This is part of a series looking at the various types of schools in LA Unified. For facts, comparisons and maps of charters in LA, click here. Follow the series with magnet schools and affiliated charters.

Independent charter schools have come to often dominate the conversation surrounding LA Unified. Proponents hail them as a savior to the district; their detractors blame them for the district’s financial woes.

The California Charter Schools Act was passed in 1992, but it took more than a decade for charters to become a significant part of the district. Part of the reason is the original act only allowed for 10 schools per district, regardless of its size, and it wasn’t until 1998 that the law was amended to allow for unlimited expansion.

By the 2001-02 school year, there were only 13 independent charters authorized by the district.

“At the time I came on the board, charters were seen as kind of a novelty and a place to send your principals who were a little too creative for their own good,” said Caprice Young, who served on the LA Unified school board from 1999 to 2003 before founding the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) in 2003. Today she is CEO of Magnolia Public Schools, which operates eight independent charters authorized by LA Unified.

David Tokofsky served on the board from 1995 to 2007 and said in the early days he was a supporter of charters, but when large charter management organizations (CMOs) started to open multiple schools around the turn of the century, his opinion changed.

“Most of the people at that stage (in the ’90s) were respected LAUSD veterans. I think in the machine politics of government organizations, they were more individualistic than if you were in this guy’s machinery or that guy’s machinery. They were mavericks,” said Tokofsky, now a consultant for the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles.

“They were people who thought they knew some stuff about good schools. They knew the district well, but they felt that the standard operations systems were not necessarily maximizing creativity. That’s what the law was all about. It wasn’t about that you are free from all regulations of government.”

Irene Sumida is executive director of Fenton Charter Schools, which today has five schools in its network. When Fenton Avenue Charter converted from a traditional school to a charter in 1993, it was only the seventh charter school in the district.

“I think the school district saw us as a novelty or an experiment that might succeed, or that might not. I cannot say that I felt real support for what we were doing, and we were very much treated like outsiders,” Sumida said.

After the charter law was changed to allow for unlimited expansion, slowly more CMOs began to open multiple schools in the district, and that is when both supporters and detractors started to take notice. PUC Schools, which operates 16 schools today, opened its first school in 1999. Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, which operates 27 schools in the district, opened its first school in 2004. Magnolia Public Schools opened its first school in 2002.

In 1999, both Dorsey High School and Crenshaw High School converted to independent charters but within a few years converted back to being traditional schools.

“Partly because the whole Dorsey cluster and Crenshaw cluster gave up their charter status people kind of thought, ‘Well, maybe this charter school thing is going to stay just being a novelty.’ It really started hitting the stratosphere in 2003 to 2008,” Young said.

In 2003-04, there were 24 charters in the district. By 2007-08, there were 114.

“From ’03 to ’07 is when the expansion started, and somewhere around ’05 there grew a little more antagonism,” Tokofsky said.

In 2003, Granada Hills High School converted to an independent charter school, and Sumida said that started to turn some heads.

“Honestly, for me, when Granada Hills High School decided to become an independent charter school, I really feel that things changed, even for Fenton,” Sumida said. “I thought that there was much more pressure on us and it was just a very different climate. It just seemed to make the district more aware of what was happening, that they may lose some of their comprehensive high schools. I think it shook them up that a high-performing school like Granada was leaving them.”

Tokofsky pointed to Young and the formation of CCSA as a turning point, because the organization helped court big donors like the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to fund CMOs.

“Caprice changed the discourse when she lost the board election and went to head up the charter association and the Walmart money came in. That’s the game changer, when it went from individual charters to multiples,” he said.

By the 2008-09 school year there were 137 independent charters with roughly 60,000 students enrolled, and the growth has continued. In the 2015-16 school year there were 221 charters authorized by LA Unified with more than 101,00 students enrolled. This school year there are 228 independent charters with more than 107,000 students — 16 percent of the district’s 665,000 total K-12 students.

• Tomorrow: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools: A replicable model or unique success?

Disclosure: LA School Report is the West Coast bureau of The74Million.org, which is funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation.

By Benjamin Feinberg

Teachers unions often argue that the “last in, first out” policy is the only fair way to lay off teachers. Reformers say that LIFO protects bad teachers while indiscriminately getting rid of young and creative new teachers.

