This morning, The 74 CEO Romy Drucker will be moderating a panel at the 24th annual California Charter School Conference in Sacramento about how the mainstream press covers, and occasionally distorts, America’s charter schools sector.

You can stream the event live here, beginning at 10:45 a.m.:

Ahead of the conversation, three of today’s panelists have published a special series of essays on the different narratives that surround, drive, and distort the education reform debate. (Get our newest commentary delivered right to your inbox; sign up for The 74 Newsletter.)

Cook examines the marketing and communication war that has played out behind the policy discussion and surveys the ways in which messaging and misinformation can warp the public’s understanding of education reform. (Read the full essay.)

Bradford looks between the polarized camps of reform advocates and charter critics to see the vast swath of centrist parents who don’t know a thing about charter schools or school choice — yet. Bradford says these are the families that may have the most to gain from additional education options and may be the ones most eager to learn more about the education reform movement. (Read the full essay.)

Drucker offers a more specific case study of a common misrepresentation of charter schools. Just as charter schools have rapidly increased their number of special education students, critics have scaled up their attacks, claiming that charters cherry-pick their students. When the statistics run counter to the narrative, but the media refuse to fact-check the attacks, how are parents supposed to know the truth? (Read the full essay.)

Education Post Director of Outreach and External Affairs Chris Stewart

Stewart says the wider charter school movement is failing to get its message out, in large part because it’s forgetting about the first commandment of politics: IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR BASE. As Stewart sees it, charters are bringing educational alternatives that are better than their competition, that large numbers of parents want. Those parents are the movement’s base — and education reformers should learn from their opponents how to better engage and cultivate those supporters. (Read the full essay.)

To learn more about the event, visit CharterConference.org; share the live stream link here. 

Five independent public charter schools were denied Tuesday night by the LA Unified school board.

The board granted one petition of the nine schools on the special agenda that had been recommended for denial. Another school will likely keep its charter under a last-minute deal, and two were petitions withdrawn.

Here is the action Tuesday night. Come back to LA School Report on Wednesday for a full report.

• El Camino Real Charter High School — The charter will remain, as long as a last-minute deal is ratified next week by the charter’s board. In it, Executive Director David Fehte will resign and four members of the governing board will step down. This is after the district staff had recommended taking the second step toward revoking the school’s charter. The last-minute deal was worked out with the involvement of UTLA, the LA teachers union.

• WISH — The petition was withdrawn prior to the meeting after issues were “remedied” over the weekend, and the petition will instead come before the board in November.

• Citizens of the World — Citizens of the World 3’s petition was granted to expand the elementary school to serve grades 6-8. The organization withdrew its request to open a new school, Citizens of the World Westside, which would have served 740 students in grades TK-6. District staff recommended against both petitions.

• Celerity — Both petitions were denied based on concerns about transparency of governance. Celerity Dyad and Celerity Troika will lose their charters at the end of the school year unless they appeal to the county. This followed the staff recommendations, and the board and staff acknowledged that the schools had a strong academic record.

• Magnolia — The three schools were not renewed, for procedural and accountability issues that district staff deemed not yet cured. The schools can appeal to the county and then to the state. The schools can continue to operate through that process and remain on co-located campuses. The schools’ strong academic record was noted by the staff.

*This article has been updated to clarify the board’s action on Citizens of the World schools.

*UPDATED

The day before the LA Unified school board is scheduled to vote on the fate of 23 charter schools, the district was hit with a bombshell of a letter signed by 64 charter school leaders.

The schools serve 90 percent of the charter students in the district — 196 schools serving 94,595 students, according to Jason Mandell, the Advocacy Communications Director of the California Charter Schools Association. Mandell said the letter was submitted Monday morning to the board by the Los Angeles Advocacy Council, a 17-member committee of charter school leaders. The letter is followed by three pages of charter executives, the number of their schools and students and their logos.

• Read more: Record number of charter schools, all outperforming district schools, are recommended for denial this week

“We are deeply concerned that this month district staff have recommended more charter renewal and material revision denials than they have in the last five years combined, none of which are based on student outcomes,” the letter reads. “The board’s votes on Tuesday have the potential to disrupt the lives of over 13,000 students attending schools operated by our peers.”

The letter asks for consistency in the district’s decisions, transparency in the charter renewal process and consideration of student achievements at the charter schools.

In the past five years, 155 out of 159 charter school renewals were approved and 42 out of 43 material revisions of a charter school were approved by the school board, according to CCSA.

The board is considering applications for eight new charter schools, the revocation of seven schools and the rejection of material revisions for two schools. Five schools are up for approval for revisions and renewal in the morning school board meeting. But the letter protests inconsistencies in the district’s decisions.

“These recommended denials and revocations threaten the basic values and expectations that we’ve held onto as partners with the district, even in the most challenging times: accountability and collaboration based on consistency, transparency, and a focus on student outcomes,” the letter states. “Most importantly, these recommended denials and revocations threaten the futures of thousands of students who have sought out these schools for an unassailable reason: they provide an education that meets their unique needs.”

*This article has been updated to clarify that the schools represent 90 percent of the district’s charter students and who sent the letter. 

Families rally outside the NAACP board meeting in Cincinnati on Saturday. (Courtesy: publiccharters.org Twitter)

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reiterated its opposition to charter schools Saturday when its board of directors ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion until more oversight is established.

The board’s vote followed months of intense pressure to reject the proposal from other black education advocates, who argued that charter schools give children in poor neighborhoods better school options. Demonstrators from a group called Memphis Lift protested and at one point disrupted the board meeting.

The NAACP’s wariness is rooted in its decades-long support for making traditional public schools more equitable for black children, said board chairperson Roslyn Brock.

“The NAACP has been in the forefront of the struggle for and a staunch advocate of free, high-quality, fully and equitably-funded public education for all children,” she said in a statement. “We are dedicated to eliminating the severe racial inequities that continue to plague the education system.”

The resolution was first proposed by the NAACP branch in California and Hawaii and was unanimously supported by 2,200 delegates at the organization’s 2016 annual convention in July, according to Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy.

The 64-member board ratified the resolution by a voice vote during a meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, said Shelton.

“It was clearly unanimous,” he said. “It was unquestionable.”

He added that the board also agreed to start a task force that will take comments from charter school families and experts to develop more specific goals for the moratorium.

The NAACP has already outlined conditions for the moratorium, including holding charter schools to the same transparency and accountability standards as those that govern district schools.

It also called into question the way charters are funded, saying a moratorium should continue until “public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system.”

Charters were also faulted for expelling students “that public schools have a duty to educate” and separating “high-performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious” as their peers’.

“The NAACP stood by its position,” said board member Amos Brown, who supported the resolution. “We made it very clear that our position was an affirmation for public education, which is where the least of these (are educated). We must make public education work for all. So that is where we still stand on that.”

At least one board member disagreed. Phil Murphy, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and current Democratic candidate for governor in New Jersey, said the resolution went too far.

