Carol Burris

Note: This post originally appeared on Education Post.

By Caroline Bermudez

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes about “a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California” in Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet, a blog more slanted than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

But as is typically true with Burris, her writing is long on bloviation and short on accuracy and reason. It seems as if she’s setting the stage for a report on charter schools her organization, the Network for Public Education, will publish next spring.

She mentions a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and Public Advocates contending 253 charter schools in the state, or approximately 20 percent, have illegal admissions policies.

Since the report’s release, Southern California Public Radio reported more than 50 charter schools have been removed from the list. A number of the violations were the result of poorly worded language or outdated documents posted on schools’ websites, hardly nefarious orchestrations.

An ACLU attorney, Victor Leung, said, in the same SCPR article, “the vast majority of schools contacting us have been in a really constructive way.” He added, “Most of these schools were quite concerned they had bad policies posted on their websites and they all wanted to change them pretty quickly.”

Contrary to Burris’ assertion that they shun accountability, charter school officials have called for better oversight instead of the hodgepodge system in place whereby 324 local, county and state agencies act as authorizers.

Jed Wallace, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association (a group that draws Burris’ particular ire), has written about the need to close failing charter schools. Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, penned a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, explaining how the current system of oversight falls short:

Charter schools are not the primary focus of any of these agencies. Instead, school districts and county education offices were mandated to oversee charter schools by the state Legislature and they are now stuck with a complex task many never wanted to begin with.

School districts in particular, working within tight budgets, often don’t have the capacity or staffing to deal effectively with charter schools. Most districts must direct the majority of their time and energy into operating traditional public schools.

Much of the targets of Burris’ criticism are virtual charter schools, which many charter school advocates do not support because of their abysmal performance. Burris may believe she’s done some substantive sleuthing here, but charter advocates beat her to the punch in reporting the failures of virtual charter schools some time ago.

ABOUT THAT TEACHERS UNION ‘STUDY’

Burris’ shoddy attempts at commentary don’t end there. She cites a report funded by United Teachers Los Angeles alleging charter schools have drained the Los Angeles Unified School District of $500 million. Aside from the teachers union’s obvious agenda behind the report, the findings bear further scrutiny—even the district has disputed them.

LAUSD has lost money for students it no longer serves; this is neither money promised to the district nor money taken away by charter schools. The district still receives the same dollar amount per pupil, yet while student enrollment has declined, the number of full-time staff at LAUSD has increased, according to a report commissioned by the district.

The dip in students is also not entirely attributable to charter schools. The same report found that half of the loss is due to a decrease in the birth rate and students transferring to other school districts. Furthermore, LAUSD students attend school less often than the statewide average, resulting in daily losses of revenue.

The report never blames charter schools for the loss of revenue. Instead, it advises LAUSD to study why families leave traditional public schools for charter schools.

Burris wades into money and paints a grossly imbalanced picture of charter schools with coffers padded by billionaires all the while neglecting to mention that the most powerful and largest political war chest in California belongs to the California Teachers Association, which outspends large corporations such as AT&T and Chevron.

From 2000-2009, the union dispersed more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses.

Pot, meet kettle.

Half of the top 10 high schools in California are charter schools. In LAUSD, charter schools are outperforming traditional public schools (but not magnet schools because charter schools don’t cherry pick as they do).

Hillary Rodham Clinton voiced her support for charter schools—at an event held by the National Education Association, no less.

You didn’t read any of these facts in Burris’ post because they don’t fit her conveniently concocted narrative of charter schools undermining public education.

My only hope is that those who benefit the most from charters—low-income families of color—don’t buy into these falsehoods and lose an opportunity to get off the waiting lists and find a better school for their children.

Caroline Bermudez is senior writer at Education Post. Before that she was a staff editor at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, covering the nonprofit world, with a particular focus on foundations and high net-worth giving.

By Caroline Bermudez

Nearly two years ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez posed a question in an op-ed worth revisiting.

“Is the L.A. teachers union tone deaf?”

Based on a recent speech given by Alex Caputo-Pearl, the head of United Teachers Los Angeles, the answer is a definitive yes.

The juvenile world of heroes and villains Caputo-Pearl described, one where evil corporations and billionaires look to profit from public education while scrappy, earnest underdogs try to stop them, bears no semblance to reality.

Teachers unions in California comprise one of the most powerful political forces in the state.

Rather than admit this, Caputo-Pearl issued a battle cry worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in his speech given at the UTLA Leadership Conference:

“With our contract expiring in June 2017, the likely attack on our health benefits in the fall of 2017, the race for Governor heating up in 2018, and the unequivocal need for state legislation that addresses inadequate funding and increased regulation of charters, with all of these things, the next year-and-a-half must be founded upon building our capacity to strike, and our capacity to create a state crisis, in early 2018. There simply may be no other way to protect our health benefits and to shock the system into investing in the civic institution of public education.”

