advantage in.”

Disclosure: Kevin Mahnken was an editorial associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute from 2014 to 2016.

Students at a Camino Nuevo school. (Source: Camino Nuevo)

California lawmakers have spent the past several weeks debating laws that would seriously hurt charter schools. While two of the bills have been shelved, others are moving forward that would be disastrous for students like me.

What makes this situation especially disturbing is that voices like mine have not been heard.

I’m a public high school charter school student. I attend Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in Los Angeles. I came to the United States from El Salvador just three years ago, and today, I’m student body president. After I graduate this spring, I’ll be heading to college, the first person in my family to do so. I’ll be going to the University of California, Davis, where I will study biochemistry. My goal is to become a doctor and help my community, and I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without attending a great school that happens to be a charter.

I want my state representatives to listen to me and students like me because we know firsthand how much public charters have helped us achieve.

In El Salvador, I worked hard at school and got good grades because I wanted to be a professional. I carried the dream with me to America, but when I arrived, I realized there were a lot of things that could keep my dream from becoming a reality. I was undocumented. My family didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t know the language. I couldn’t have even a casual conversation with someone in English.

I was very fortunate that I had the chance to attend a school that had a lot of experience teaching English learners like me; almost three-quarters of Camino Real students speak a language other than English when they start. In fact, because it is a charter, my school has always offered bilingual education even when it was banned in other California public schools.

As a charter, my school does not have to deal with the usual red tape and has been able to create programs and a curriculum that fit the needs of students like me. It is also smaller. That has made it easier for me get personal attention and support from my teachers.

These teachers have been critical to my success.

When I had trouble in calculus, my math teacher, Takashi Matsumoto, would sit with me after school and tutor me. If I didn’t understand one explanation, he would try another. If I couldn’t solve one type of problem, he would give me another to try. He had the patience to work with me until I got it. Thanks to his commitment to me, I passed AP calculus.

My guidance counselor, Vanessa Juarez, took extra time to guide me through the process of applying to college and securing financial aid. She would stay in the library long after the end of the school day, helping me research schools and giving me feedback as my essays took shape.

My language lab teacher, Sarai Vasquez, saw me struggling to learn English and knew what I was going through because she came from a similar background. She’s bilingual. She was the first person in her family to go to college, and she knew what it meant to have to work extra hard to succeed in school. She took me under her wing and never gave up on me and never let me give up on myself.

With the support of these and other dedicated teachers, I not only learned English, I got good grades. I got involved in many extracurricular activities and landed a prestigious internship at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Most of all, I developed the confidence to run in and win the election for student body president.

In every public charter school across California, there are kids like me. Kids who don’t have papers; kids who come from poor families; kids who have been given up on because of the color of their skin. In many ways, traditional public schools have given up on these kids.

Public charters haven’t.

Instead, students like me have found a welcoming, supportive environment at charter schools, and we have succeeded. Sure, there are students who attend traditional schools who get attention and support as well, but my charter school was the right fit for me and my peers. At my school, 70 percent of my fellow seniors were accepted to four-year colleges. Among them are a number of kids who, like me, only recently came to this country.

We never talked about Camino Nuevo as a charter — it was simply a great school. Our state representatives shouldn’t be trying to limit the number of great schools. They should be doing everything possible to create more of them. When it comes to deciding the future of public charter schools in California, it’s time to listen to students who go to them.

Please, hear us loud and clear. We’re proof that charter schools work. Don’t close them for the sake of politics. Learn from them. Charters have a lot of great lessons that can help us improve all public schools. So let’s work together and focus on what’s important: making sure every kid in California can go to a great school and achieve their dreams.

Roberto Delgado is a high school senior at Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in Los Angeles.

Protesters — many affiliated with the California Teachers Association — gather on May 22 in Sacramento to advocate for tougher regulations on California charter schools. (Source: Maripaz Berlin)

What started as a package of four bills tamping down on charter schools in California quickly became two this week, as legislation in the Assembly and the Senate that looked to cap the schools in one chamber and place a moratorium on their future growth in the other were both withdrawn.

The demise of Assembly Bill 1506 and Senate Bill 756 before a vote was taken on either was seen as a decisive victory by charter supporters.

“Charter public school families’ voices were heard loud and clear by Sacramento politicians: We cannot and will not accept legislation that limits access to great public schools,” Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, said in a statement released Thursday.

“Today, the collective power of charter school leaders, teachers, families and students defeated this extreme legislation and with their voices, we’ll continue to do all we can to defend great public schools throughout California,” she continued.

But proponents of the bills, including California NAACP education chair Julian Vasquez Heilig, remain focused on the prospects of the surviving legislation, seeing this week’s events as a step in a larger process. Those two remaining bills are:

● AB 1505 – The bill gives local school districts sole authority to approve new charter schools and to consider how new schools would impact the district’s budget in the approval process. Since new charter schools typically attract students – and their per pupil funding – away from traditional public schools, many expect that this measure would make it much more difficult for new charter schools to be approved. AB 1505 passed May 22 and will now go to the state Senate.

● AB 1507 – This bill closes a loophole in state law that has let some districts boost their budgets by approving charter schools outside their boundaries. AB 1507 would require all charter schools approved by a district to be located within it. It passed on May 13 in the state Assembly and is also now headed to the Senate.

“The commonsense transparency and accountability in [AB] 1505 has a really good shot in the Senate. I don’t think a plausible outcome of this legislative session is that California will do nothing,” said Heilig, a professor of education leadership at California State University Sacramento.

Charter school showdown in Sacramento: Assembly moves forward with package of powerful regulations as proponents and teachers unions clash

On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Elena Durazo sidelined the Senate moratorium bill, which she authored. The bill would have placed a two-year halt on new charter schools in the state unless the Senate passed further regulations. The measure could return for consideration next January, according to Senate rules.

The next day, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty opted to hold his bill on the last day it was eligible for a vote in the chamber. AB 1506 would have mandated a statewide cap on charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, to be determined at the end of the year.

Just a week earlier, hundreds of protesters — many affiliated with the California Teachers Association — marched through Sacramento demanding state representatives pass the bills, among other legislation. The teachers union sees charter schools as draining traditional district schools of badly needed funding and argues that charters, which are generally not unionized and have grown rapidly in California, require stricter regulation.

The union protest at one point intersected with a smaller, opposing demonstration by black parents that was organized by the California Charter Schools Association. The association says black students are the lowest-performing student subgroup in California after special education students and black and brown families, whose neighborhood schools are failing, deserve high-quality options.

The support for the moratorium by the California NAACP echoes the position of the national body, which called for a moratorium on charter schools in 2016. Three local branches of the California NAACP broke from that position in May, saying that charter schools produced some of the strongest academic outcomes for black students in the state.

3 California NAACP chapters break with state and national leaders, calling for charter moratorium to be overturned

While the bills are dead for now, both Durazo and McCarty suggested they could return to the legislature in the future.

“We are fighting for good public education. It is worth it to take the time to get it done right,” Durazo said in a prepared statement.

The two remaining Assembly bills are not yet scheduled for votes in the state Senate, but are expected to come up before the end of the legislative session in mid-September. With the failure of the more aggressive charter restrictions, questions remain about whether they will actually make it into law. The Assembly was also expected to craft a new appeals process for charter school applications to go along with AB 1505, but it’s unclear where that stands.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose election was opposed by charter school backers and supported by the teachers union, has been publicly silent on the legislation. In May, he signed legislation making charter school operations more transparent, including that they be subject to open meeting, public records and conflict-of-interest laws.

Some California officials see a clear distinction between the still-alive AB 1505 and 1507 and the other now-dead moratorium and charter cap legislation.

While speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle, California Congressman Rob Banto described a desire among lawmakers to stay away from “blunt instruments,” in the charter policy debate, instead favoring more precise regulation.

“People want more of a scalpel,” he said.

In the past, the state has been a relatively stable ground for the growth of charter schooling. It’s 1992 Charter Schools Act represented one of the movement’s first successful statewide initiatives. And under former Gov. Jerry Brown, the state instituted few substantial regulations on the schools until last year, when it banned for-profit charters.

The continued momentum of two of the original four bills signals to Vasquez Heilig that past reluctance to tighten control on charter schools in Sacramento may be over.

“California is the leading edge of a lot of this political movement,” he said. “People are realizing that the deregulation of charters have not led to appreciable achievement differences, especially for African Americans.”

A 2014 CREDO study found that low-income black students in California charter schools gained 36 more days of learning in reading and 43 more days in math a year than their district school counterparts. Low-income Latino students gained an additional 22 days of learning in reading and 29 days in math compared with their district peers.

Members of the California Teachers Association at Wednesday’s rally in Sacramento. (Photo: state Sen. Connie Leyva/Twitter)

The biggest statewide battle over charter schools in the country is coming to a head in California. Amid competing protests in Sacramento on Wednesday, the California Assembly narrowly passed legislation that would give local school districts sole authority to approve new charter schools.

The bill, titled AB 1505, is one of several new measures the Assembly has passed or is considering that would level tougher regulations on charters schools, which are publicly funded but independently run. The schools are typically not unionized and have greater control over decisions such as staffing, the length of the school day and the school year and their educational model.

Under the current law, new charter schools seeking approval can appeal to the county and then the state if the district initially denies them. In order to hit the 41-vote mark supporters of AB 1505 needed, the Assembly agreed to create a new appeals process, but it’s not yet clear what that would look like.

With @WeAreCTA members marching around CA State Capitol today, the Assembly *just barely* passes #AB1505, part of a suite of legislation to limit #charterschools — a bill that could make it easier for a district to block a charter from opening. #caedchat #lausd #caleg pic.twitter.com/f6cDhm3CVQ

— Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) May 22, 2019

The vote signals a broader policy shift in California, home of the 1992 Charter Schools Act that many recognize as one of the first big wins for the movement. California has the largest number of charter schools and charter school students in the country, with about 11 percent of students in the state attending charters. But public support for them — especially among Democrats — has become more ambiguous.

AB 1505 is one of four bills regulating charter schools that either the California Assembly or Senate is considering. Here’s a breakdown of what they would do:

• AB 1505 – The bill gives local school districts sole authority to approve new charter schools and to consider how new schools would impact the district’s budget in the approval process. Since new charter schools typically attract students – and funding – away from traditional public schools, many expect this measure would make it much more difficult for new charter schools to be approved. AB 1505 passed on Wednesday and will now go to the state Senate.

• AB 1506 –  This measure would place local and state caps on charter schools. Those figures would be determined at the end of 2019. AB 1506 passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee on May 16 and will now head to the full body.