“I remain committed to bringing both sides of this issue together in New Jersey to figure out what works, what hasn’t, and how district schools and charter schools can best coexist in our communities,” he said in a statement.  “Communities may disagree as a matter of opinion, but leadership requires a careful examination of all facts and a shared goal of arriving at a consensus, when possible. I could not support today’s resolution without having such clarity.”

Education advocates pressured the board to reject the resolution until just before the vote this weekend.

The Black Alliance for Education Options and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools co-hosted a “meet and greet” breakfast with board members earlier to discuss the potential impact of the resolution on black children. Only one board member attended, according to the Alliance.

Advocates also presented a petition with more than 3,000 signatures opposing the moratorium. Last month, the two groups launched a “Charters Work” campaign, when more than 160 black education and faith leaders sent a letter to the NAACP urging the group to rethink the resolution.

In a separate demonstration, more than 100 pro-charter African-American parents and grandparents from Memphis piled into buses on Friday in advance of the vote. The protesters, part of the Memphis Lift advocacy group, gathered in the square across from the hotel, chanting, “I won’t stop. I can’t stop,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“We have charter schools that are good,” Sarah Carpenter, a grandmother of 13, told the newspaper during the protest. “We are not against public schools. We want good schools of any type. Where was the NAACP when so many public schools were failing our children?

In a video that surfaced on social media over the weekend, a man who appeared to be a representative from the NAACP can be seen arguing and fielding questions from a group of protesters. The man says “in some cities (charter schools) are not getting what they are supposed to get,” referring to their performance.

“But that’s in public schools too,” one woman yells in response.

Later, some of those demonstrators marched into the hotel and disrupted the board meeting with chanting until police were called. There were no arrests and it was likely the hotel who called the police, according to Shelton.

“They shared what they wanted to share,” said Shelton, who talked with some of the protesters on Saturday. “Hopefully it’s just a down payment on what we will hear from these parents and many other charter school parents.”

The vote quickly attracted response from education groups across the country.

“On behalf of the membership of the United Federation of Teachers, we support the NAACP resolution calling for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.  “Charter schools claim to be public institutions, but in too many communities, charters take public funds yet are not accountable to parents, lawmakers or taxpayers.”

But Democrats for Education Reform President Shavar Jeffries argued that the NAACP was acting counter to its mission.

“W.E.B. DuBois is rolling in his grave,” he said in a statement. “The NAACP, a proud organization with a historic legacy of expanding opportunity for communities of color, now itself stands in the schoolhouse door, seeking to deny life-changing educational opportunities to millions of children whose parents and families desperately seek alternatives to schools that have failed them for too long.”

The debate among minorities over charter schools dates to their inception in the 1990s. Even the NAACP was divided in 1997 about whether supporting charter schools undermined their long-held demand for a better and fairer public education for all children.

The next year, the civil rights group passed a resolution against charter schools arguing they are not subject to the same accountability standards that public schools are.

More resolutions against charter schools followed. In 2010, the NAACP argued that too much emphasis was placed on charter schools. In 2014, the group passed another saying it opposed the “privatization of public schools.”

Given the NAACP’s long history of advocating for equal resources for all traditionally public schools, it was no surprise the board voted in favor a moratorium, said Brown.

“All these schools should be working,” he said. “There should not be inequality in school districts.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

A record number of charter schools, all outperforming nearby district schools, have been recommended for denial by LA Unified staff when their petitions come before Tuesday’s school board meeting.

More than 15,000 students could be affected by board decisions involving charter schools that are up for renewal or revision.

Seven schools that have 6,730 students are recommended to have their charters revoked, including LA’s top-ranked charter high school, while three other schools asking for revisions affecting 2,060 students are also recommended for denial by staff.

One revision, for WISH Middle School, was resolved over the weekend and their petition has been pulled from Tuesday’s agenda.

“This is unprecedented,” said Jason Mandell, spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association. “Last year 100 percent of the charter renewals and material revisions were approved.”

In the past five years, 155 out of 159 charter school renewals were approved and 42 out of 43 material revisions of a charter school were approved by the school board, according to CCSA.

“The standards have been the same and the schools have improved in academic achievement,” Mandell said. “These schools have all been blindsided by the district recommendations.”

LA Unified oversees the charter schools, which must petition for renewal every five years. Many of the independent charter schools up for renewal are co-located on traditional public school campuses.

The charter school division makes recommendations to the school board for approval or denial. The elected school board members have on multiple occasions rejected the staff findings.

Meanwhile, five charter schools up for renewal and revisions are recommended for approval and are slated to be added to a consent agenda without comment by the board members. Those schools, affecting more than 1,400 students, will be decided on at a morning meeting at 9 a.m. during about an hour of discussion. Then the school board will go into closed session at 10 a.m. and at noon will reconvene with their main agenda.

The nine schools that face rejection from the school board have their hearings scheduled for a 5 p.m. meeting on Tuesday. School board President Steve Zimmer has tried to schedule meetings in a more compact manner to make it easier for faculty and parents to attend and speak about the issues involving their schools without having to wait for hours.

Among the most controversial proposed rejections is El Camino Real High School, which has 3,900 students and has won academic awards. The district is recommending the second step toward revoking its independent charter school status and turning it back into a traditional public school, following an investigation into financial mismanagement first reported in the Los Angeles Daily News. The district staff said that their concerns have not been adequately answered.

MAGNOLIA SCHOOLS

Three Magnolia Science Academy schools are recommended to have their charter renewals denied, two of which were ranked in April by U.S. News & World Report in the top 100 high schools in California. Magnolia Science Academy 2 in Van Nuys was the top-ranked charter high school in Los Angeles Unified, and along with Magnolia Science Academy Reseda made the top 3 percent of all U.S. high schools.

According to the staff reports, all three schools outperform neighboring district schools on this year’s state tests in both math and English, with the exception of Magnolia Science Academy 2, where students meeting or exceeding English standards fell 12 percentage points below the average at nearby resident schools. However, the report shows that the school’s reclassification rate of English language learners was twice that at resident schools, while its percent of EL students nearly matched resident schools’.

The reclassification rate at Magnolia Academy 2 was 30 percent, and 51 percent at Magnolia Academy 3, about twice the rate of neighboring district schools.

The reclassification rate Magnolia Science Academy in Reseda, located in Board District 6, was 33 percent, according to the LA Unified staff report. That is triple the rate of nearby Reseda High School (11 percent) and more than four times the rate at Canoga High (7 percent). Magnolia’s rate was nearly three times the district’s rate last year, and the report shows Magnolia’s reclassifications rose 3.6 percent from the previous year while the district’s as a whole fell 4.5 percent.

“Because our students are successfully gaining English proficiency, the EL students are not the same students from year to year. They test out,” Caprice Young, CEO and superintendent of Magnolia Public Schools, said in a statement. “If we held them back to game the system, our scores would be much higher.”