The way we lay off teachers will become more important as Los Angeles Unified School District enters yet another budget crisis.

Let’s ignore the policy argument for a moment and instead focus on LIFO’s effect. Ironically, this policy supported by teachers unions ends up benefiting charter schools.

To get a good understanding of LIFO’s impact, we should look back to 2009, when LAUSD laid off 1,806 teachers.

THE YEAR I WAS LAID OFF

This happens to be a very personal subject for me because I was laid off that year.

I started my teaching career in 2008. Three weeks after the first day of school, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the economy went into a tailspin. At first, this didn’t really hit the teaching sector hard, but by February it became clear that layoffs were coming. And then, on May 15, 2009, 5,618 LAUSD teachers received layoff notices.

Many of those layoffs were rescinded, and those whose notices were not rescinded were told that we could sub for ourselves and stay at our schools. But from a more personal perspective, getting a layoff notice makes you panic.

That is exactly what I did. I. Freaked. Out.

As a relatively risk-averse person, I chose to apply for a new teaching job.

And who was hiring?

Charter schools. Oodles and oodles of charter schools.

I was hired at Aspire Public Schools, one of the fastest-growing charter networks in Los Angeles. My girlfriend was hired at Partnership to Uplift Communities (PUC Schools). My friends got jobs at Green Dot, Synergy, Para Los Niños, Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools (ICEF), the list goes on.

In fact, of my Teach For America (TFA) cohort who received layoff notices that year, only 21 percent were rescinded, 18 percent decided to sub for themselves, and 57 percent headed to charter schools. LIFO took a bunch of young, excited teachers who already had a year of experience under their belts and pushed them into charter schools.

FROM DISTRICT TO CHARTER

But it gets better. Charter schools are rapidly expanding in Los Angeles, meaning that good teachers can quickly rise through the ranks of charter schools and become administrators.

Out of that group of 22 TFA corps members who were laid off, five are now charter school administrators, one is a charter school recruiter, and one worked for the California Charter Schools Association. One person who decided to sub for themselves is now running for a spot on the LAUSD School Board on a pro-charter ticket (although he would say that he isn’t just pro-charter, he is pro-good-schools).

What do these teachers have to say about their shift from the district to charter schools after getting laid off?

Michelle Wilson, who was laid off from Gardena High School, found a job at Synergy Charter Academy. “I saw that I was serving students from the same demographics,” she said. “I also worked with more colleagues who were passionate and willing to make changes in and out of the classroom to impact students.” She is now an administrator at Green Dot.

Casie Little was laid off from Bret Harte Middle School and has worked at three charter schools since. She left LAUSD feeling defeated but says that when she joined a charter school, her enthusiasm for teaching was rekindled.

“I discovered a passion for curriculum planning, instruction and assessment that I never knew I had.” She is now an administrator at Wilder’s Preparatory Academy Charter School.

Casie has strong opinions about what successful schools look like based on her experience.

“When I hear or see other admin that don’t uphold the values I was shown at PUC and at the two schools I was at Green Dot, I know that it’s not best for kids and that data backs that up.”

A FUTURE THAT ISN’T LAUSD

These are young educators that could have been part of the LAUSD family. Instead, they were booted out without evaluation. They were let go of simply because they were new.

From my perspective, unions shoot themselves in the foot by supporting LIFO. The policy supplies charter schools with a stream of fresh young blood, who could have been a boon for traditional public schools.

These teachers are becoming leaders who will lead the way toward a new educational landscape. And, unfortunately, that future isn’t in LAUSD.

Benjamin Feinberg is an eighth-grade math teacher at LA Unified’s Luther Burbank Middle School. Follow his blog at schooldatanerd.com.

This article was published in partnership with Education Post.

A groundbreaking summit that plans to share best practices between LA Unified traditional school and charter school educators is at capacity with more than 350 people signed up for the Saturday event planned by Superintendent Michelle King.

From the moment she was appointed to the position in January, King said she planned to find ways to share best practices between educators at magnet, charter, pilot and traditional schools resulting in this Promising Practices Forum scheduled all day at the Sonia Sotomayor Learning Academies in Cypress Park. But don’t expect to just drop in to attend.