• AB 1507 – This bill closes a loophole in state law that has let some districts boost their budgets by approving charter schools outside their boundaries. AB 1507 would require all charter schools approved by a district to be located within it. It passed on May 13 in the state Assembly and is now headed to the Senate.

• SB 756 – The only bill in the package being considered first by the state Senate, SB 756 would put a two-year moratorium on new charter schools unless the Legislature passes the reforms above. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved the bill on May 16 and it’s headed now to the full body.

Wednesday’s demonstrations — with fiery chants and parades of decorated flags and signs — highlighted the highly charged divide over the charter school legislation. On one side are teachers unions, including the powerful California Teachers Association, whose members marched on the capitol in support of AB 1505 and other initiatives, including raising public education funding. Teachers unions in California have made curtailing charter schools central to their cause and the issue was at the heart of this year’s teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland.

“We’ve been through an era of the Wild West around the charter schools,” CTA President Eric Heins told his supporters. “What we find is that there is a charter school industry that’s risen in California without any accountability or transparency.”

https://twitter.com/rachelranamok/status/1131633312974245888

On the other side of the debate are charter proponents, including the influential California Charter Schools Association. The organization held a smaller counter-protest called the “black parent strike.” The group opposes the bill, arguing broadening school choice in California — a state with persistent achievement gaps between white students and students of color — is a racial equity issue.

“We are standing up and telling legislators and the (teachers union) that they cannot take away the rights of our most vulnerable communities … by closing down the charter schools that are helping them learn and thrive,” Myrna Castrejón, president of the charter association, said in a statement.

In blasting the California legislation in a statement Wednesday, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools cited a 2014 CREDO study that found low-income black students in California charter schools gained 36 more days of learning in reading and 43 more days in math a year than their district school counterparts. Low-income Latino students gained an additional 22 days of learning in reading and 29 days in math than their district peers.

A showdown between the California Teachers Association and the #BlackParentStrike group. A lot of signage on the #RedForEd
side with anti-charter messaging, none about student performance. #SchoolChoiceTheBlackChoice@edu_posthttps://t.co/krSfOlYEtK

— Sis. Peeples Servin’ Real Talk ️ (@PeeplesChoice85) May 22, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Charter schools have become a complex issue for black voters — in California and the U.S. nationally. While recent analysis from Democrats for Education Reform indicated support for charter schools is much higher among black Democrats than white ones, research from the Public Policy Institute of California last year showed that just over one-third of black families in the state support them generally.

The NAACP continues to uphold a national moratorium on charter schools, arguing they need greater transparency and can contribute to segregation. But earlier this spring, three of the organization’s branches in California publicly challenged that position, stating that only 10 majority African-American public schools in California fall in the top half of student performance statewide in English and math, and eight of them are public charter schools.

• Read more: 3 California NAACP chapters break with state and national leaders, calling for charter moratorium to be overturned

For the California Teachers Association, a major complaint with charter schools in the state is the perceived financial drain they have on already-stretched funding for traditional public schools.

“Concerned Californians will be calling on lawmakers to support legislation to fix the broken laws governing charter schools that have allowed for egregious cases of waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars intended for students in neighborhood public schools,” reads a CTA press release from the day before the vote.

In the lead-up to the AB 1505 vote, the National Action Network and the National Urban League, two non-profit groups advocating for racial equality, issued their own letter urging Gov. Gavin Newsom not to sign off on charter-restrictive legislation.

“We have determined, these measures represent a direct attack on the ability of African American parents to choose the best education possible for their children,” it reads.

Rev. Dr. Tecoy Porter Sr., president of the Sacramento chapter of NAN, supports the letter and believes the NAACP’s moratorium is out of touch with black families in his community. He is skeptical of the concern that charter schools drain needed district funding.

“The big story is the underfunding of public schools, or the mismanagement of funds,” he says. “Unfortunately [supporters of AB 1505] are using charter schools as a scapegoat rather than addressing the real issue.”

If the state legislature passes AB 1505 or its companion bills, they will proceed to Newsom to be signed into law. Part of the energy behind this package of charter school bills is linked to the state’s new governor, who was heavily supported by the teachers unions and has more actively pursued charter school regulations. Similar versions of AB 1507 have passed in the California Legislature before, but former Gov. Jerry Brown consistently vetoed them.

“It should have happened a long time ago, but it’s happening now,” Heins told the San Francisco Chronicle.  “I think that Gov. Newsom thinks differently about this than Gov. Brown.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Lafer’s methodology, which has not been peer-reviewed, measures the budget impact of closing local charter schools on three hypothetical school district budgets. It makes several flawed assumptions that result in unsupported conclusions.

The study assumes that without charter schools, all the charter students within district boundaries would attend that district’s schools. Then it assumes that the district’s new tax revenue connected to those new students would exceed the cost of educating them, resulting in an improved financial picture for the district.

The questionable assumptions don’t end there.

Lafer assumes the Oakland Unified School District wouldn’t hire any new staff in its central office to help educate the 15,000 new students the district would gain if charters were closed. He also assumes no new costs for school buildings and transportation.

His low-cost estimate to educate a lot more students doesn’t even agree with Oakland Unified’s financial history.

Oakland’s enrollment in 2000-2001 was as high as it would be if all charter students returned to district schools today. Nineteen years ago, the district was beleaguered and schools were just as poorly resourced as they are today. Moreover, when enrollment grew previously in districts like Oakland, spending increased at a higher rate than revenues, not at a lower rate.

The author is trying to turn an institutional failure into an advantage — a creative approach, but not an accurate assessment.

History shows a district that is already spending more than it should on its central office and operating too many under-enrolled schools would not become more efficient if it grew significantly.

Actual district expenses rise and fall as enrollment numbers change, even though most districts find it painful to cut staff when enrollment numbers indicate they should.

The study focuses its analysis on charter school growth, ignoring other influences on district enrollment. While charter schools have drawn students away from district classrooms, so have other school districts, private schools and changes in family size. School districts must not look to one source of financial give-and-take.

The author highlights the fact that the loss of a few students sprinkled across the various grades cannot be solved by laying off any single teacher — a point that economists refer to as a “lumpiness” problem. This is a challenge for districts every fall, whether or not they have charter schools, and applies whether enrollment is growing or falling.

If this were a true cost-benefit analysis, why are the academic benefits to students not considered in the equation? A Stanford University analysis found urban charter schools in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay significantly boosted student achievement in both reading and math.

I’ve outlined specific methodological problems, but several other facts undermine Lafer’s implied claim that charter schools are to blame for district financial problems:

• Oakland, one of the three districts profiled in Lafer’s study, has had stable enrollment for the past five years — and rising revenues.
• Many California districts have financial problems and few, if any, charter schools. Clovis Unified, for example, has the 10^th largest deficit in the state and few charters.
• Many districts are financially stable, despite having a large number of charter schools, such as Albany City Unified and Capistrano Unified.
• Most California districts that encounter fiscal problems stabilize over a few short years. Long-term fiscal distress is unusual, confined to a few districts with a history of gross financial mismanagement.
• California’s own Legislative Analyst’s Office finds that the key predictors of fiscal distress in school districts are unsustainable collective bargaining agreements, failure to maintain healthy reserves, and flawed enrollment and income projections.

Financial stability is a challenge for all school systems. California has an opportunity to lead the way in developing new solutions. Transition funding, for example, could help districts make adjustments when they lose enrollment. State policies should help districts with particularly troublesome expenses, such as the long-term costs of school buildings, or retiree health care and pension costs.

Studies that suddenly blame long-standing problems in public education on charter schools make it harder to identify the real problems and potential solutions.

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell.

California’s Legislature is grappling with these issues this session. Assemblymember Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), a progressive voice and chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, is authoring AB 392, which seeks to change the use of deadly force by California law enforcement officers — thus hoping to stop the police shootings of unarmed black people.

Weber has also introduced AB 575, an education bill sponsored by the California Charter Schools Association that would acknowledge black students as a high-needs group in the state because of their chronically low academic achievement and drive more funding to the public schools that serve them.

Taken together, Weber’s bills offer a provocative challenge to a blue state where black youth struggle with the reality that they are targeted by the police, but not for school funding.

At the same time, another group of Democrats in Sacramento are showing how politicians can be liberal and tone-deaf at the same time on issues of race in public schools as they work on behalf of teachers unions to dismantle public charter schools in the name of balancing school budgets.

Assemblymembers Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), Rob Bonta (D-Oakland), Patrick O’Donnell (D-Long Beach), Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) and Christy Smith (D-Santa Clarita) have authored AB 1505, 1506 and 1507, measures that will kill public charter schools and limit public school options for black children, who are one of the lowest-performing subgroups of students in California.

Let’s put this in perspective. Charter schools have been a part of California’s public school system since 1992. Sen. Gary Hart (D-Van Nuys) authored the charter school law at a time when Californians were considering a school voucher initiative on the state ballot. California’s charter school law came to be in the context of providing parents with choice within the public school system.

According to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, black parents are more likely than other ethnic groups to choose a charter school. If these bills pass, black parents will no longer be able to choose where their children will go to school within the public school system. This means that they will be forced to send their children to the district-run public schools, which have an alarmingly poor track record of educating black children.

It is well established that California’s public school system is failing black children, with suspension rates three times that of white students and the state’s lowest academic performance for children without learning disabilities. Last year, only 32 percent of black students met state standards in ELA, compared with 50 percent of all students.

Legislators McCarty, Bonta, O’Donnell, Kalra and Smith represent the majority of California’s Assembly Education Committee and are backed by labor. The fix was in when they passed their anti-charter school bill package at a public hearing on April 10 over the objection of hundreds of parents from black, brown and immigrant families who clogged the halls of the state Capitol. I attended the hearing. Testifying for hours in opposition to the bills, parents outnumbered red-shirted, teachers union members in support of the bills at a ratio of 20 to 1.

Black parents at the hearing, who watched the Democratic committee majority carry the union’s water, got a clear message that it’s not about their children at all. It’s about the money.

Yes, school districts like Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento have crippling financial problems. However, as the editors of The Sacramento Observer wrote, to try to place the blame of poorly managed school districts on public charter schools is misleading and wrong.

At the crux of the issue for school districts in financial distress is the confluence of declining enrollment due to lower birth rates and low student attendance with skyrocketing teacher pension and health care costs that exceed the districts’ ability to pay.

The crisis in public funding for education in the state is real. California ranks 41st in the nation in per-pupil spending.

But, if you are interested in problem-solving, scapegoating charter schools for the fiscal insolvency of school districts lacks the nuance that the reality of the situation requires. It also puts the future of the 660,000 students who attend charter schools in California in jeopardy. That’s 10 percent of the state’s student enrollment.