Between 2011 and 2015, the three Magnolia schools sent 92 percent of its graduates to college and 95 percent of its seniors completed A-G college readiness standards, according to the staff report. More than 65 percent of graduates each year are the first in their families to go on to college, Magnolia data show. Since its first graduating class in 2008, Magnolia has graduated more than 700 students and sent them to college. 

The average AP participation rate of all three schools is 30 percent higher than surrounding residential high schools, Magnolia reported.

The Reseda school, which serves grades 6-12, also far outstrips district schools in graduation and A-G completion rates; 98 percent graduate, with 100 percent passing A-G courses, meaning they are eligible for University of California and Cal State University acceptance. At Reseda High, 84 percent graduate with 42 percent UC/CSU ready. At Canoga High, 75 percent graduate with 29 percent UC/CSU ready. The district as a whole is predicting a 75 percent graduation rate this year, a record, while its A-G completion rate is 42 percent.

The school has 91 percent of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch; 12 percent were English-language learners and 84 percent were Latino.

The district staff report also shows that the school’s special education enrollment (16 percent, with 89 percent high-incidence, 11 percent low-incidence) exceeded the district’s at similar schools (9 percent). Special education students made up 20 percent of enrollment last year at Reseda High and 15 percent at Canoga High.

“When our students graduate, their diploma means admission into a four-year university,” Young said. “Some may choose to start at a community college and transfer, but almost all of our students go directly to a major college or university. The bottom line is that if these schools close, 150 to 200 students per year will not go to college. How does that make sense?”

Young added, “I hope the board will see the operational progress we’ve made during the last year. Magnolia has produced the highest performing charter high schools in Los Angeles. Our immigrant students quickly learn English and compete successfully in mainstream classrooms. More than 90 percent of our students graduate college ready, twice the rate of surrounding schools.”

CELERITY SCHOOLS

Renewals of Celerity Dyad Charter School, on its own campus south of downtown LA, and Celerity Troika Charter School, co-located in Eagle Rock in Northeast LA, have also been recommended for denial.

Celerity Educational Group started in Los Angeles in 2005 and now has eight schools in Los Angeles County (six authorized by LA Unified) and has expanded to Ohio, Louisiana and Florida.

The report states that Celerity Troika outperformed the nearby district schools as well as the district as a whole. It also reclassifies EL students at a higher rate than the district, 19 percent last year compared to 12 percent for the district, with Latino and disadvantaged students increasing their performance in both English and math this year.

Celerity Troika, located in Board District 5 and co-located on two campuses, Luther Burbank Middle School and Garvanza Elementary School, enrolled 609 students as of last October, with 68 percent qualifying for free or reduce-price lunch, 24 percent English language learners, 77 percent Latino and 4 percent African-American.

On the state English language arts test, 68 percent of Celerity Troika students met or exceeded standards, compared to 38 percent of district schools in its area, according to the district staff report. In math, those figures were 67 percent for Celerity and 28 percent for area district schools.

While the report “recognizes subgroup academic gains achieved by the school,” it says the recommendation of denial is based on “a pattern of insufficient responses to inquiries, … lack of transparency, and the potential for significant conflicts of interest posed by its governance structure.”

“The district’s own report clearly shows that students at Celerity’s schools are knocking it out of the park compared to students attending neighboring district schools,” said the CCSA’s Mandell. “If the district were to close the Celerity schools, it would force their students to attend schools that are, quite simply, worse.”

In its written response to the report, Celerity states that the issues brought up are old, do not represent the current organization and have been addressed. It also notes that the state Board of Education recently recommended approval of two new Celerity schools.

It also states that the district’s staff findings “fail to explain how denial of the renewals, as CEG currently operates today, could possibly be the best result for the students at our charter schools. The reality is: if the charters for Dyad and Troika are not renewed, our students will attend schools that perform significantly worse based on accountability.”

It adds that Celerity “has cooperated and been transparent, and will continue to cooperate and be transparent.”

In an email over the weekend, Celerity CEO Grace Canada said the organization was “blindsided” by the denial recommendation.

“It is a disservice to our students, families, and community that after receiving a score of ‘Accomplished’ (the highest positive score any charter school can receive) in ‘Student Achievement and Educational Performance’ and ‘Governance’ and a score of ‘Proficient’ in ‘Organizational Management, Programs, and Operations’ we are blindsided with a recommendation for non-renewal,” Canada said. “At no point was there any indication or conversation with Celerity about being in danger of not being recommended for renewal. Learning this at the last minute comes as a shock to our board, our students, and our community.”

CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

District staff are recommending denials for two Citizens of the World schools in Board District 4: one for a new charter, called Citizens of the World Westside, and the other for an expansion of Citizens of the World 3, a K-5 on two sites with 470 students. It is petitioning to add grades 6-8.

Citizens of the World Los Angeles operates three charters in LA Unified that enroll about 1,600 students. They had about five applications for every open seat this past year.

The schools rank in the top 10 percent of all district schools in both English and math.

The Westside school would serve 740 students in transitional kindergarten through 6th grade and expand to 1,020 students and add 7th and 8th grades by the fifth year.

More than 5,000 family and community members from every local board district signed a petition asking the board to approve CWC Mar Vista’s expansion through 8th grade, according to the organization.

Citizens of the World 3, as of last October, enrolled 368 students, 33 percent receiving free or reduced-price lunch, 11 percent were English language learners, 51 percent white and 32 percent Latino or African-American.

In its recommendation for denial, district staff noted that there are 578 unfilled seats in the three Citizens of the World schools, which “has not demonstrated its capacity to fulfill its existing commitments in its charters.” It also cited a “lack of capacity to prevent and systematically resolve operational difficulties.” It said a “pattern of facilities-related challenges that have included incomplete Prop. 39 applications.”

Another reason for the denial recommendation was the number of material revisions, one of which was to add a preference for low-income families.

The district staff wrote: “In the past thirteen months alone, CWC submitted eight (8) material revision requests to the Charter Schools Division, ranging from instructional program changes to admissions preferences and changes in facilities. This record demonstrates a lack of capacity for strategic planning by the governing board and organization’s leadership, and raises concerns about successful implementation of expansion and further changes.”

The district staff report acknowledges that the school is outperforming area district schools, by 16 percentage points in English and 23 percentage points in math. Special education students make up 7 percent of enrollment, compared to 13 percent at neighboring district schools.

“We don’t agree with the analysis and conclusions in the staff report, which do not accurately reflect the true state of our organization,” Mark Kleger-Heine, executive director of Citizens of the World Los Angeles, said in an email late Sunday. “We are confident the board will recognize the high-quality education we provide our diverse community of families.”

WISH

The staff also recommended that the school board reject the Westside Innovative School House Charter Middle School’s request to add transitional kindergarten through 6th-grade classes, also in Board District 4.

WISH Academy Executive Director Shawna Draxton, in a letter to families, explained why the district was wrong in its recommendation for rejection and noted that the district “once again mischaracterizes WISH’s financial position, just as it did in its recommended rejection of WISH Academy High School earlier this year. WISH’s financial position continues to grow strong.”