What is glaring in Caputo-Pearl’s speech is that aside from mentioning his own two children, the word “children” was said only once. This speaks volumes as to the rationale behind his leadership, a role serving the interests of adults before those of students. Threatening to strike should be an absolute last resort, not the first order of action.

It calls to mind a classic paradox.

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

The unstoppable force is the rising cost of health care and pensions in this nation. As a result of these sharply increasing costs, LAUSD faces a staggering amount of debt, to the tune of more than $11 billion, that threatens to cripple the entire system because the district is on the hook, per demands made by UTLA, to provide lifetime health benefits and retirement pensions to its employees.

According to a report written by an independent financial review panel that was commissioned by LAUSD, the district owes more than $20,000 per student for unfunded liabilities (see page 44) although per pupil expenditure in California is less than $10,000 per student. Placed in further context, the liability for retirement benefits LAUSD is obligated to pay for is four times that of other large urban school districts. Twenty-seven percent of state funding LAUSD receives goes to paying pension and health care costs before factoring in teacher salaries, school supplies and textbooks.

To fully fund health care benefits, LAUSD would have to pay $868 million every year for 30 years—and it is not alone. Seventy percent of school districts in California provide some variety of lifetime health benefits to retired employees.

The pain will not be felt by Los Angeles alone.

The immovable object is the UTLA, which Lopez wrote, “has shown little flexibility: not on salary negotiations, tenure, student testing, teacher evaluations or anything else.” The district is standing on the edge of a fiscal cliff, yet Caputo-Pearl ignored the findings of the report.

• Enrollment at LAUSD schools has declined by 100,000 students, half of the loss is due to a dip in the birth rate and students transferring to other school districts. The other half has gone to charter schools, but the report’s authors take a neutral stance when it comes to charter schools. They advised the district to study why families decamped for these schools in the hopes of gathering insight.

• Although enrollment has dropped dramatically, the number of full-time staff at LAUSD increased, which the report’s authors wrote merited rethinking.

• Students in the district attend school less often than the statewide average resulting in daily losses of revenue.

• Only 75 percent of LAUSD teachers have a strong attendance rate (defined as attending work at least 96 percent of the time), leading the district to spend $15 million it can ill afford to lose paying for substitute teachers.

These findings paint a more complicated picture than Caputo-Pearl was willing to acknowledge. Instead, he resorted to megalomania. He stated, “We are going to need to build as much power as possible to shift the political dynamics not just in Los Angeles, but in California.”

Except teachers unions have already done just that and have been for years. A Los Angeles Times article stated the California Teachers Association, which UTLA is a part of, is one of the biggest political players in the state with the money to back it up:

“It outpaced all other special interests, including corporate players such as telecommunications giant AT&T and the Chevron oil company, from 2000 through 2009, according to a state study. In that decade, the labor group shelled out more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses — roughly twice that of the next largest spender, the Service Employees International Union.

“Since then it has spent nearly $40 million more, including $4.7 million to help Brown become governor, according to the union’s filings with the secretary of state.”

We are not talking about some cash-strapped upstart, but a well-oiled political machine, a group that will fight tooth and nail to preserve its own interests even if it means bringing about financial ruin.

Caputo-Pearl should not aim to create a state crisis, but to try to prevent one from happening. But when someone delivers a speech about education and the word “children” is barely uttered, holding such a hope is magical thinking. If UTLA doesn’t embrace some measure of compromise with the district, the immovable object will have nothing to meet it.

Caroline Bermudez is a senior writer at Education Post and former reporter at Chronicle of Philanthropy.

By Caroline Bermudez

The great Joan Didion rose to literary fame chronicling her love-hate relationship with her native California. In Where I Was From, she unleashed a cool invective about the state’s less than firm grasp of reality that still applies today:

“A good deal about California, in its own preferred terms, does not add up.”

California, in particular Los Angeles, is defined by its contradictions. It’s a place of indescribable beauty teetering on the edge of environmental disaster. It exudes a glamour and carefree spirit that draws thousands of hopefuls, but as you stroll through the city’s rejuvenated downtown area, you see rows of tents nearby inhabited by the homeless. The University of California system is the nation’s crown jewel of public higher education, yet prisons comprise a bigger chunk of the state’s budget.

Perhaps the most glaring contradiction of California is how it regards K-12 education as both a priority and an afterthought.