All schools need adequate and equitable funding to ensure each student has a chance at success.

Education is a core value for Californians. Making public funding match public values is an expensive proposition. But if California’s public schools can’t stop fighting among themselves, they will miss the opportunity to stand together for increased investments for all public school students.

The truth is, the California Teachers Association used teacher strikes in L.A. and Oakland to shoehorn the same anti-charter school agenda they’ve always had into a set of bills that, if passed, would have a devastating impact on California’s black community for generations to come.

As the richest and most powerful lobby in public education, the CTA has had plenty of time to fix a broken school system for black children. But they haven’t. Instead, they want black students back in district-run schools for the money.

That’s not progressive. It’s disrespectful and oppressive to black families who have exercised their right to choose public charter schools.

Black oppression is wrong, even at the hands of a blue state.

Margaret Fortune is president and CEO of the Fortune School and the graduate Rex & Margaret Fortune School of Education, board chair of the California Charter Schools Association, a member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Charter Task Force and trustee emerita of California State University.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Charter school supporters at the “Stand for All” rally on March 13 in Sacramento. (Credit: Roxann Nazario)

*Updated May 9

NAACP branches in three California cities that have some of the state’s largest populations of black students are calling to end the charter school moratorium adopted by their national board in 2016.

The San Diego, Southwest Riverside and San Bernardino branches have submitted separate resolutions to NAACP’s state board saying they oppose the moratorium, a move that breaks with the state organization’s education chair, Julian Vasquez Heilig, who was a driving force behind the national board voting in favor of the measure.

In an email obtained by LA School Report, Alice A. Huffman, president of the California Hawaii NAACP, told leaders in the three local branches that the state branch “has already taken a position of opposition and would appreciate it if you all would rescind your positions.”

Huffman could not be reached for comment. The resolutions also come as California lawmakers are considering restricting charter schools in the state, a move that California NAACP supports.

The resolution adopted Wednesday by the San Diego branch’s general membership states that in the top 10 California school districts with the highest enrollment of African-American students — including San Diego, San Bernardino and Moreno Valley Unified in Riverside County — the average achievement gap on state test scores for black students is 14.5 percentage points in English and 15.2 percentage points in math.

190425 NAACP RESOLUTION CA PUBLIC SCHOOLS (Text)

It also states that only 10 public schools in California with a majority African-American student enrollment fall in the top half of student performance statewide in English and math, and eight of them are public charter schools.

Similar resolutions have been created in the Southwest Riverside and San Bernardino branches.

“We’re hopeful that it can be adopted in California, and then the national board will do their research and investigate the facts in order to look at this again from the perspective of what is really going on with the African-American students locally, statewide and nationally,” Christina Laster, education chairwoman for the Southwest Riverside branch, told LA School Report.

Laster said that the charter moratorium has been “a huge issue” within the organization. Her branch’s resolution had full support from their members, she said. “While in our branch there was not a vote, it was shared with our members and officers and there was no opposition. They were in full support.” She said every branch has different rules and her branch did not require a vote, but that San Diego’s did.

“By us coming out with the resolution, people can be aware that the moratorium is not helping our kids,” she said. “I believe they will now have a platform to voice their concern.”

John Futch, president of the San Bernardino branch, said enough members of his group had approved the resolution for it to be submitted. “I understand that if it passes (at the state level) then it would be recognized by the national NAACP. That’s what we expect.”

He added, “I have seen successful charter schools. And I have seen not very successful traditional schools. That’s a concern. As an advocate, you want what’s best for kids, sometimes you have to come out of the box.”

Vasquez Heilig, who is a professor at Sacramento State University, said the charter moratorium is the “national policy of the organization” and accused members of the individual branches of being paid by the California Charter Schools Association, specifically in Riverside. The association opposes the charter legislation now being debated in Sacramento.

• Read more: Antonucci: Will the state legislature pass the unions’ charter school wish list?

“This isn’t the first time that the charters schools association — and I’m sure it won’t be the last — is trying different strategies to influence this debate inside our organization,” Vasquez Heilig said. “But bottom line, the NAACP is a democratic organization, and there’s a long democratic process by which all the resolutions go through.”

Myrna Castrejón, the charter association’s president and CEO, said, “That’s a bag of goods. It sounds like NAACP branches are breaking ranks with the California State NAACP and national board. Everybody knows black students are the lowest-performing subgroup, other than students with special needs, and the system has done nothing to provide targeted supports. So it makes sense that NAACP branches representing regions of the state with the highest black student enrollment are crying foul on the charter school moratorium. They want quality options in the public school system. They want charter schools.”

Laster denied that she was paid by the association to push the resolution.

“I have never received one penny from CCSA. That’s insane,” Laster said. “What’s been missed here is that there’s an assumption that all parents need some kind of direction from an outside stakeholder to tell them what’s best for their children. We’re missing the whole dynamic of supporting parental choice. They are able to make their own decision. We don’t have the power to direct parental decision.”

The very visible split in California over the role of charter schools reflects ongoing tension and debate in the national ranks of the country’s most storied civil rights organization. In adopting the moratorium in 2016, the NAACP cited concerns about charter school accountability and transparency, how the schools were funded and whether that was diverting money from district schools and whether charters were expelling students, especially low-performing ones, that traditional public schools were obligated to educate.

After being among the most contentious debates at the 2016 and 2017 national conventions, the issue was not as great a priority at the 2018 gathering and appeared to be losing steam, some insiders said, partly because some local NAACP leaders were not behind it.

• Read more: The War That Wasn’t: A Year After Its Much-Hyped Launch, the NAACP’s Push for a Charter School Moratorium Has Run Out of Steam

In California, however, the movement to curtail charter schools is on the rise.

Four bills are moving through the California legislature. Assembly Bills 1505, 1506 and 1507 would limit charter schools in the state, and one would cap the number based on how many the state has by 2020. The bills, which have passed the Assembly Education Committee, also would grant local school districts sole authority over their approval. Another bill, SB 756, would impose a five-year moratorium on charter schools and passed its first policy hearing in the state Senate last month.

“I think it’s important that the NAACP has called for legislators in California and elsewhere to revisit charter schools,” Vasquez Heilig said.

In opposing a charter school moratorium, the San Diego NAACP resolution notes that California has eliminated for-profit charters and recently adopted legislation to make charter school operations more transparent, including that they be subject to open meeting, public records and conflict-of-interest laws.

Vasquez Heilig said the national charter moratorium was started by the San Jose branch when it submitted a resolution. Then, after a “democratic process,” it became national policy within the NAACP organization.

“It starts at a local level, then it goes to the state conference typically to a vote. After the state, it goes to the national committee of resolutions, and then after that, it goes to a vote at the national convention. After that, it goes to a vote by the national board,” he said. “The national policy of the NAACP can’t be co-opted by any one person or any set of individuals. It’s a democratic process by which national policies are adopted.”

The three California branches are now taking the same path to end the moratorium. Laster said they are expecting to hear back from the state board by May 14. “They can approve it (the resolution) and send it to national, or they can reject it.”

NAACP’s annual convention is July 20 in Detroit.

LA School Report attempted to confirm the official process with the NAACP California Hawaii chapter but has not yet received a response.

*This article has been updated with CCSA’s response and corrects the name of the Southwest Riverside branch. An earlier version of the story incorrectly identified the branch’s name.

Eighty-six percent of independent charter school graduates in L.A. met college eligibility standards for the state’s public universities last year, according to data from the California Charter Schools Association — 24 percentage points higher than L.A. Unified reported for its traditional schools.

About 8,400 independent charter school students graduated with C’s or better in their college prep “A-G” courses — what students need to apply to the University of California and California State University systems. CCSA’s data cover independent charters authorized within the boundaries of L.A. Unified.

L.A. Unified, comparatively, reported a significantly lower rate in 2018: Nearly 62 percent of about 27,400 graduates passed with C’s. The data include six affiliated charter high schools, which are operated by L.A. Unified. The district’s A-G rate is even lower when considering an entire class, rather than just graduates. LA School Report last month reported that 49 percent of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 is projected to graduate eligible to apply to the UC/CSU systems.

• Read more: Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

CCSA and the district record their A-G data differently, complicating direct comparisons. CCSA had the most complete dataset for independent charters, whereas L.A. Unified could not provide the A-G rate for those schools. The district does “not have access to this info” because these charters “report their own data to the state,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Traditional schools and independent charters in L.A. are both part of the public school system, and they have comparable student demographics. In both systems, about 4 in 5 students are minorities from low-income families — and some would be first-time college-goers.

Elizabeth Robitaille, CCSA’s senior vice president of school performance, development and support, attributed the gap in part to charters’ laser-like focus on college preparation.

“Many charter schools are beginning their model with a college-going culture and mission that’s specifically saying, ‘College for all,’ not ‘College for some,’” Robitaille said.

Independent charter schools in L.A. have become a political lightning rod — especially in the wake of January’s teacher strike, which tied traditional schools’ plight to charter schools’ expansion. The state legislature is reviewing four bills to restrict charters, including one that would eliminate a current state law provision that “increases in pupil academic achievement for all groups of pupils” must be the most important factor in deciding whether to renew a charter. The bills would also end charter schools’ ability to appeal to the county and state if a district rejects their application and would cap the number of charters in the state.

CCSA and charter school leaders spoke with LA School Report about what is factoring into the higher numbers. Here are some of the main examples:

1. Traditional schools and independent charters can have different graduation requirements.

L.A. Unified requires D’s or better in A-G courses to graduate, even though the UC/CSU systems require at least C’s.

But many independent charter high schools — 55 of 77 authorized by L.A. Unified, for example — require C’s or better to graduate, according to the district. (Independent charters within L.A. Unified’s boundaries can be authorized by the district’s school board or other local entities, such as the L.A. County Office of Education. The district and CCSA couldn’t provide a complete breakdown.)

“All charter schools and districts have to get their A-G coursework approved through the UC system. … But independent charters have autonomy to set their own requirements,” a CCSA spokeswoman wrote in an email. “So when the district decided that a ‘D’ grade counted as passing A-G coursework, that didn’t impact independent charters’ requirements.”

For L.A. charters like North Valley Military Institute College Preparatory Academy, which this spring has 47 of its 51 graduating seniors set to attend two- or four-year colleges, the C or better requirement helps guarantee access. “We try to make really clear to everybody who wants to come here that we are about getting kids ready for college,” Superintendent Mark Ryan said. “We want them to have college as an option.”