The letter noted that the charter division staff’s recommendation for denial did not relate to “WISH’s sound educational program, student achievement or educational performance,” but instead was based its assessment of the school’s ability to successfully implement the proposed changes. 

A follow-up letter over the weekend then stated that “all items have been remedied to our satisfaction” and that school leadership has agreed to postpone the material revision vote until November, when “we expect to receive approval from LAUSD for our TK-8 merger.”

NEW CHARTERS’ PUBLIC HEARINGS

Also Tuesday, the school board will hold public hearings for petitions to open nine new charter schools from Maywood to Sherman Oaks that could hold more than 5,000 students.

The school board in the same meeting is considering establishing the Horace Mann UCLA Community School, which doesn’t have a number of students associated with it but has a mission to recruit from charter schools and private schools.

According to the district’s documents, “The mission of Mann UCLA is to create an innovative K-12 learning environment in South Los Angeles, thereby restoring the faith in an historic public school, by recruiting neighborhood students currently attending charter, magnet and private schools back to their community.”

Mandell said the charter schools slated for their petitions to be rejected should have more of a chance to correct whatever problems the staff is finding.

“We call for closures of charters every year,” Mandell said. “So if these charters were not helping kids learn, we’d be calling for their closure too. But if academic success is there, then everything else should be given a chance to be corrected.”

* This article has been updated to add that Citizens of the World was being recommended for denial in part based on its number of material revisions, one of which was to add a preference for low-income families, which it now has. 

Sylmar students Briana Borunda and Alma Carrera.

When Principal James Lee learned that his students at Sylmar Charter High School had among the biggest jumps in state test scores in the local school district, he was thrilled but surprised, because they managed to pull it off despite a well-publicized lunchtime brawl that erupted on campus right in the middle of testing.

He credits the teachers who created their own data analysis to discover which type of questions students struggled with and then focused on those skills, as well as a new collaborative spirit that pulled the team together as they applied for and won affiliated charter status — the only LA Unified school to do so in the past two years.

• How Sylmar’s test scores stack up: See the 10 most-improved LAUSD district high schools.

“I’m delighted we are showing up as most improved, it’s just that we had a bit of an incident that was going on right in the middle of the testing last year,” Lee said. “Apparently all of the preparation and special planning we did to prepare for the testing ended up working out well, despite the incident.”

The “incident” became international news when a schoolyard brawl was caught by a cell phone camera and the YouTube video went viral. It was incorrectly characterized as a racial incident, set against a backdrop of demonstrations throughout the country and presidential rhetoric perceived as racist.

“The dispute was between athletes and non-athletes,” Lee explained, with one group predominantly African-American and the other mostly Latino. Six students were suspended, but they all were allowed to attend graduation ceremonies.

Sylmar Charter High Principal James Lee.

“I got a lot of criticism for allowing them to culminate, but for four years they were good kids,” said Lee, although the decision was ultimately made by the district. “Three were very academically strong.”

As TV crews staked out the campus for days and celebrities jumped in to talk about the incident, the school was taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests scheduled by the state. They were on the third day of testing, it was near the end of the year, and the principal couldn’t change or stop the tests if he tried.

“We did prepare a lot, and that seemed to pay off,” Lee said.

The students’ English scores rose 13 percentage points from 45 percent of the students meeting standards to 58 percent. The math scores rose 15 percentage points, to 27 percent meeting or exceeding standards. Districtwide, English scores rose to 39 percent and math to 29 percent.

“Ironically, students were SBAC testing in the midst of our highly publicized lunch altercation, town hall meeting and student walk-out,” Lee said. “Students demonstrated much focus and resiliency.”

Also, 80 percent of students enrolled in the Math Science Magnet on Sylmar’s campus met or exceeded standards in English, and 57 percent did so in math. That compares to 80 percent in English and 59 percent in math earned by Granada Hills Charter, a rival school.

The only schools in Local District Northeast that did better are Triumph PUC Charter, Arleta High and two of the Chavez Humanitas schools, district numbers show. There are 17 traditional and charter high schools in the local district. The Sylmar Magnet exceeded the scores of some local competition: Triumph, Arleta and Chavez, according to Debbie Steinert, Sylmar’s magnet school coordinator.

Sylmar’s test scores are among the highest increases of any schools that have 80 percent or more families eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Reclassification of English learners was also one of the highest, at 20 percent, compared to the district average of 11 percent.

“All of this can be credited to the hard work of teachers who worked much more collaboratively last year in the spirit of our charter petition, and having the right mindset on lifting up students regardless of socioeconomic status, a turn away from the student deficit mindset,” Lee said.

Math teacher Tony Nunez is one face behind the success stories. He identified the types of questions his students were having trouble with and focused on them, particularly the new Common Core standards that give questions in word problem formats and ask students to figure out how math applies to real-world situations.

Math teacher Tony Nunez.

“Those are the kinds of questions I like because it shows students how math applies to the world around them, but they are tougher questions,” said Nunez, who is a business technology teacher and has a degree in economics. “It’s not just filling in the bubble with multiple choices, they have to create graphs, fill in the blank or require multiple responses and do it on the computer.”

With their own data analysis, the teachers targeted the problems students had the most trouble with.

“There is happiness that we moved up, but it’s still only 27 percent meeting (math) standards and that shows that nearly three-fourths of the students don’t, and that means we have a lot of work left to do,” Nunez said.

The high school’s 15 math teachers did some unprecedented collaboration by sharing sample questions, going over problems and identifying common issues. An assistant principal who was also a math coach stepped in to help. The teachers and principal adopted strategies posed by educator Michael Fullan, used the CPM Educational Program and took advantage of some autonomies even before they officially became an affiliated charter school over the summer.

“We had been working on becoming a charter for years, so the mindset was already there,” the principal said. “Although we haven’t seen much flexibility in the funding yet, we do have some autonomy in the curriculum.”

Nunez said, “The principle benefits of being an affiliated charter gave us flexibility and autonomy for using the CPM book and not following the interim assessment plan. We decided as a group what the right direction is and what are the main benefits for success for the kids.”

The teachers also worked to get students used to taking the tests on computers, rather than with a pencil.

Briana Borunda and Alma Carrera earned top scores.

“The teachers really prepared me for the tests,” said 17-year-old Alma Carrera, a member of the Glee Club and softball team. “We did practice tests a few times, and it helped me with the concepts when we took the tests.”

Alma and her friend, Briana Borunda, also 17 and a senior, live near the school and were both witnesses to the lunchtime brawl.

“It was a strange time, I feel like the whole thing was over-exaggerated,” said Briana, who is also involved in many extracurricular activities and on the volleyball team. “People kept talking about it, but the teachers emphasized how important the tests were and calmed us down. I was worried about the math test.”

Both Briana and Alma were in the highest-achieving percentiles on the tests. Briana received a perfect score on her English test.