Although the event was free and open to the public for registration of 350 seats in early June, the registration closed on July 8. According to district spokesperson Monica Carazo, “We are at capacity and cannot accommodate any other participants.”

The event will kick off with school leaders such as King, school board President Steve Zimmer, board members Ref Rodriguez and Monica Ratliff as well as Local District South Superintendent Christopher Downing and Local District Northwest Superintendent Vivian Ekchian. They also expect Antonia Hernandez, president of the California Community Foundation, 
Yvette King-Berg, executive director of the Youth Policy Institute, and other LA Unified and charter school leaders.

Rodriguez and King plan to lead a panel discussion at the beginning of the event. Rodriguez spearheaded a resolution recently asking the superintendent to report back to the board after identifying successful programs and potential funding sources.

The forum is a culmination of King’s seven-month “listen and learn” tour as superintendent, and she is well aware of the divisiveness and conflicts that have occurred between traditional and charter schools with issues involving student safety, school choice, charter co-locations, teaching assessments, equitable funding, union disputes and general distrust among parents.

The forum will feature more than two dozen breakout sessions where school experts plan to share ideas and successful strategies for improving learning, parent engagement and school climate.

Results from this and other meetings will form the basis of King’s three-year plan for the district.

“We are all LA Unified school students,” King said at a previous forum with parents when asked about what she thought of charter schools. “It is unfortunate we have labels, saying that this one is better than that one. It’s not us versus them.”

Students rejoice at news to keep open New Designs Center in Watts

The Los Angeles Unified school board faced long hours of personal and emotional pleas yesterday on a vast array of issues, including how to spend $837 million in money directed to helping low-income students, children in foster care and English learners.

A parade of community members addressing the board at the end, each speaking for two minutes to express support for a particular need, was clearly the heart of the meeting. It was an exercise conceived by board President Richard Vladovic to show that the board is listening to public concerns, even though the hard work of making line-item budget decisions is yet ahead, and it remains unclear whether anything anyone said changes members’ priorities.

In fact, in a meeting that stretched well-past the cocktail and dinner hours, the most fruitful arguments came from parents, students, and even a former congresswoman, who convinced the board to keep open two charter schools in Watts, one of the most economically-challenged areas of the city.

After several hours of testimony, the board defied the recommendations of Superintendent John Deasy’s staff and voted against shutting down the Watts Learning Center Charter Middle School (see LAUSD report card here) and New Designs Charter School – Watts (see LAUSD report card here).

In both cases, the schools were found by district staff to offer an “unsound education program.”

At Watts Learning Center, the 2013 API of 621 was lower than the Resident Schools Median of 632 and is a decline of 56 points when considering the school’s 2009-2010 Growth API of 677. And according to Jose Cole-Gutierrez, the head of LA Unified’s Charter School Division, students there are underperforming in all subject areas; the overall the 2012-13 English Language Arts proficiency rate was 27 percent while the math proficiency rate was 11 percent.

But advocates of the school, including attorney Janelle Ruley, said the staff is “working tirelessly” to improve the quality of education.

“We are turning a corner…we’re on the road to recovery,” she assured the board.

And apparently they agreed. The board failed to get the four votes needed to uphold a motion to deny its charter renewal, thus keeping it open.

In the case of New Designs, the district had recommended a denial of the renewal charter petition claiming it, too, is performing worse than surrounding schools. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) also urged the board to close the school.

However, several speakers disputed the findings by LA Unified and the CCSA.

One supporter of New Designs, a math teacher there, skewered the board for misreading its own data and accused the CCSA of “doing a hit job” on the school.

“If you read this report carefully you will be amazed at how the charter school division will cite the right law, use the right data, but somehow come to the wrong conclusion,” he said.  “Somehow they said that our API score, 674, is less than 609, the resident schools API. And that is where they got it wrong, and the math is wrong. Board members, rectify this wrong.”

Former Congresswoman Diane Watson also appealed to the board to give the school more time. She argued that despite evidence of poor performance, New Designs plays a pivotal role in the community.

“If there is any area that has been underserved by providing education for all children, it is the area referred to as Watts,” Watson told the board. “And if you [deny the renewal] and leave a hole in the area it is a misdeed.”