North Valley Military Institute’s postsecondary data for the last four years. Data show how many students get accepted to two- and four-year colleges, and how many go. (Credit: Mark Ryan)

Huge honor to have legendary @StanfordTennis Coach Dick Gould share his wisdom & definition of success w/North Valley Military Institute, Eagle Canyon and Reilly students today!

"Success is a matter of everyone of us trying to get a little better each day to improve ourselves." pic.twitter.com/dM8NYFwaFi

— Harper for Kids (@HarperforKids) December 4, 2018

“We’ve never had D’s at our school, because what’s the point?” said Alfonso Paz, executive director of APEX Academy, which has 390 students in grades 7 to 12. “Our mission is … to stop the cycle of poverty. And when we did all this research, we found that what a kid needs is to be A-G eligible. So we went backwards planning from there.”

The district has been working to expand college access in other ways. L.A. Unified for the first time paid to have all district juniors take the SAT in school in March — a reported $1.2 million cost, according to the L.A. Times. The “Close the Gap by 2023” initiative passed by the school board last June has also set a higher bar for college readiness, aiming to make 100 percent of high school graduates eligible to apply to a state college by 2023.

2. Data are defined differently.

Charter and district data can be higher — or lower — depending on where the data are from and how they are defined.

CCSA’s data showing that 86 percent of charter graduates in 2018 passed their A-G courses with C’s or better, for example, include almost all independent charters authorized within the boundaries of L.A. Unified — including those approved by the L.A. County Office of Education and the state. The data don’t include “dashboard alternative schools” — there are at least three independent charter high schools with this designation — because they are “serving a very high risk” population and are “treated differently” by the state, a CCSA spokeswoman said.

L.A. Unified’s A-G rate actually fared better with CCSA’s data, at 65 percent versus the 62 percent that the California Department of Education and the district reported. Because CCSA excludes alternative schools in its data analyses while L.A. Unified retains that data, that discrepancy likely caused the percentage bump, the spokeswoman added.

The state education department reported the same district A-G rate as L.A. Unified did. However, it reported a significantly lower charter A-G rate — 74 percent. This is because unlike CCSA’s data, it only counts charters that are authorized by L.A. Unified.

CCSA 2018 data for independent charter schools within L.A. Unified boundaries. A-G rates shown in second column from right. (Credit: CCSA annual regional report)

3. Charters have a more prominent ‘college-going culture,’ leaders say.

A college-going culture centers on a “belief system” that “every student can go to college, and that it’s our job to prepare them, and it’s their job to choose,” says Cristina de Jesus, president and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools California, a charter network with nine high schools in L.A. serving nearly 6,100 students. “We don’t make any exceptions around that.”

That belief system, she continued, is established by thoroughly vetting new staff; by taking students on college tours — sometimes as far as New York and Boston (tour funding comes from Green Dot’s fundraising efforts, or from the budget, de Jesus said), and even by something as simple as teachers putting their alma mater and college major on their classroom doors.

Another element is having a lower student-counselor ratio. School counselors are integral to students’ success; they help them decide which college is the right fit, guide them through financial aid forms and connect them with mental-health resources. The American School Counselor Association recommends a 250:1 ratio, though the national average is 482:1.

At Green Dot, where 69 percent of graduates in 2018 had C’s or better in their A-G courses, the ratio is about 260:1. Every school must also have a full-time psychologist, de Jesus said.

North Valley Military Institute has two counselors, which works out to a 318:1 ratio, Ryan said, with 84 percent of graduates in 2018 getting C’s or better despite a student population that is 25 percent students with disabilities and 8.2 percent students who are homeless. Both percentages are about double the district average for those student groups.

The ratio is notably low at APEX Academy, at 150:1. The school had a 79.3 percent A-G rate in 2018, even though an estimated 75 percent of the student body is battling some form of mental health issue or trauma. It embraces a mental health-first model that Paz said is all about “meeting students where they’re at.”

“The basis of all change comes from relationships,” Paz said. “That’s why you stay in the system.”

L.A. Unified schools’ ratios, meanwhile, can be nearly triple the ASCA’s recommendation. There can be as few as one counselor for every 690 students in predominantly minority high schools, and as few as one counselor for every 790 students if the school has more diversified enrollment. The district’s traditional schools “have the [freedom] to purchase additional positions,” an L.A. Unified spokeswoman wrote in an email.

• Read more: LAUSD high school counselors say they don’t have enough time to help students with college application process

Traditional schools in California are systemically underfunded; the state ranks anywhere from 22nd to 46th in per-pupil spending, depending on the data source. And charter advocacy organizations do often benefit from philanthropy. But Paz said the lower student-counselor ratios at schools like his doesn’t mean a charter has more cash on hand. Rather, he said it’s about how a school prioritizes hiring and retaining counselors when it budgets.

“My budget constraints are the same budget constraints as every school in California. I don’t have a trust fund, I don’t get anything extra,” Paz said. “Has it been hard? Yes. One time we had to dismiss some people. It’s really hard. You need a clear understanding of what you’re doing.”

4. Charters can have lower student-teacher ratios.

Across Green Dot’s L.A. high schools, the average student-teacher ratio is about 24:1.

Low ratios “allow for more individualized support for students and allow teachers to know their students well,” said de Jesus, ensuring “that every student is truly ‘seen’ in every sense of the word.” Studies show this to be true in the earlier grades in particular.

While state-level data put L.A. Unified’s average high school class size in 2017-18 at about 25 students, the district reports that the current average for “core classes” such as math and English is nearly 40 students for grades 9 and 10 and nearly 43 students for grades 11 and 12. As with counselors, a school site can budget for more teachers, a district spokeswoman confirmed.

Lowering class size was one of the aims of January’s teacher strike and subsequent contract.

5. Charters have more freedom around curriculum.

Independent charters within L.A. Unified’s boundaries  — and across California — are public schools. They are not-for-profit and have oversight provisions such as submitting budgets to the county, commissioning third-party financial audits and petitioning for renewal every five years. They are also privately run and abide by their own “charter.” Therefore, they have more discretion around curriculum, the length of the school day and year and hiring and firing.

“The autonomy that charter schools have allows them to develop and make quick adaptations” and “revise and adjust the kinds of interventions and supports they’re giving based on the kids that are there in front of them,” CCSA’s Robitaille said.

6. Charters have detailed academic plans.

Independent charters petitioning to open within L.A. Unified boundaries have to present an academic plan that addresses 15 elements. These range from the needs of the targeted student population to annual performance goals — all of which serve as an educational roadmap for a charter once it opens, a CCSA spokeswoman said.

Requirements include:

• For proposed high schools: An explanation of how the school program and course schedule will enable all students to meet graduation requirements and A-G requirements within four years.
• Description of the proposed charter school’s annual goals for all pupils and for each subgroup.
• An outline of the specific educational interests, backgrounds or challenges of the student population the school wants to serve.
• Description of the educational program’s overall curricular and instructional design, including how the school will structure and staff the program. Research-based evidence is required to demonstrate how the design will successfully serve the needs of the targeted student population.

Charters’ commitment to these plans is reviewed when they apply for renewal every five years. Affiliated charters also undergo this renewal process. District schools have no similar review and renewal process. However, any schools that receive federal funds through the district must develop a “School Plan for Student Achievement” — reviewed and updated annually — that “includes long-term goals, measurable objectives and a system for evaluating progress toward meeting those goals,” a district spokeswoman wrote in an email.

In five studies that we’ve conducted during the past several years, we’ve compared traditional schools and charter schools in a diverse roster of U.S. cities where a substantial portion of families are choosing charters. We’ve examined how much funding each sector receives and how much learning each produces. The facts are quite clear:

Charter schools do more with less.

Our first report, “Charter School Funding: Inequity in the City,” identified a significant funding gap between traditional and chartered public schools. In 14 cities spanning the country, from the nation’s capital to Memphis to Los Angeles, charter schools received considerably less funding — an average of $5,721 per pupil — than traditional schools. To put it another way, families sacrificed about one-third of their educational resources when they chose to enroll in charter schools.

University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform

Two years later we revisited these same 14 cities and found that the funding gap between traditional and charter schools had increased slightly, to an average of $5,828 per pupil. Local funding sources, including property and sales taxes, were the biggest contributors to the disparity. (A third report that focused on New York City’s charter and traditional schools yielded similar findings.)

At the same time, we wanted to factor in academic achievement. In 2018 we completed a study measuring the cost-effectiveness — the amount of learning per educational dollars spent — of charter and traditional schools. To determine academic performance, we used results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.

For that study, we focused on eight cities that, despite their different sizes and demographics, all have substantial charter sectors: Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. In each city, we found that charter schools were more academically cost-effective than traditional schools.

University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform

We found that charter schools continued to demonstrate greater value than traditional schools in a follow-up report released earlier this month. “A Good Investment: The Updated Productivity of Public Charter Schools in Eight U.S. Cities” reports that in reading, charter schools averaged 4.80 points higher — per $1,000 funded — than traditional schools, making charters 40 percent more cost-effective in reading. In math, charters average 5.13 points higher per $1,000 funded, making them 40 percent more cost-effective in math.

We also measured the taxpayer return-on-investment generated by each sector. Our most recent report found that charters’ ROI exceeds that of traditional public schools by an average of 53 percent over the course of a 13-year investment in a K-12 education.

University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform

While our research demonstrates that charters do more with less, it also brings up the question: Should charters get stuck with less funding in the first place?

Presuming that policymakers believe in the principle of equity, they should fix the funding structures that currently grant substantially fewer resources to charter schools. They should allocate education dollars in a way that ensures a given public school student receives the same amount of resources whether they choose to enroll in a charter or traditional school.

To boost academic performance across the public education system, policymakers should examine why charter schools, despite receiving less funding, yield greater academic achievement than traditional schools. What are charters doing differently? Several researchers, including Philip Gleason of Mathematica Policy Research and Mark Berends of the University of Notre Dame, as well as report co-author Patrick Wolf, have conducted initial studies of charter school best practices. That vital line of research should be broadened and deepened.

What makes Washington, D.C., charters 43 percent more cost-effective than the city’s traditional schools, and why do charters there produce a 58 percent higher ROI than traditional schools? Why are charter schools in New York City 26 percent more cost-effective — with a 53 percent higher ROI — than nearby traditional schools?

In light of the evidence, these are the questions that policymakers should ask. The sooner policymakers can answer them, the sooner they can figure out how charter schools can best achieve one of their original promises — to stimulate improvements in all public schools.

Corey A. DeAngelis is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Patrick J. Wolf is Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Larry D. Maloney is president of Aspire Consulting, LLC. Jay F. May is founder of, and senior consultant for, EduAnalytics, LLC.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Nearly half — 49 percent — of all adults surveyed said they favor charter schools, while 46 percent oppose them. However, the margin of error was 3.5 percent, just over that spread.