Both girls hope to attend UCLA, and few family members have been to college. According to Sylmar’s magnet school internal statistics, only 10 percent of their parents graduated from college and 37 percent of the parents aren’t high school graduates.

“I feel more self-motivated, but it also came from my teachers,” said Briana, who is leaning toward a career in criminology.

Alma, who aspires to be a pediatrician, added, “I feel pretty proud of myself and the skills I have, and I think it’s great that we did as good as Granada Hills.”

Sylmar Spartans see Granada Hills Charter Highlanders as competition in many ways. They battle for students, and even though this is the first year Sylmar has added “charter” to its name, the school population dipped to about 2,000 students.

“I think the lunchtime incident last year scared some of the new students away,” Lee said. “That is a shame.”

Nunez started teaching at Sylmar seven years ago when the student population was nearly 3,000. He recalled how the school faced major issues after losing grants and major funding. Then Lee was transferred to the school, and they started working in smaller learning communities.

“It was a high-stress time with a lot of changes,” Nunez said. “But now we are working together with a lot of collaboration and looking at data to see how we can improve. Ideally, we want to get 100 percent to be meeting standards. That’s a goal, I don’t know how realistic it is with limited resources, but it is a goal we are striving toward.”

English teacher Ires Moxley at Sylmar Charter High.

Ires Moxley noted how her 16 fellow English teachers have a greater sense of collaboration in the three years she has taught at the school. Their regular meetings and sharing best practices helped with the improved test scores.

“I was very excited and very happy when the scores came out,” Moxley said. “We laid the foundation for the students, and I’m elated that it paid off.”

They are teaching students how to write using the Toulmin Method, and that helped in the essay part of the exams.

“We increased the opportunities to write and that helped with the testing,” Moxley said. “As soon as they come in to class we encourage academic discussions and if they can speak academically you can write it.”

Teachers incorporate writing with science, math, history, language and other classes. “With our emphasis on writing, it helps develop reading and listening and creates the building blocks so they can learn on their own,” Moxley said.

When the brawl happened, Moxley treated her students like a strict mom. She wanted to know if any of the students were distracted or bothered by the incident, but she talked it out with them and shut the door to the disturbances outside and got them focused.

“The kids just wanted normalcy, and the SBAC got them focused again,” Moxley said. “They were truly resilient and knew that this was important to them and their future. And we’re all on board with that.”

Principal Lee has a daily meeting with a school team to discuss issues.

Every morning, the principal holds a meeting with his team of assistant principals at 8:30 in his office to discuss issues around the campus. The administrators are involved with three different committees involving teachers, students and parents that are working on the marketing and promotion of the school and its programs.

“I never thought I would be involved in the marketing of the school, but that is something we are learning to do now,” Lee said. Their school is now open to enrollment throughout the district, but they want to make the school attractive to their feeder schools too, and not lose too many students to independent charters or private schools.

Sylmar’s first-ever promotional event is taking place this Saturday, Oct. 15, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. billed as a Town Hall and Resource Fair. It will offer a chance to connect with the local Neighborhood Councils and Neighborhood Watch groups, and the school will be all out to promote its programs.

Next year, Lee’s teachers plan to increase their test scores again.

Would another lunchtime “incident” help?

“Oh no, no please, not that again!” Lee smirked. “It would be nice to know what our test scores would do without something like that going on in the middle of the testing.”

A new report shows that growing numbers of the 12 million Hispanic children in American public schools are turning to charter schools, where they tend to reach higher levels of achievement than at traditional district schools.

“While district public schools still continue to serve the majority of Hispanic students, an increasing number of Hispanic families are choosing to enroll in charter public schools,” the report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reads, “as new charter schools continue to open their doors in neighborhoods with concentrated Hispanic populations, they are also investing in the future of the Hispanic community.”

Hispanic students make up approximately 30 percent of charter school enrollment and 25 percent of the total student body of traditional public schools. (LA Unified is 74 percent Latino.)

The study found that charter students get more instructional time than traditional counterparts. Charter students have additional learning equivalent to 22 extra days of math and six extra days of reading instruction as compared to peers in traditional schools, the report said. For Hispanic students living in poverty, this number jumps to an extra 48 days in math and 25 extra days of reading.

Read the full article from Watchdog.org.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/credit-recovery-at-charter-schools-more-limited-than-lausds-extensive-program-and-a-higher-bar-for-pre-tests/ Mon, 10 Oct 2016 14:08:01 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=41815

*UPDATED

While LA Unified is firmly committed to online credit recovery classes as a means to the district’s newly stated top goal — 100 percent graduation — Los Angeles charter school operators use these classes much more sparingly, as their graduation rates tend to be far ahead of the district’s.

At three of the city’s largest charter management organizations, no more than 5 percent of students have taken an online credit recovery course. LA Unified has yet to report how many of their 2016 graduates used credit recovery to gain a diploma. A $15-million credit recovery program took LA Unified’s projected graduation rate from 49 percent last fall to an estimated 75 percent this summer, a record. The official graduation rate will be reported later this fall.

The three CMO’s also have more stringent policies for testing out of a course. LA Unified allows students to test out of much of a course if they can score 60 percent on a pre-test. The charters set that bar higher or don’t allow testing out.

“I strongly support the use of online learning, not just for credit recovery but for enrichment and for broadening the curriculum. That said, across all of our schools, only 1.3 percent of the course credits are provided through online learning,” said Caprice Young, who is CEO of Magnolia Public Schools and also a former LA Unified school board president.

Last school year, as part of a $15 million program, LA Unified for the first time implemented a major push for online credit recovery courses across the district. The move was in response to a looming graduation crisis, as the school board raised the bar for graduation requirements and installed a series of courses called “A through G.” Students would need to take and pass the A-G courses before the end of their senior year, and if they earned all C grades or above would be eligible for admittance into California’s public universities, although the district allows D’s for graduation.

The district was unprepared for the raised bar, so part way through the fall of 2015 the credit recovery program kicked in. This year the courses were offered as soon as school started.

The dramatic increase in the graduation rate has turned some heads in the academic world, with some experts questioning the validity and rigor of online credit recovery courses. In that program, students without enough credits to graduate retake classes during free periods, after school, on Saturdays and during the winter break. The courses are online and have either a teacher running the class along with a computer program, known as blended learning, or an all-online course known as virtual learning. If students prove proficiency with the material they receive a C grade at LA Unified. A’s and B’s aren’t an option.

But LA Unified is not alone in using online credit recovery programs despite their controversial nature. Most large districts across the country also use them, as do at least three of the largest CMOs authorized by LA Unified, although each one appears to use them on a far more limited basis. And each CMO — PUC Schools, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools and Magnolia Public Schools — had a different set of guidelines regarding if students could pre-test out of some course material.

PUC SCHOOLS

“We most definitely use it very sparingly. It is not our goal to use it in place of intervention and support,” said Leslie Chang, superintendent of leadership and instruction for PUC Schools. PUC operates 16 schools, of which six are high schools.