Eventually, the board vote ended, 3 to 3, leaving it open. But Vladovic warned New Designs leadership to remedy a failure to offer Special Education services consistent with students’ Individualized Education Programs or it would be back before the board to defend itself.

Following the most contentious arguments of the day, the board unanimously approved a plan from board member Monica Garcia to develop more wellness centers — school-based health clinics — that can provide “comprehensive and integrated acute and preventative medical, mental, oral and social support care to students.”

Arguments persisted over whether the board should commit $50 million for the next phase of development or, as member Tamar Galatzan unsuccessfully argued, create an overall development plan to leverage money from private partners before earmarking a specific amount from the district.

Currently, 12 wellness centers exist throughout the District, and two more will open this fall. In all, they cost the district $34 million.

“LAUSD’s Wellness Initiative represents an approach to student and community health that is among the most hopeful strategies to health equity for all,” said Maryjane Puffer, executive director of the L.A. Trust for Children’s Health.

“Over 20,000 students, family and community members have used the services and that will more than triple by next year.  LAUSD and partners should invest generously in this opportunity for student health that directly leads to student success.”

The board’s action approved the $50 million but also directs the superintendent to create within six months a plan that identifies opportunities to leverage matching funds that expands the number of wellness centers and services at schools.

Another hotly debated issue was a motion to support a living wage of $15 an hour for the city’s hotel workers, which it eventually did.

Although the resolution is a largely symbolic measure with no direct bearing on the school district, it may have significant implications for pending negotiations with several of the district’s labor unions, especially SEIU Local 99, which is asking the district to raise its members’ salaries to a minimum of $15 an hour. Many earn considerably less.

Board member Monica Ratliff was the only member to voice opposition. “I worry that this is hypocritical,” she said after pointing out that not all LA Unified employees earn as much.  “We need to get our own house in order.” She abstained in the vote.

The eight hour meeting concluded with the line of parents, students and community leaders weighing in on Deasy’s proposed Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP).

More than 80 people signed up to speak, some arriving as early as 6 a.m. — seven hours before the start of the meeting and more than 11 hours before the first speaker took the podium. For two minutes at a time, they pressed the board to allocate funds to their cause of choice.

Several speakers associated with the Community Rights Campaign lobbied for restorative justice counselors; advocates for English Language Learners asked for additional support services; and still other parents asked the district to restore after school programs and arts  education.

How persuasive any of them was will be more apparent at the June board meeting, when the board moves closer to finalizing the budget for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Every charter school in the district — and that includes 52 affiliated and more than 200 independent schools — must craft an individual Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to show how it will disperse funds from Governor Jerry Brown’s new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).

Traditional LA Unified public schools are covered under the district’s LCAP, so they’ve been spared the extra paperwork.

“This is the fourth major plan that is due this month and on that timeline, the LCAP is the last one that’s due, so my attention has been on the first three,” Joe Martinez, principal of Carpenter Community Charter School in the Valley told LA School Report.

Martinez is also chairman of Valley Affiliated Charter Schools, a coalition of 43 charter schools in the San Fernando Valley who are working together to meet state and federal funding guidelines.

He says all charter schools have been facing deadlines for major issues. Orders for textbooks were due last week, each school’s Single Plan for Student Achievement is due to the state at the end of the week, and next week, they’ll have to finalize their annual budgets for the 2014-15 school year.

“Once those get done, then I’ll start focusing on the LCAP,” Martinez said.

That’s not to say they charters and the district haven’t been preparing for the April 30 LCAP deadline.

Jose Cole-Gutierrez, chief of the charter schools division for the district, met with all affiliated charter school leaders last week.

“We’ve given them templates to use as models so that they’re not all starting from scratch,” he told LA School Report.

“We know there’s a lot on principals’ plates, and the LCAP is new, but we’ve tried to create a web of support [for charter schools],” he said.

The district has assembled a team with members from six offices including Budget Services and the Office of Instruction to help affiliated charter school leaders navigate the new process.

Once the district has approved the charter school LCAPs, they head to the state in July.

When asked if he is stressed about the approaching due date, Martinez laughed and said, “We’re not going to lose sleep over it, we’re just going to make sure it gets done.”