An overwhelming majority — 75 percent — said it is very or somewhat important for low-income parents to have the option of sending their children to charter schools. Among public school parents, that figure rises to 81 percent.

However, 64 percent of adults were concerned about charters diverting state funding away from traditional local public schools. Those in Los Angeles were the most likely to express that concern, at 71 percent.

The statewide 2019 Californians & Education survey was released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California and is the organization’s 15th annual K-12 survey. It polled 1,512 Californians in English and Spanish between April 5 and 15. It was PPIC’s first fully online survey, which the researchers said allowed them to examine more issues and go into greater depth than telephone polling.

“Charter public schools get mixed reviews,” Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO, said in a news release. “Many Californians say it is important to have the option of a charter school, but there are concerns about the fiscal impacts on traditional public schools.”

Among public school parents, support for charters is somewhat higher, with 59 percent in favor and 38 percent opposed. About half of Latinos and whites are in favor of charter schools in general, over Asian Americans (43 percent). African-Americans are the group least likely (36 percent) to favor them, the survey found.

When asked to name the biggest issue facing the state’s K-12 public schools, most adults and public school parents say they are concerned that the level of state funding for local public schools is not enough, followed by large class sizes, standards/quality of education, limited/poor curriculum and low teacher pay.

Following teacher strikes in multiple school districts including Los Angeles and most recently in Oakland seeking higher pay, 61 percent of adults and 58 percent of public school parents say teachers’ salaries in their community are too low. In Los Angeles, 65 percent hold this view.

But while most respondents wanted more funding for schools, when asked about a state ballot measure that would lower the threshold — from two-thirds to 55 percent — for passing local parcel taxes for public schools, less than half of Californians (44 percent of adults, 39 percent of likely voters) approve.

Those findings are especially significant in Los Angeles, where voters in June will be considering an L.A. Unified parcel tax that would raise about $500,000 annually. Only half of Los Angeles respondents said they would vote yes on a parcel tax.

• Read more: Whether for or against a parcel tax, parents and advocates want more money for schools — but they don’t yet trust LAUSD to be a ‘good steward’

“Majorities of California likely voters favor a state bond and higher taxes on commercial properties to raise school revenues, while lowering the local tax threshold receives less support,” Baldassare said.

Other key findings:

• Nine in 10 adults say it is very or somewhat important for charter schools to operate with the same transparency and accountability as traditional public schools.
• At least 7 in 10 adults — across all regions and across age, education, income and racial/ethnic groups — say K-12 should be a high or very high priority in the state.
• Four in ten Californians (38%) and half of public school parents (49%) give their local public schools a positive grade of A or B.
• Majorities say their local public schools are doing an excellent or good job preparing students for college (55%); fewer than half say the same about preparing students for jobs and the workforce (48%).
• Many adults (43 percent) say they are very concerned that students in low-income areas are less likely than other students to be ready for college when they finish high school.
• Majorities (61 percent of adults and 71 percent of public school parents) are either very concerned or somewhat concerned that increased federal immigration enforcement efforts will affect undocumented students and their families in their local public schools.
• More than two-thirds of Californians (70 percent of adults and 80 percent of public school parents) are very concerned or somewhat concerned about the threat of mass shooting in their local schools.
• More than half of Californians (55 percent of adults) would like Gov. Gavin Newsom to change to different K-12 policies, rather than continue those of his predecessor, Jerry Brown.
• Majorities of Californians approve of the Common Core State Standards and the Local Control Funding Formula.

These are all real issues that require careful planning to solve. Unfortunately, we fear these problems will take a backseat to the debate over capping the number of public charter schools in California. Instead of tackling underfunding by organizing a march on Sacramento, the L.A. Unified School Board, educators and parents were engaged in a lengthy, often heated debate last week about the merits of charter schools before the board voted to support a temporary moratorium on the number of charter schools in the city.

We understand that charter schools have become one of the most hot-button topics in education, but we know that terms like “charter campus” or “district school” are overly simplistic and have turned into distracting catchphrases. Instead of focusing on those divisive labels, we should be partnering to create school communities that prepare students for college and the workforce while also enriching students’ lives through experiences like arts and sports that will expand their worlds beyond the boundaries of their neighborhoods and communities.

Overly idealistic? Unrealistic? We disagree. We know this is possible. As the former CEO and current union president of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, we have seen it happen.

When Camino Nuevo started in 2000, it was part of a broader community redevelopment effort that included a thrift store, a worker-owned janitorial company, a nonprofit community development corporation and a free clinic. The educational mission was to create a place that would nurture and support students in the greater MacArthur Park neighborhoods, the majority of whom come from low-income immigrant families. And given our grassroots origins, when our teachers decided to unionize in 2004, we committed to a collaborative and constructive partnership with student learning as our north star.

When Camino Nuevo administrators and union leadership hold our monthly meetings, we do not focus on whether we are “union” or “administrators.” We sit down to communicate honestly and transparently with each other to find ways to provide a great education to all of our students.

This collaborative approach was especially crucial during the recession, when we faced a deficit of nearly $700,000, about 5 percent of the operating revenue for our network of four schools. We all realized that unless we found a way to balance the books, we faced the possibility of having to close our doors, which would have been devastating to our students, faculty, staff, families and our community.

As we sat down in 2008, we saw that the root cause of the problem was not within our schools. Instead, it was a lack of state funding for public education. We also recognized that teachers and students were our most valuable assets. During discussions over the next several weeks, we found a way to make sure no teachers were furloughed while keeping class size small.

Most importantly, we were able to preserve Camino Nuevo’s culture. If anything, we emerged from the recession with more trust in each other and more confident that if we worked together we could accomplish more.

We believe that if this collaborative approach could work at Camino Nuevo, it could work everywhere. Too many students in L.A. are under-educated and underserved by the status quo. It would benefit everyone to elevate the dialogue around public education and avoid easy, divisive labels. Together, we need to press our state lawmakers to address declining enrollment and make sure every school is providing the kind of education and environment in which students, parents and teachers belong, thrive and stay.

John Ildefonso is an arts teacher and the president of the Camino Nuevo Teachers Association. Dr. Ana Ponce is the former CEO for Camino Nuevo Charter Academy and current executive director of the nonprofit, grant-making education organization Great Public Schools Now.

Charter supporters rally Tuesday outside LAUSD headquarters to urge the school board to reject the charter moratorium resolution.

*Updated Feb.1

Families, teachers and students from Los Angeles’s independent charter schools turned out by the thousands Tuesday to urge school board members to reject a resolution calling for a moratorium on new charters in L.A. Unified. After the resolution passed with only one dissenter, parents said they felt betrayed and worried about what the vote actually meant and said they are “ready to fight back.”

Tuesday’s rally was the largest protest by charter supporters that L.A. advocates could recall. Their numbers were dwarfed by the tens of thousands of union supporters who marched before and during the six-day teacher strike. But it was a show of force for those who said they had stood by respectfully during the strike but now felt their community and their right to school choice were under attack. Some said they felt sold out by those they called supporters and a backroom deal to end the strike that targeted their schools.

The 5-1 vote approved a board resolution calling on state leaders to order a pause on opening new charters in the district while they conduct an eight- to 10-month study of their financial impact. Charter supporters plan a March 13 rally in Sacramento to press legislators and the governor not to impose a moratorium. In the meantime, they expressed confusion over what it means for charter families now.

• Read more: After thousands rally for charter schools, LAUSD board votes for a moratorium

“By supporting this it doesn’t mean that in L.A. we are going to have a moratorium, that’s not what this means,” board President Mónica García explained a day after the vote. “It’s a communication about an intention about what would be helpful from one particular perspective.” Until Gov. Gavin Newsom acts, nothing has changed in L.A., she said.

“A lot of people, one, have to understand what a public school is, and then two, we have to understand that there is no charter ban or moratorium or study in Los Angeles right now, that is not happening.”

Myrna Castrejón, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, also said there is no immediate change.

“All it does is it’s a recommendation to the state legislature and governor to act,” Castrejón said. For that to happen, “a bill has to be introduced, debated and approved in the first house, the second house, pass to the governor for him to sign and then set an implementation timeline. (There’s) nothing about whether authorization of new petitions or renewals will materially change at a local level.”

‘EXTREMELY HURT’

Before the board approved the resolution, charter families gathered in unprecedented numbers, about 3,500 people according to an estimate by an L.A. School Police officer outside the district’s headquarters. People chanted “My child, my choice” in English and Spanish as they filled the street, which was closed in both directions as people of all ages streamed in. Students arrived in their uniforms, some with their bands and dance groups. Parents pushing strollers through the crowd managed to hold their little ones’ hands and posters at the same time.

Some parents arrived early to line up on the sidewalk outside the boardroom’s entrance so they could get one of the limited slots to speak at public comment. One of them was Roxann Nazario, mother of a fifth-grader at Fenton Avenue Charter School in the San Fernando Valley.

She has been advocating for school choice, and particularly for charter schools, for the last two and a half years. Her involvement grew after she joined Kelly Gonez’s campaign for the board in 2017. A day after the board vote, in which Gonez supported the resolution, Nazario said, “Our charter community in Board District 6 is extremely hurt.”

Charter students at the rally.

Gonez “presented an amendment and incorporated some changes into the resolution, that part I appreciate. But of course we didn’t think she was actually going to do that. I’m not going to attack her, but I’m just going to say from the heart that it hurts.”

Nazario was in tears Tuesday as she addressed the board.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here,” she said, then pointed at board member Richard Vladovic, who authored the resolution. “You were the one who [told me that] charter school parents should not feel like they have a scarlet ‘A’ on their chest. Well, do you think this helps? What are you doing to bring us together now?”

On Wednesday, Nazario said of the board members’ agreement to pass a resolution to end the strike, “You shouldn’t have made that promise in the first place, a promise you didn’t have the right to make. You sacrificed us and anybody in the future who wants school choice for their child.”

Nazario said that she and about eight parents met with Gonez on Monday to ask her to vote no on the resolution.

She said Gonez told them that she was inclined to support the resolution only if the board would include language she was going to offer as an amendment. Vladovic forcefully rejected Gonez’s amendment, which failed to win the required four votes. Despite that, she voted to approve Vladovic’s resolution, which he had modified slightly during the meeting.

“It makes us look bad, dumb, for trusting her. It reflects badly on us,” said Nazario, who plans to attend the Sacramento rally. “When we campaigned for her, she was the best candidate that we had to choose from. I just wish that she would be a little stronger with where she stands and not alienate the charter community that helped her get there.”