A report cited by a recent article in L.A. Weekly shows how out of reach a good school is not only for its many residents scraping by, but also for those who, if they lived in other regions of America, would have a surfeit of options:

“The jaw-dropping takeaway here is that the average home price near the highest-ranking public schools in L.A. is $1,430,000, the report from RentCafe found.”

The same RentCafe report the article refers to determined most high-achieving schools are concentrated in one wealthy area of Los Angeles:

“It defines highest top-ranking campuses as those with ratings of between 8 and 10 on the GreatSchools site. Those compose 12 percent of public elementary schools in L.A. Most of these campuses are on the Westside, the report states. That makes sense, since the median home price on the Westside is now $1.2 million.”

To live in proximity to an excellent public school, a resident of Los Angeles will have to pony up seven figures.

Pause here for a second.

But what about renting?

The outlook does not improve much, according to the report:

“Renters spend approximately $617 more on rent every month to live near top-performing elementary schools in L.A. than those living near low-ranking schools,” a RentCafe spokeswoman said. “That amounts to more than $7,400 a year.

The average rent in a bad-schools neighborhood is $1,614, while the same in a good-schools area is $2,231, the site says. That’s a 38 percent rent difference.”

Los Angeles has one of the most unaffordable rental markets in America. Given the median income in the city is $49,497, the majority of the city’s residents can barely pay their rent let alone purchase a home when the average cost is over $570,000.

Low- and middle-income Angelenos pay a staggering percentage of their salaries on housing for no guarantee of being able to send their children to a decent school.

It’s magical thinking to pretend the vast majority of the city’s residents living outside the tony Westside have equal access to a quality education. And even more magical to think that will change if data used to monitor school quality and funding is cast aside.

California has been on a three-year hiatus from accountability, leaving residents to wonder how school districts are not obligated to demonstrate results when so much money is involved.

The Local Control Funding Formula, passed in 2013, grants school districts unprecedented flexibility over how they spend money with the understanding that extra resources would be directed to low-income students, foster youth and children learning English, a laudable development if the formula was not lacking in transparency.

Teacher evaluations are not tied to test scores, but to vaguely defined “multiple measures.” There has been little discussion as to what to do with low-performing schools. California has become a virtual data desert leaving researchers, policymakers and politicians frustrated—even efforts to track chronic truancy have been thwarted. Three organizations have filed suit contending that the Los Angeles Unified School District shortchanged its funding for low-income children, foster youth, and English-language learners.

Compounding all this is the vacuum created around teacher accountability. It is extremely difficult to dismiss teachers even after multiple complaints of wrongdoing. LAUSD has paid out at least $300 million to settle sexual abuse lawsuits. The district also spends $15 million annually to keep teachers in the limbo of “teacher jails” while they sit and do nothing awaiting internal investigations into alleged misconduct. According to an independent report commissioned by LAUSD, only 75 percent of school staff has strong attendance. The report states on page 14:

“If 25 percent of school site staff are missing 5 percent or more of their work during the school year, the loss of instruction time and productivity, and the expense of finding substitute labor, is deeply troubling.”

California ranks 46th on fourth and eighth grade NAEP scores and the state’s dismal results are further magnified when examined along racial lines. Fewer than one in four Latino children and fewer than one in five African American children are proficient in math.

Nevertheless, conversations about teacher quality in California have mostly come to a standstill. Despite study after study illustrating its importance and how poor children of color are denied good teachers, progress has been lagging. To wit: the LAUSD board is only just now beginning to entertain the idea of sending talented teachers to struggling middle schools.

Yet such a measure will be sure to meet intense opposition from the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles. What ails traditional public schools in the city, the UTLA contends, is charter schools.

Here is magical thinking at its most galling—find fault with school choice. Don’t look inward.

Try telling that to the families who comprise a waitlist of 41,830 students for 282 charter schools. Try telling that to people who fork over ever increasing amounts of money to live in a city that puts education on the backburner (whose mayor is known for sidestepping the issue whenever possible). Try convincing these people to not care about how money is given to schools when the system keeps ignoring its neediest students, including their own children.

It is magical thinking for the state of California to not appreciate the anger of many families who have lost faith in its traditional public schools, an anger built over decades.

From EdWeek:

“At root, the problem is trust. For the last half century, education politics has been built on profound distrust of school districts to act in the best interests of poor and minority students. Civil rights efforts in the United States were born of this reality.”

As long as California has a shaky relationship with this reality, distrust will only grow as will the exodus from traditional public schools. And the following kernel of sarcasm, taken from the aforementioned L.A. Weekly article, will continue to be a rueful joke.

“California is the ultimate land of opportunity. And everyone has an equal chance.

“OK, you can stop laughing now.”

Caroline Bermudez is a senior writer at Education Post and former reporter at Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Great Public Schools Now’s executive director, Myrna Castrejon, announces the first grants at a news conference last Thursday.