Chang said PUC used Apex Learning for its online programs, which is one of two companies that LA Unified also uses. Chang estimated that 4 or 5 percent of PUC graduates last year had taken at least one online course and said it was most commonly used when a student transferred into a PUC school already behind in credits.

“If the child is behind and we determine that based on their current schedule they may need to take an additional course, then we will offer that option to them. We want to make sure it is not the go-to for everything that is required for graduation for our schools. Typically, a select few number of students will use the blended learning approach,” Chang said.

PUC also has different guidelines on pre-testing. While LA Unified allows students to skip chapters or units if they pass at least 60 percent of a pre-test, PUC sets the pre-test bar at 70 percent.

“I think there is a place for online learning in the academic experience of every student in today’s day and age. I do not think it can replace the power and effectiveness of a teacher, and if a student is behind in credits or content, then blended learning can have a very powerful effect,” Chang said. “But they really do have to be in tandem with teacher support and done very strategically and intentionally.”

MAGNOLIA

Young said she thought that LA Unified’s approach to online credit recovery will become more balanced in time. Magnolia operates eight independent charter schools within LA Unified, and four of them are schools for grades 6-12.

“I think LAUSD is going in the right direction, and the next step is to get more nuanced in how they use it. This is pretty common when school districts implement online learning. The first year it may be overused or underused or inappropriately used, but as they get more nuanced about how to match the right kids with the right courses and the right content it makes sense,” Young said.

Magnolia has an 80 percent pre-test bar and they use Fuel Education for their programs. Young estimated that 5 percent of Magnolia’s graduates last year took an online credit recovery course.

“And that’s because kids don’t always start with us in 6th grade, they may come to us in their junior year and they are already behind and we have to help them catch up, and sometimes that requires them to essentially take more than six courses in the semester. Adding more online can catch them up,” Young said.

Young also defended the idea of pre-testing.

“One of the things that the online learning is for is at the beginning of each unit the student can demonstrate their knowledge, and then if they can demonstrate their knowledge that they know it, there is no sense in boring the student and making them retake it,” Young said.

ALLIANCE

Perhaps the biggest reason the large CMOs use online credit recovery on a more limited basis is because they tend to be far ahead of the district in graduation rates. Magnolia’s graduation rate in 2015 was 96.4 percent. Alliance’s grad rate in 2014-15 was 95 percent, and PUC says they exceed 90 percent every year. With fewer students in danger of not graduating, fewer are obviously in need of credit recovery.

“Graduation is what we do. It’s part of our DNA. It’s what we do. And it could be what LAUSD does too and hopefully they will,” Young said.

Robert Pambello, an area superintendent for Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, said Alliance’s use is “very limited. Every student has a graduation plan, and so we track students on a regular basis for being on track for graduation, and there are very few kids that actually need the credit recovery.” Alliance is LA Unified’s largest CMO and operates 28 schools. Eighteen of them are high schools.

Pambello said less than 3 percent of Alliance’s graduates last year took an online course and that Alliance does not allow pre-testing.

“We do not have that feature. The student takes the whole course because they did not pass the course,” he said. “We don’t do pre-testing at all, they are assigned the course and they work through the course at their own pace.”

GREEN DOT

Not every large CMO is as centrally organized with its online curriculum as PUC, Alliance and Magnolia. Green Dot Public Schools, which manages nine high schools in Los Angeles and Inglewood, has online credit recovery programs but does not centrally track how many students are taking them. The courses are viewed no differently than its regular curriculum, according to Sean Thibault, communications director for Green Dot.

“It’s not like there is an online department or a whole team working on online programs, this is just part of what the whole curriculum team does,” he said. “Every one of the Green Dot schools in high school are offering A-G curriculum as the baseline, there is no friendlier curriculum they could do. So all the schools are doing assessments and doing what they can with proficiency and to catch some students up in the school year.”

As far as what the guidelines are, Thibault said “as a general rule, where students need that kind of option (with credit recovery) we have made it available. I don’t think that there is a model that is enforced or universal for pre-testing, but it is more school-by-school, or depending it could be course-by-course or instructor-by-instructor or student-by-student. And that’s Green Dot’s approach, to identify the student’s needs and develop the instruction they need to be successful.”

Pacific Palisades Charter High School is not a CMO but a standalone independent charter school. While it also offers credit recovery, like Green Dot it does not centrally track how many students are taking the courses. The school has been offering online credit recovery courses for five years during summer school, but this year it also began offering them throughout the school year as well. Like LA Unified and the large CMOs, the online courses are overseen by a licensed teacher.

“We do not know (how many take online credit recovery). We don’t track it in that way, because when the student passes the course, because it has a highly qualified teacher running it, it doesn’t have a separate designation,” said Jeff Hartman, director of academic planning and guidance.

Palisades does not allow for any pre-testing out of chapters or units. Randy Tenan-Snow, an English teacher at Palisades who helps oversee online credit recovery, predicted the school will be expanding its program in the coming years.

“I believe that as we gather more data and we start enrolling more students, I see that online and blended programs will be the wave of the future for most students that are trying to do credit recovery,” she said. “It is very difficult to add a class when you are already taking six classes, so to take a class online it definitely helps our community and our students. We will probably expand as we move forward.”

*UPDATED to reflect PUC operates six high schools, not four. 

KIPP LA Prep School Leader Carlos Lanuza and some of his students. (Courtesy: KIPP)

KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory School in Boyle Heights has been named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. The designation was given Wednesday to 279 public schools across the country and is considered the highest honor the federal government can bestow on a school.

KIPP LA Prep is an independent public charter middle school that serves a primarily Latino student body and was one of only two schools from LA Unified to receive the honor, along with Wonderland Elementary, a traditional district school. Last year KIPP Raíces, an elementary school, was the only LA Unified school, charter or traditional, to receive the honor and was the first school from the KIPP LA Schools organization to receive the Blue Ribbon.

Ninety-four percent of KIPP LA Prep’s students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, but the Blue Ribbon award names it an “exemplary high-performing school,” meaning it is recognized as a top school in the nation, not just a top school for low-income students.

“That’s the thing that we constantly tell our students, which is that we are not just competing against the neighborhood schools, we are competing with the rest of the world, with the rest of the population, and that has always been our focus,” School Leader Carlos Lanuza said Thursday.

KIPP LA Prep is one of 33 schools in California to receive a National Blue Ribbon Award and one of 29 public schools in California.

“We got nominated last year and then we did all the work that we needed to do on the application and the calls and the scores, and then this year we got the call that, ‘Hey, you got the Blue Ribbon award,'” Lanuza said. “I want to say it was vindication for our community. This is such a good feeling for Boyle Heights, that they deserve a quality school. And I think that our community knows that we are a quality school, but this award puts the stamp on it.”

The school began in 2003 in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood and moved locations several times before signing a 25-year lease eight years ago at its current location, which used to be a tortilla factory. Lanuza, who also started working at the school eight years ago and has been school leader for five, said a permanent facility allowed the school to expand its approach.