Gonez responded in an email Wednesday to LA School Report that “I was elected to represent all of Board District 6, including families of district schools as well as charter schools. I support options for families, but a key part of governing is compromise. I sought to improve the final resolution, but despite my efforts, the full Board did not accept those changes.

“A study of charter schools could help to inform continued policy improvements, and it remains up to the state to decide whether to put a temporary pause in place during that study. If they do, students in existing charter schools will not be impacted,” Gonez added.

Mónica García, the school board president, tells charter supporters at the rally, “I hear you, I’m with you.”

Before the board meeting, García, the board president, had addressed the rally to thank charter supporters for showing up, telling them, “I hear you, I’m with you.” She said Wednesday by phone that she had heard multiple criticisms since the vote.

“I embrace the responsibility that some people felt unsupported, I hear that. I know what they wanted. But I did not go out there to tell them, I will vote as you want me to. I said I understand, you do not want to be closed, you want a choice for your kid, you want us to stand up and tell Sacramento that you are part of the solution.”

She stressed “the respect that I have for any mom or parent or community member that is fighting the fight for their kid and their community.”

“What I wanted them to know is we need you part of this district, and we need your voices. If we’re going to march and take to the streets, you need to be here too.”

CHARTER ENROLLMENT

Vladovic cited fewer students enrolling in the district’s 225 independent charter schools as one reason for a moratorium.

“The rate of growth is slowing as charter leaders recognize that there is a natural limit to how many schools of any model our student population can sustain,” Gonez said Wednesday.

CCSA data show that enrollment in independent charters authorized by L.A. Unified has grown by over 4,000 students for each of the last three years, from 87,572 in 2013 to 112,333 in 2018.

Students at the Tuesday rally.

Javier Reyes, CEO and founder of Alta Public Schools, including Academia Moderna and Prepa Tec charter schools in Huntington Park, was at the rally and said all of his schools have waiting lists.

“Families want high-quality schools, and that’s what the families we serve — low-income families — have found in charters. Charters are not the root of the problem. If traditional schools would offer high-quality education, charter schools simply wouldn’t exist. Our families are demanding more charter schools, and politics shouldn’t dictate what they want.”

Xitlali Castro, a mother of a middle school student at Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima, said days before the vote that, “If there are too many charter schools, then why did I have to get on the lottery list for the four charter schools I applied when I was looking for a middle school for my son? Some of the charter schools I applied to had waiting lists, and some never called me, so if there are too many, why would they have to use a lottery to admit students?”

Nazario said in her community in Sylmar there are only two middle schools, and she fears her daughter may have no other option.

“We have only two, Olive Vista, which is notoriously bad for generations, and PUC, which only takes two or three hundred kids,” she said. “We have a lot of elementary charters in Sylmar, but we also have a severe lack of charter middle schools. We need more charter middle and high schools. The moratorium resolution is so wrong at too many levels.”

She added, “They signed the contract on the backs of charter students and of thousands of students on waiting lists waiting to get into charter schools because they want to get out of their district schools.”

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president and sole “no” vote on the moratorium, said at the board meeting, “I don’t believe in unlimited charter growth, and if you don’t believe that, then consider that since I’ve been on this board, not one new charter school has opened in Board District 4.”

Gonez said by email Wednesday that the district has approved just four new charters this school year. Next Tuesday’s board meeting is the monthly meeting on charters. No new charter petitions are scheduled for a vote, just one material revision and one renewal petition.

IMMIGRANT PARENTS

More than 80 percent of charter students are non-white and from low-income households, according to CCSA.

The crowd outside district headquarters Tuesday was a reflection of that. While families came from all parts of the city, they were overwhelmingly Latino, and a number of them said they were immigrants.

Adela Carmaz, an immigrant from Romania, said,
“I grew up in a Communist country where I had no choice for schools, so I want choices for my children.”

Adela Carmaz, an immigrant from Romania, said her two daughters asked her to join the rally Tuesday to advocate for their school, High Tech Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. One is in ninth grade, the other is now at UC Davis.

“I grew up in a Communist country where I had no choice for schools, so I want choices for my children. I have nothing against LAUSD. I just want to have a choice for my children. I did have not that in my country, that’s why I’m here,” Carmaz said.

“I had to miss work today, but they asked me to be here,” said Carmaz, one of the first parents to arrive outside the district headquarters early Tuesday morning. She said that when she discovered charter schools after her daughters attended district schools in elementary and middle school, she saw a big difference.

“Everyone knows my daughter by name, there’s only 20-something students per class, and when my daughter graduated she got accepted to all the colleges she applied to.”

Magda Ríos immigrated from Guatemala and her children attend Fenton and Vista Charter. She said charter schools have offered her children access to high-quality education. “For me, as an immigrant, education is major. It’s a possibility for having a better future. That option in my country doesn’t exist,” she said in Spanish.

“This is a country of opportunities, so I’m here to ask the board members to please follow their hearts and focus on the kids and families, because while we parents are fighting for a better education for our children, they just care for more money and their politics.” Ríos said. She said she wants the division among parents and the attacks against charters to stop, and a moratorium wouldn’t help.

Guadalupe Torres said she joined the rally because she has children in both traditional and charter schools. She said she also supported the teachers in their strike. “It’s not fair that we respected them when they were on strike demanding a better salary and nurses, but they are now attacking our charter schools. My eldest child is in the tenth grade at an excellent charter school and they should respect that, put their politics away and respect our choice,” she said in Spanish.

Ana Ponce, who founded Camino Nuevo Charter Schools, which serves a large immigrant population, was at Tuesday’s rally. “People here feel they can’t have that choice without charter schools. They believe in public schools, most of them have children attending both schools. We just want good schools for all kids in this city,” said Ponce, who this month started as executive director of Great Public Schools Now, which advocates for more high-quality school options, both charter and district.

CCSA’s Myrna Castrejón.

Castrejón, who previously held that position, told the crowd from the stage that as a Latina and as an immigrant, “I’m used to being lied about. I know what it is like to face closed doors to opportunity, and today there are people that want to put a cap on our dreams. We have the right to speak with our voice.”

On Wednesday, Castrejón said by phone that “charters have always been open to refining and improving the policy framework under which we can improve our services to students, that’s a conversation we’re very open to. But certainly introducing this issue of stopping all growth until we figure out what the problem is, that just not how policy is made.”

Tuesday’s rally, she said, “was not the end but the beginning.”

“We will continue to tell our story so Californians understand who we serve, what value we’re adding to public education.”

*This article has been updated to correct that Xitlali Castro applied to seven schools for her son, but only four of them were charter.

Thousands of charter supporters rally outside the Los Angeles school district headquarters hours before the school board voted for a temporary moratorium on new charters in the district.

*Updated Jan. 30

Hours after about 3,500 charter school supporters rallied at Los Angeles Unified’s headquarters, the school board approved a resolution Tuesday calling for a moratorium on new charters.

Only the state can change charter law, so the 5-1 vote directs the district to ask state leaders to study potential changes to the law and to impose a temporary moratorium on new charter schools in the district while the eight- to 10-month study is conducted.

The resolution’s passage was secured when board President Mónica García said late in the discussion that she would vote for it, to gasps from the packed boardroom. She had appeared at the rally before the meeting, thanking charter supporters for showing up and for offering needed options for students when the district’s schools had been overcrowded. She told them, “I hear you, I’m with you. No matter what happens here today, don’t give up your power as parents to choose the best education for your children.”

District 4’s Nick Melvoin, who cast the sole “no” vote, said at the rally that he supports charters because all families, regardless of income or where they live, deserve the same opportunity to have a good education like he did. At the board meeting, he expressed “consistent frustration” with the heated political battle over charters. “We’re blaming others for our financial problems without getting our house in order.” To loud applause, he added, “I’d like to see a moratorium on low-performing schools.”

A board vote on a moratorium was a key element in last week’s agreement that ended the six-day teacher strike, though it’s not mentioned in the actual contract and there was no guarantee it would pass. The teachers union listed the deal first in its summary of what the agreement had accomplished.

That contract won unanimous board approval Tuesday, even though board members had just received a stern warning from their county overseers. Shortly before the meeting, the Los Angeles County Office of Education approved the contract but released a letter stating that it “continues to move the District toward fiscal insolvency” and that its costs — including more than $400 million in new hires and to lower class sizes — are “not sustainable.” It gave the district until March 18 to show how it will make cuts or find new funding, or the county could take over all fiscal decisionmaking.

Speaking to the charter resolution, Superintendent Austin Beutner emphasized that it would not impact the district’s existing charter schools.

“I do support strongly school choice for families and recognize charter schools are one of the options for a high-quality education,” he said. “There is nothing in this resolution to close any existing charter schools or reduce the many choices available to families in Los Angeles Unified.”

"I came outside because I wanted to see you and hear you,” @Monica4LAUSD tells #charterschools rally. “Because in the past 15 to 20 years, you have shown up to help L.A. Unified serve all students well. … I appreciate when families in L.A. demand choice.” pic.twitter.com/oxJJRRaxSr

— LA School Report (@LASchoolReport) January 29, 2019

Beutner said at the board meeting and in a statement that he had agreed to the resolution in order to end the strike, that it came up late in the teacher contract negotiations and that it had been introduced by a board member.

A day after the contract deal was reached, District 7 board member Richard Vladovic announced he was the resolution’s sponsor. On Tuesday, he stridently defended it, rejecting a suggested amendment by board member Kelly Gonez that offered multiple changes, such as including local representatives and parents in the study on charters.

“This is not acceptable,” Vladovic said of Gonez’s amendment, because “this doesn’t keep our promise to our labor partners.”

Vladovic did offer his own amendment to his resolution, which he said he didn’t want to do but did in order to get it passed. He added the eight- to 10-month time frame. And he deleted a provision that would have required Beutner to present a plan within 90 days “to pursue laws intended to authorize a moratorium on new charter schools within the boundaries of the District” and to “report if the authority for such a moratorium requires a voter approved ballot initiative at the local or state level.”

Charters were “never meant to supplant a district, but supplement a district,” Vladovic said. “So I want to step back … and look at the financial impact, the educational impact. Has it made a difference?” Vladovic said he helped write the contract language of the district’s first two charter schools 27 years ago, following state passage of the Charter Schools Act of 1992.

Charters are public, nonprofit schools that are privately run. There are currently 225 independent charter schools within L.A. Unified serving more than 112,000 students. L.A. Unified has the most charters of any district in the nation. Ten new charters were approved last year, according to the district.

The resolution will now be sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the State Board of Education and the California Department of Education. While the resolution doesn’t force the state’s hand, it likely will provide political cover for state leadership, namely Newsom, to pursue restrictions on new charters. The new Democratic governor is union-backed and has said he supports greater transparency measures for charters.