By Caroline Bermudez

More than once in California, it has taken a major lawsuit to try to propel long-awaited change for its schools. In 1999, the State Allocation Board was sued because of overcrowding in Los Angeles public schools. Last year, a coalition of groups brought a lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) of diverting money away from low-income, foster children, and English-language learners.

So it’s a welcome development when instead of looking to the court system to improve schools, educational inequities can be addressed through partnerships among schools, nonprofits and philanthropies.

Great Public Schools Now (GPSN), a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles, is awarding grants to successful programs and schools—be they traditional public schools, charter schools or magnet—to replicate or expand their efforts to improve schools for 160,000 students in 10 low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods.

On Thursday GPSN announced its first three grants—$2 million for Teach For America to focus on training more special education teachers for traditional schools, $2 million for Equitas Charter Network to build a school and expand its new K-4 campus, and $500,000 for new space for an after school program run by Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA).

The fact that Great Public Schools Now is open to supporting any type of high-achieving program (and not just charter schools) is a refreshing development in a city whose school board has been hostile to the expansion of charters.

For parents who reside in the low-income neighborhoods GPSN will focus on, they say it’s time for the conflict between traditional public schools and charter schools to end.

Mary Najera, community liaison for Extera Public Schools and a veteran parent organizer who lives in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, said she was excited by the collaborative nature of Great Public Schools Now.

“If charter schools are going to work with traditional public schools, then let’s go for it,” she said. “I love the idea that they’re all sitting at the table together. At the end of the day, it’s not your money, it’s the kids’ money.”

Carmen Avalos, city clerk for the South Gate community of Los Angeles and a mother of six children, four of whom attend charter schools, said the Great Public Schools Now plan has been greatly anticipated by parents of color like herself who have endured what she called a “two-tiered system.”

“It’s long overdue, particularly in homogeneous communities of color,” she said. “There should be high-quality access for all students. Zip code should not determine how far you can get.”

As a former LAUSD biology teacher, Avalos said the most promising part of the plan was its emphasis on teachers’ professional development. She said that it was a misconception that struggling neighborhoods don’t have any talented educators.

“We have great teachers, but they don’t have the opportunity to shine and share and learn from others,” Avalos said. “There are not enough [of these] teachers in one school.”

Like so many urban districts, Los Angeles schools suffer a dearth of quality and money. Great Public Schools Now is not putting a cap on how much money it will award or how many organizations will win grants. Not many cities have received such a boon.

“Every kid we help is a win,” said Glenn Gritzner, a GPSN spokesman. “As long as more kids need help, we’re keeping at it.”

That’s belated news for parents like Avalos who experienced years of frustration before finding the right schools for her children—and then had to fight for these schools to remain open.

“Once you know what quality is, you never go back to mediocre,” she said.

DETAILS ON THE GRANT WINNERS

• Teach For America Los Angeles will receive $2 million to train and develop new corps members and alumni. The organization will increase its crop of teachers from 80 to 130 teachers next year. Out of this number, between 45 and 50 members will be placed as special education teachers in traditional public schools and their affiliates.“Given the current talent shortage I knew we would need to increase the number of new teachers joining our Los Angeles corps…This support will allow Teach For America to have a greater presence and impact across the highest-need public schools – with a focus on traditional LAUSD schools – in Los Angeles,” Lida Jennings, executive director of Teacher For America Los Angeles, said in a statement.

• Equitas, founded in 2009 in the Pico-Union neighborhood, got $2 million for a new building for Equitas Academy #3. Malka Borrego, Equitas’ founder and chief executive, says her network has a waitlist of more than 1,000 families. Through the funding, Equitas Academy 3 will be able to expand from 100 kindergarten students to 500 in grades K to 8.“Our families want access to schools. We’re trying to unite Los Angeles and develop strong schools,” said Borrego, a third-generation resident of the neighborhood.

• Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), a nonprofit organization in the Rampart district that operates after-school academic and arts programs for over 2,300 children, won $500,000 to help construct a new 25,000 square foot building. Tony Brown, the charity’s executive director, said its current building is overcrowded and HOLA has a waitlist of more than 300 families.With the grant money, Brown said, HOLA will be able to eliminate the list by 2020. The new building will open next year and give HOLA the ability to accommodate families eager to place their children into its programs.“Ninety-seven percent of the families we serve live in poverty,” Brown said. “They are craving the types of programs and services we provide. This is a huge victory for families who have been in a sub-par system.”

Caroline Bermudez is senior writer at Education Post. Before that she was a staff editor at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, covering the nonprofit world, with a particular focus on foundations and high net-worth giving.