“We created this beautiful school and then our whole focus changed from just academics, where it was academics, academics, academics, to really a whole-child approach and making sure students are not just getting the high academic opportunities, but music, art, dance, electives and enrichment programs,” he said.

Steven Almazan is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and taught special education for several years at KIPP Sol Academy in East LA. Almazan grew up near KIPP LA Prep’s current location and reminisced in a recent blog post about smelling the tortillas from the factory as he walked past it on the way to his school. He didn’t realize the factory had become a school until he saw KIPP LA Prep featured in the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman” when he was in college. Seeing the work that was being done at KIPP, he said, “propelled him to want to work for KIPP.”

“It is really hard to find schools that can provide an excellent education in Boyle Heights. Typically we hear if you want a good education you should go outside of the neighborhood,” Almazan told LA School Report. “The fact that one of the best schools in the nation now is in Boyle Heights is just a huge testament to the work that has been done at KIPP.”

Almazan added, “KIPP LA Prep, I feel out of all the KIPP schools in LA, they have a lot of teachers who have been there since the beginning and a lot of teachers who essentially mastered their content.”

Lanuza said even when the school started adding more electives, the school’s API scores continued to rise, and the school has scored extremely well on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) tests, which began last year. On the 2016 tests, 72 percent of KIPP LA Prep’s students met or exceeded the standard of the English language arts test, and 74 percent met or exceeded the math standard. On the same test, 39 percent of LA Unified’s students at traditional schools met or exceeded the English standard and 28 percent met or exceeded the math standard.

Catching students up their first year and then keeping the bar at a high level is an important cornerstone of why his students are achieving so much, Lanuza said.

“We usually get students who are reading two or three grade levels behind, so we are making sure that we are doing the interventions, doing the tutoring and doing the re-teaching to get kids up to grade level,” Lanuza said. “And then once they get up to 6th grade to actually access the material, just exploding from there. We make sure we have a high level of mathematics. We actually teach geometry and Algebra II, which is not common for middle schools.”

Lanuza also said that while his students seem pleased that the school has received the award, they may not be grasping how big a deal it is.

“They are happy and they are proud and there is part of me that thinks they don’t know the magnitude of this,” he said. “We tell them every day that they are proving what’s possible, that Latino children in Boyle Heights can achieve. And they take our word for it, but I don’t think they have gotten down to the magnitude of what this award really means.”

Thousands of people marched through the streets of San Fernando and Pacoima on Saturday, calling on their leaders at LA Unified and Sacramento to support the charter school movement. The “Rally in the Valley” began at Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in San Fernando, which was the first charter school to be started at LA Unified and the first conversion charter school in the nation.

California Charter School Association Families, which hosted the event, estimated the crowd to be at 3,000. After the march the crowd heard speeches from a number of elected leaders, including LA Unified board member Monica Ratliff and Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, and charter leaders, including Yvonne Chan, who founded Vaughn Next Century Learning Center.

Watch the video for highlights of the event.

They don’t take special education students. They screen during enrollment for students with high academics. They are funded by billionaires out to bankrupt the unions and take over LA Unified. They are unregulated monsters run amok on our school system.

There is no lack of accusations that are frequently hurled at independent charter schools. Since the first independent charter school was started in LA Unified in 1993, charters have over time become one of the most polarizing issues on the educational landscape. Whether it be their financial impact, enrollment practices or educational philosophies, there seems to be no shortage of critics.

• Read more about charters: How charters went from a ‘novelty’ to dominate the conversation of LAUSD, 9 questions and answers about LA’s charters and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools: A replicable model or unique success?

Last week the Washington Post ran an article that was heavily critical of charters in California, and it also cited an August report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California which found that 20 percent of all charter schools in California had enrollment policies in place that violate state and federal law.

While some of the accusations in the ACLU report are true of some charters or were true of some in the past, other accusations that are commonly thrown at charters are hard to prove one way or another or boil down to philosophical differences. In light of the recent high-profile criticism of California and LA charters, here is what several prominent charter leaders in Los Angeles had to say about the frequent accusations that are made against the charter movement.

Accusation: The ACLU report found many instances of enrollment violations regarding students’ academic performance, English proficiency and immigration status, despite the fact that charters are not allowed by law to consider these factors. 

Jacqueline Elliot, co-founder of PUC Schools: “Our movement is big. It has gotten huge, in fact, in LA and California and across the nation. And frankly, I don’t think we can expect that we are going to have perfection across the nation, and we are going to have charter schools that are doing things we don’t like and that are perhaps not legal, and it is our responsibility in the charter movement and also of the authorizers, which is how the legislation is set up, to weed out and stop those practices. But I do think that the vast majority of charter schools are run by dedicated educators who have integrity and who will abide by the law.”

Caprice Young, founder of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and CEO of Magnolia Public Schools: “If I did a Lexus Nexus Google search of every abuse at every school district in the state of California, the list would be about 40 times that long… What I would say in response to (the ACLU report) is that charters are required to have their entire enrollment procedure approved by whoever their authorizer happens to be. And almost all of the schools identified in the ACLU report were actually implementing the enrollment procedures that had been approved by their local school districts. So the issue is not charters, in so much as if they are complying with what they put in their charter, but the issue is really more a question of oversight and if the school districts feel comfortable having some guidelines in the context of charter school lotteries.”

Cristina de Jesus, president and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools California: “I think it’s unfortunate that a few bad actors are being used to paint the entire charter sector with a broad brush. They are not representative of the great majority of charters who are actually changing the odds for kids across the country every day. I can say in general, Green Dot feels that bad actors should suffer the consequences if they are employing policies and procedures that are not on the up and up.”

Jason Mandell, spokesperson for CCSA: “We are still dealing with in some cases myths that are very much outdated or maybe were never true, and so it continues to be an issue. If a small number of schools have an issue, all charters tend to be grouped together in how they are reported on in the media. Something happens at one charter school and that charter school speaks for all charters in some cases. With district schools, people don’t necessarily group them all together in that way.”

Accusation: An early draft of what became the Great Public Schools Now plan to fund successful school models aimed to enroll half of all LA Unified students in charter schools, something critics said would threaten the solvency of the district. The plan, which originated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, has since changed to include other school models beyond charters, but the draft plan has led to the accusation that billionaires are out to bankrupt the district. 

Elliot: “I would say to keep in mind that plan came from one person, and that was Broad. You should not condemn a big, successful charter community because what one philanthropist published as his plan. That was him, that wasn’t me and that wasn’t my colleagues. I mean, let’s keep perspective here. Anybody can say what they want to say, but it is called the ‘Broad Plan,’ it is not called ‘the plan of all the charter leaders in Los Angeles.’ I think people need to keep that in perspective. It was not wise. It was a bad choice. It hurt us terribly.”