The board’s approval of the resolution stood in stark contrast with the throngs of protesters who rallied outside district headquarters hours earlier — some as early as 6 a.m. L.A. Unified School Police said they estimated that about 3,500 people attended the rally.

• Read more: Seen and Heard: Thousands of Pro-Charter School Parents Turn Out to Rally Ahead of Controversial Moratorium Vote at L.A. Board Meeting

Hugo Hernandez, a charter parent and a business owner, said at the rally that “competition is good for our kids’ education.” He said charter schools compete for students “to serve them better, what’s wrong with that?”

Charter school students are arriving at the rally outside @LAschools. School bands are playing while families chant, “My child my choice.” pic.twitter.com/OxMmuIt65P

— Esmeralda Fabian (@EsmeFabianTV) January 29, 2019

About two dozen parents and community members stayed to speak at the board meeting. Emotions were tense, with some charter parent speakers breaking into tears.

One charter school parent was particularly overcome with emotion as she addressed the board.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here,” Roxann Nazario said through tears. She pointed to Vladovic, her board member. “You were the one who [told me that] charter school parents should not feel like they have a Scarlett A on their chest. Well, do you think this helps? What are you doing to bring us together now?”

An L.A. Unified graduate, who now has a bachelor’s degree from UCLA, also spoke against the resolution, fondly remembering her charter school in Huntington Park that gave her access to seven AP classes and four SAT practice tests her senior year.

“I don’t know if I would have made it to UCLA without my charter school, without my mother’s choice to send me there,” she said. She added for Vladovic, “I am the educational impact of charter schools. Although I am one person, if you want to see the educational impact, you can go outside.”

Others, however, viewed the resolution as necessary. Julie Regalado, from East Los Angeles, said already existing charters don’t need to leave. But she doesn’t think there needs to be more.

“There’s a charter school in each corner; we don’t need any more,” she told the board. “The ones that are there, they can stay, but [these schools] are taking a lot of money from my child’s education.”

Scott Mandell, a teacher at Pacoima Middle School, said, “Dr. Vladovic’s resolution was a central part of the agreement” to end the teachers strike and the board needed to uphold that promise.

The resolution was the latest fallout in the battle against charters that engulfed the district during the six-day teacher strike. Charter schools have become a political lightning rod, with United Teachers Los Angeles portraying them as a threat to traditional public schools.

The union has labeled charters as “privatization” schemes, purporting that they siphon away money from district public schools and into corporations.

While charters are privately run and have more discretion around decisions involving curriculum, the length of the school day and year and hiring and firing, they are public schools and non-profit. They “are open to all children, do not require entrance exams … may not discriminate, may not charge tuition [and] must achieve a racial and ethnic balance reflective of the District population,” according to the district website. They are typically not unionized.

After the vote, charter school students, parents, teachers, leaders and advocates announced they will fight back. In a news release, they said “the voice of LAUSD charter public school students and families was completely disregarded during recent contract negotiations” and denounced the “backroom deal that threatens to compromise high-quality public school options throughout the Los Angeles area.”

Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, stated, “For parents, the issue isn’t about politics, it is about what their child needs and what learning environment will help them thrive. Without a doubt, this charter school ban will unfairly target the most vulnerable students in Los Angeles.”

She added, “This resolution to ban charter schools is a solution in search of a problem. The real problem facing Los Angeles public schools is the persistent achievement gap.”

*This article has been updated with a new number of charter schools in L.A. Unified and Vladovic’s own amendment to his resolution.

Myrna Castrejón, CEO of @CALcharters, calls out “Charter nation” to the crowd. “The fight today is about the achievement gap, not about a charter cap. We’re here to fight for all kids in L.A.” She added, “Unionized teachers, we’re here for you too.” pic.twitter.com/qjLaAStVEb

— Esmeralda Fabian (@EsmeFabianTV) January 29, 2019

Families arrive Tuesday morning outside LAUSD headquarters to protest the proposed ban on charter schools.

Today’s L.A. Unified school board vote on a resolution calling for a moratorium on new charter schools is the latest fallout in the battle against charters that engulfed the district during the six-day teacher strike. But despite scant detail on the resolution’s origin and impact, advocates believe it poses an opportunity for an inclusive community discussion on charters’ value and place in the public school system.

The resolution, announced by District 7 board member Richard Vladovic last Wednesday, was a key element in L.A. Unified’s and United Teachers Los Angeles’s agreement one day earlier that ended the strike. If passed, it would direct the superintendent to pursue a moratorium on new charter schools in the district and require the school board to call on state officials to study the financial impact of charters on the district to inform revisions to the state’s charter law. Four of the six board members — the majority of whom were elected with charter organization backing — would have to approve it.

“To think through all of the perspectives on the issue in a thoughtful and in a thorough manner, and getting less than a week between the resolution’s public announcement and its voting, makes that difficult,” District 6 board member Kelly Gonez told LA School Report on Monday. “But as an individual board member, I’m going to do everything possible to get all of the information I need to be well informed.”

How the resolution came about during the negotiations and how it would affect the 110,000 students in the district’s 224 independent charter schools is unclear. Uncertainty and unrest are already being seen through extensive social media campaigns and two rallies scheduled before today’s vote.

: #KidsNotPolitics!!! #NoCharterBan #StandForAllStudents pic.twitter.com/oV6KSd8kYa

— CA Charter Schools Association ‍‍ (@CALcharters) January 29, 2019

But education reformers and some board members say this resolution does offer a silver lining: a chance to push for new evaluation measures, replace rhetoric with facts and bring parents’ opinions to the table.

“This is a call to action,” said Myrna Castrejón, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association. “This is the beginning of a conversation around how do we get this [public school vision] to come to fruition — and what role do charter schools play.”

• Read more: After teacher strike agreement, LAUSD school board to vote Tuesday on supporting charter school moratorium

The proposed moratorium wouldn’t affect already-established charters, but it’s not explicitly outlined in the resolution what it could mean for new or expanded schools, or how long a moratorium could last.

UTLA last Tuesday listed a resolution as the first item in its summary of wins in the new agreement, even though it’s not in the tentative contract. And UTLA posted resolution language that same day, before Vladovic had formally proposed his own. While UTLA’s post looks fairly similar to Vladovic’s resolution, there are some differences: namely, that the union says the resolution is asking for a charter cap — a limit on the number of new schools that could be approved — rather than a moratorium, or temporary pause on any new schools.

Neither UTLA nor Vladovic responded to LA School Report’s requests to clarify the discrepancies. Vladovic during the strike called himself a “founding member of UTLA” on Twitter. He’s also regularly approved charters in the past, voting yes on more than 80 percent of last year’s new charter school petitions, according to CCSA data.

RETHINKING EVALUATIONS

The Charter Schools Act of 1992 made California the second state to allow educators, community members, parents or other groups to create an alternative type of public school. California, unlike several other states, does not have a cap on charter schools.

But some 25 years later, there hasn’t been a reframing for what L.A. Unified’s needs are in 2019 in relation to charters, Gonez said. So she sees a possible study as “a legitimate conversation.”

“Our schools were overcrowded, we had higher birth rates” back then, Gonez said. “And now we have more choices for families: magnets, dual language programs, schools of advanced studies. We’re living in a different ecosystem now than we were. So I think it’s really important to take a step back and look at the impact of charters on our communities.”

L.A. Unified has lost more than 245,000 students in the past 15 years — about 35 percent from transfers to charter schools, and the rest to lower birth rates, dropouts and transfers out of the district. Independent charter school enrollment rose steadily between 2013 and 2018, CCSA reported, though traditional school enrollment is declining by at least 12,000 students a year. There were 10 new charters approved by the LA Unified school board last year, a district spokeswoman confirmed.

Many charter advocates say they aren’t opposed to taking a fresh look at charter accountability; they welcome it, even, if it’s in the interest of students. But organizations like CCSA are viewing this upcoming resolution as a way to re-up calls for charter policy protections, too.

Charters have largely outperformed their peers, even though they get close to $2,000 less in per-pupil funding than district schools. About 48 percent of Los Angeles charter schools yield significantly larger learning gains in reading, while 44 percent do so in math, according to a CREDO study. Charter students also benefit from an average 50 extra days of learning in reading and an additional 79 days of learning in math annually. Those number could be skewed, however, by the fact that charters can draw students who are already high-performing, said Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at UC Berkeley.

But the way charters are reviewed is outdated. Since the state got rid of the Academic Performing Index in 2014, it “has not updated actual charter renewal criteria to match up with the new Common Core state standards” a CCSA spokeswoman said. “It is a huge problem for our schools because it leaves them vulnerable to being closed over political fights. … It’s easier to shut down or close charter schools if you don’t have a clear, agreed upon parameter in terms of performance and what they should be doing.”

The resolution also brings the opportunity to talk about evaluating all schools. A trio of three local advocacy organizations have called for expanding the resolution’s accountability and transparency focus to district schools as well as charters. Kids Coalition, Parent Revolution and Speak UP plan to present a resolution amendment during today’s meeting calling for a “consistent” public charter school renewal policy that emphasizes “student improvement and student outcomes,” “parent-friendly district school transparency policies” and new district policies that reward high-performing public charter and district schools.

• Read more: Commentary: Rush to pass ‘backroom’ deal banning charters would be bad for L.A. students — transparency calls should be for all public schools

The district has not shown “vigor” in addressing inequities in district schools, making a charter-only target inappropriate, the groups wrote in an op-ed, pointing out that only 38 percent of L.A. Unified graduates are deemed college or career ready on the state’s accountability measurement tool. Parent Revolution in a tweet also spotlighted low achievement in Vladovic’s district, where it said 52 percent of the elementary schools are rated in the lowest two categories — red or orange — in English language arts performance on the California School Dashboard.

Cool, cool, cool. Here’s the performance of students in district schools in your school board district from last year. https://t.co/v3PmDT0JGC … Will there be reflection and analysis of the impact of the district on the children that attend this schools?

— Parent Revolution (@parentrev) January 23, 2019

“We agree with UTLA’s call for charter accountability and charter transparency, and we think that there’s good work that can be done collaboratively on that front,” Ben Austin, executive director of Kids Coalition, told LA School Report. But “that rubric should be applied to all public schools. All public schools should be fundamentally accountable for the outcomes of students.”

GETTING PAST RHETORIC TO FACTS

While charter school advocates and district leadership are eager to talk about the future of charters in L.A. Unified, the subject has been mired by politics and divisive rhetoric — especially during the strike.

The resolution provides a platform to cut through the rhetoric and get to the facts, Castrejón said. “It’s all very politicized, and we’re never going to escape that in the end,” she said. “Everyone has the intent to serve students well, but we focus on different ways to get there. And part of what we can do is … to help people understand the true story.”

One flashpoint is the public vs. private debate. The union has labeled charters as “privatization” schemes, purporting that they siphon away money from district public schools and into corporations. Charters are often philanthropically supported by wealthy foundations, such as The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Beutner: Privatization’s best friend! He willfully ignores the $600 million drained by charters from our schools every year, says unchecked charter growth is a “distraction” and claims not to know what “privatization” is. #chartercap #utlastrong #charteraccountabilitynow pic.twitter.com/tGtKL5Tp9t

— United Teachers Los Angeles (@UTLAnow) December 21, 2018

The pro-charter corporate Democrats for Ed Reform in LA are making moves to dismantle public education. They are furthering the Trump/DeVos’ agenda of privatizing our public schools. Luckily we have the power of unity in our union and our community. #UTLAStrong #LAUSDStrike pic.twitter.com/xK6MM24wCx

— United Teachers Los Angeles (@UTLAnow) January 21, 2019

Even the day after the tentative contract agreement, when the mayor called for both sides to put away divisive language, the union tweeted: “We were able to wrest major concessions from a billionaire superintendent intent on privatizing the district.”

“This is fundamentally about the teachers union seeing charter schools as an existential threat to their power,” Kids Coalition’s Austin said.

Advocates say that mentality neglects the fact that L.A. Unified’s charters  — although they are privately run and have more discretion around decisions involving curriculum, the length of the school day and year and hiring and firing — are public schools and non-profit.  They “are open to all children, do not require entrance exams … may not discriminate, may not charge tuition [and] must achieve a racial and ethnic balance reflective of the District population,” according to the district website. They are typically not unionized.

Another area to clear up, advocates say, is how charters are largely blamed for the district’s declining enrollment and funding losses, as state funding follows students to their public schools.

Last year, only 13 percent of district enrollment loss was from families choosing charters, according to a Reason Foundation study. The decline is attributable as well to lower birth rates, dropouts and transfers out of the district, driven in part by the rising cost of renting in Los Angeles. Experts say the district’s low achievement metrics are also a detraction.

It must be recognized that there is no one cause for the decline in the District’s enrollment, but rather it is the culmination of various factors, some within and some outside, of the District’s control.

— Robin Lake (@RbnLake) January 15, 2019

Another argument is that charters are not being properly regulated or held accountable.

Fuller told LA School Report he doesn’t believe the district “holds their feet to the fire.”

“It’s been a hazy line because there’s technically public accountability, but L.A. Unified has never done a good job assessing the effectiveness of charter schools,” Fuller said, referencing findings from a study he co-authored. “The district has never been assertive in pursuing the question of ‘Are charters more effective than [traditional] public schools?’ I think that’s why people like Alex [Caputo-Pearl] say, ‘These are like private schools.’” The school board approved 54 of the 59 independent charter renewal applications in 2017-18, according to the district.

A CCSA spokeswoman said in response that L.A. Unified is considered “a model authorizer in terms of holding schools accountable” with new charter petitions and charter renewal applications, which are required every five years. There are about 50 staff members in the district’s charter school division that divvy up caseloads.

By the time a petition goes to the school board for a vote — which follows about two months of overview by the charter division staff and “extensive back and forth” like line-item, red-line edits and capacity hearings — “you can be confident that the [petitioned] school is high capacity, and that they’re going to be able to open the school in the next few years and do a decent job serving kids,” the spokeswoman said.

She added that once charters are approved, they have many of the same obligations as traditional schools, such as submitting budgets to the county and commissioning third-party financial audits. District staff visit each charter school at least once annually.

Ten of the 19 new charter petitions to the district made it to board approval in 2017-18, the district confirmed. Five were denied; four were withdrawn.

Gonez said it’s easy to forget the charter school argument has shades of grey. “It’s not black and white, and unfortunately, when we are so ideologically polarized, most people don’t want to see nuance,” she said. The current rhetoric “makes it hard to have substantive conversations.”

She added that many parents have struggled with charters’ vilification. “I think there is willingness to address the very legitimate concerns we’re hearing [about charter growth], but there is also a request for more of a civil discourse. And a request for us to address these issues in a way where it doesn’t feel like we’re demonizing parents and families and educators.”

GETTING PARENTS A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Advocates and education watchers agreed that this resolution poses an opportunity for parent insight that wasn’t available during the negotiations between UTLA and L.A. Unified.

“Parents were not at the table. Charters were certainly not at the table. And broader Los Angeles voters were not at the table,” Castrejón said. “We will definitely be part of the conversation [now].”

Thousands of charter school students, families and community members will rally at L.A. Unified headquarters today to oppose a charter ban, followed by a pro-moratorium, union-backed rally. Parents will also be addressing the board during the discussion on the resolution.

The board meets at 1 p.m. at district’s Beaudry Avenue headquarters. It will be livestreamed here.

A group of parents last week held their own news conference outside City Hall, saying their voices need to be heard when significant decisions are made about their children’s education, and asking for inclusion in local decision-making at their schools.

https://twitter.com/CALcharters/status/1090301403497721856
https://twitter.com/jollenelevid/status/1090297177295876097

“We don’t want just to be spectators. We want to be part of the action,” said Evelyn Alemán, who has a child at Grover Cleveland Charter High School and is a member of the LAUSD Parent Advisory Committee.

Bielma Pérez, a charter school parent who has a first-grade son at Fenton Avenue Charter School in the east San Fernando Valley, told LA School Report last week at the news conference that she believes charters are being “attacked unfairly.”

“Charter schools should have the same opportunity [as] traditional schools to serve students,” she said in Spanish.

A mother of a special education student also took to Twitter to express concerns with the resolution, tweeting Saturday that her daughter’s charter school — the CHIME Institute — is an “innovative” school where her child “is fully included.”

@alexcoheninla @nickmelvoin @AustinLASchools Re: @LASchools vote on capping LAUSD Charter Schools this Tues. Every child should have access to a great school. For my disabled child, that school is @CHIMEInstitute an innovative public charter school where she is fully included. pic.twitter.com/2M6jYn9h6q

— Dawn H (@dboeckermann) January 26, 2019

These concerns and uncertainties emphasize the importance of getting — and keeping — the conversation going, Castrejón said.

“We will all have to continue to engage,” she said. “I’m optimistic, and we’re looking forward to addressing our vision and our concerns and advocating for our children in a way that is inclusive and not divisive. This is what democracy is.”

Disclosure: The 74, the parent organization of LA School Report, receives funding from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

In the early 1990s, a critical moment for our city, charter public schools — overseen and regulated by L.A. Unified and operated directly by non-profit organizations and their school communities — were introduced in California to help give every kid, regardless of ZIP code, access to the type of high-quality education that wealthy families take for granted. Since then, our city has been a proof point that when we give educators more control of resources to run schools, the flexibility to do what they know works and accountability for the results, we can truly improve education outcomes for kids in every neighborhood.

We have proof today that charter public schools have helped to dramatically accelerate the learning for kids in Los Angeles who need it the most. L.A. Unified has been upheld as a national model for charter authorizers when it comes to approving and overseeing schools that help black and brown students achieve.

According to research by Stanford University, charters generate the learning equivalent of four extra months in math and 2.5 months in reading. For low-income Latino students, for every two years that they are enrolled in a charter school, they gain well over three years of learning in math and more than 2.5 years of learning in English language arts, compared to what is happening in LAUSD district schools.  The 2018 state tests results show charter schools performed better for every measured student group across math and English language tests. This decade, only seven schools in L.A. Unified have won the National Blue Ribbon award: six of the seven are charter schools where students are predominantly low-income students of color.

But now, the Board of Education is on the precipice of robbing our city of this important lever for innovation. Tuesday’s Board of Education resolution endorsing a ban on new charter schools isn’t based on research, and it isn’t good policymaking. It would cut off parent choice and cripple one of our city’s best-proven strategies for education innovation and student success. Schools like the CHIME Institute and WISH Academy are national leaders in special education practices. Networks like KIPP LA Public Schools, Ednovate and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools are helping our most underserved students get to and through college at rates far beyond the national average.

A blanket ban on any new charter schools, even replications of high-performing organizations with student waitlists, makes little sense. When researchers at Stanford University studied charter school caps, they found that charter caps lead to significantly lower academic growth.  The U.S. Department of Education concluded that they “are of little value in the quest for [school] quality.”

To be clear, the anti-charter rhetoric that is permeating the education conversation in L.A. is not backed by evidence. Two recent major studies of charter school research found that in nearly every case, charter schools had a positive or neutral impact on the learning of students who stayed in traditional district schools.

This makes sense here, too. Over the past 25 years, even as charter schools have expanded, L.A. Unified’s graduation rate had nearly doubled. Most of that credit should go to the hardworking principals, teachers and students in L.A. Unified, who have moved to embrace innovative models and more flexibility for educators, too. But some of that credit can be shared with the educators in charter schools who have proven that every child can succeed if given the right support and setting. All schools in Los Angeles are better today than they were before charters existed.

It would be naïve to say that charter schools have no impact on the district. But it is even more naïve, and harmful to kids, to say that the only way to address these challenges is to ban something that works. Instead, we should be working together toward solutions that support every student. The legislature can increase per-pupil funding for all kids, bringing us to and above the national average.

The state could also do what Massachusetts does to help district budgets without removing options for families. This concept, called “hold-harmless” funding, would allow the district to keep stable funding when a parent decides that a charter school is the best option for her child. We haven’t broached that conversation in California. But we should. And to do that, we must tackle these issues together instead of blaming one part of our education community for decades-long systemic dysfunction.

Not every charter school is successful. And a few have even been downright bad. But we already have a proven way to deal with this problem. Every five years, the L.A. Unified board has to vote to reauthorize every charter school. Schools that are not working should be closed, and this board has the power and overwhelming support to follow through with that.

But there aren’t enough great public schools in our city. Educators across L.A. need to have more control, more flexibility to personalize learning and be creative in the classroom, and more funding to ensure our kids have everything they need. And we need more, not less, of what works. We need our public officials to choose kids over politics. The charter community stands ready to work with the district to create solutions for every kid. A new charter ban in a city where they are working best for kids who need charters most isn’t one of them.

Emilio Pack is the Executive Director of STEM Prep Schools, and Cristina de Jesus is the President and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools California. They are the co-chairs of the Los Angeles Advocacy Council, a council of charter school leaders that work together to improve public education for all students in Los Angeles.