Young: “In the 1990s, when the Annenberg Foundation gave LAUSD half a billion dollars and the local business and civic community matched that donation two-to-one, no one was screaming, ‘Don’t let the billionaires take over our schools.’ The fact is that in order to have strong schools in Los Angeles, we need everyone involved, from small business owners to big business owners. From nonprofit leaders to churches and synagogues. All of the population of LA needs to be putting its whole strength into the schools. I’m just grateful that our business community is willing to continue to invest in public schools.”

Accusation: The early draft of the Great Public Schools Now plan had critics saying it — and charter growth in general — would threaten the financial solvency of the district. This has led to accusations that charters fight any attempt to limit or control their growth. 

Elliot: “I think it’s a tough situation for them and I get it, I understand if I was in their seat and I thought that the charter movement was going to become so huge, huge, huge that it was going to suck more seats until we are extinguished and the whole city will be charter, that’s the fear. I don’t think the whole city should be charter. I think we are just spending all this energy fighting with one another.”

Young: “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to limit the growth of any charter schools or any high-quality schools. As long as we have schools that are not successful for our kids, we need more schools, charter schools or specialized schools of one sort or another. We need more schools that do the job. And I think the financial situation of the district actually has almost nothing to do with the charter schools, and that is easily documented. And because of that, it’s an excuse and instead of focusing on fixing their financial challenges, they say oh, don’t have more charter schools.”

Accusation: The LA teachers union, UTLA, often uses the term “unregulated” when talking about charters and says there needs to be more oversight of charters because they are unregulated compared to district schools. 

Elliot: “I I think when people say charters are unregulated it means they are doing whatever they want with complete freedom and flexibility with no rules applying, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Charters come up for renewal every five years, and if there is any group of schools that feels they are being watched and are accountable it is charter schools. And not just because they come up for renewal every five years, but because we have an authorizer that keeps a close eye on us. They come in and do oversight visits every year. They continually ask for our financials and are watching everything and going over it with a fine-tooth comb much more so than what happens in the district.”

Young: “Bureaucracies oversee things in the way that they know how. And the charter school law is really all about holding schools accountable for student outcomes and for fiscal stability. And the only way that the school district knows how to hold anybody accountable is how many mountains of paper they have turned in.”

De Jesus: “I think one of the big myths out there about charters is that they are unregulated, which is simply not true. We have an annual oversight visit for every single school, whether the school is high performing or not. And we also have to go before the board every five years to see if we deserve another shot. And when do regular public schools have to go through that kind of scrutiny? Hardly ever.”

Accusation: Some charters, especially in the startup phase, lack the facilities of a traditional school and hold classes in churches and other non-traditional settings. This has led to the accusation that some charters deprive students of a well-rounded school experience by lacking athletic fields, auditoriums and other traditional amenities. 

Elliot: “I have really evolved on this over the years. I always used to say that it doesn’t matter where you teach, you could be in a little red schoolhouse in the middle of a field and you can have great results, and I believe that to be true. However, I do believe that children deserve fields and they deserve a gymnasium. They deserve to have a performance area and a multipurpose room, especially because that’s what the other children at traditional schools get.”

El Camino Real Charter High has back-to-school night this week.

An emergency meeting has been called for Friday morning by the El Camino Real Alliance Board to discuss an internal investigation and the paperwork left to satisfy an LA Unified inquiry. On the agenda is “public employee discipline/ dismissal/ release” in closed session.

Meanwhile, the El Camino Real Charter High School already sent new documentation to LA Unified to answer questions of their Notice of Violation which could lead to the district taking back the independent charter school. The school plans to give more documentation before the Sept. 23 deadline next week.

Before Friday’s meeting was announced, Marshall Mayotte, the school’s chief business officer, said Wednesday that the board has been trying to schedule a special meeting since LA Unified issued the Notice of Violation at last month’s LA Unified school board meeting. The El Camino board is made up of three teachers, a parent, a classified employee representative and two community representatives.

“We are not sure what they will discuss, but it could have to do with the Oracle report,” Mayotte said.

The school spent $20,000 to hire Oracle Investigations Group earlier in the summer when LA Unified charter division officials were asking about what they called “seemingly exorbitant personal and/or improper expenses.” It is possible that some results of the investigation will be revealed on Friday, and it’s possible the board could decide whether or not the results could be made public. But it’s also possible the report may fall into attorney/client privilege and never be released to the public.

Marshall Mayotte, El Camino Real Charter chief business officer.

These next few days are important to the future of the academically successful charter school. Thursday is back-to-school night, which will not be a forum for anyone to address the issues before the LA school board, according to ‎the school’s Director of Marketing Melanie Horton. Parents have been notified by a weekly newsletter and staff is informed regularly at staff meetings about the progress of the school’s response.

Friday’s emergency meeting will be followed next Wednesday by the El Camino regularly scheduled board meeting. El Camino isn’t expected to be scheduled for discussion at Tuesday’s LA Unified school board meeting, but issues or updates could be brought up while other charter school issues are addressed. Then, Sept. 23 is the school’s final deadline to answer all of the district’s questions.

“We feel confident that all of the questions will be answered to their satisfaction and that we will be able to put this behind us,” Horton said.

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer asked for a detailed list of the inaccuracies that the school saw in the violation notice presented by the district’s charter division. After three weeks, they presented 40 of them to Zimmer. Some of those included business expenses such an Academic Decathlon coach who traveled to Sacramento to receive a proclamation by the state Senate. Others include charges made on Mayotte’s card by other employees.

Some of the teachers were concerned about the school’s response to the district and wanted to be involved in writing the response, but Horton said, “This requires going over a lot of accounting records handled by the business office so teachers are not involved in the response.”

“It’s really a busy time for our teachers and they are making every effort to stay focused,” Horton said. “There was some fear about what it all means, and is the school going to close tomorrow, but we have had staff meetings and explained the process and let everyone know it is our top priority to put out a quality document and provide a satisfactory response that will end this process.”

El Camino officials, who claim there is no wrongdoing in their financial reports, provided a lot of details and evidence that they provided previously, but did so once again “just to prove our point,” Horton said.

The LA Unified staff noted that no one at the school has been disciplined or replaced for violations, and Horton said the El Camino Real Alliance Board “made it clear that they won’t take any action until they study the results of the Oracle report and have all the information and allow due process to all of our employees.”

Mayotte said the school didn’t have a chance to respond fast enough before the Notice of Violation was made public.

This is the first of three steps the district would have to take before the school reverts from a charter to a district school. The school converted to an independent charter in 2011 and receives $32 million a year in government funding.

Patrick O’Brien, a parent of two children who just started at El Camino, sent a detailed letter to Zimmer protesting the unfairness of the scrutiny that the school faces. An attorney who has conducted investigations himself, O’Brien wrote: “I don’t at all disagree with the reasonableness of your use of a school-owned vehicle to head out for dinner and a nightcap when you’ve put in a long day of school business, and I don’t really think the law is intending to prohibit that. But the apparent approach of the Notice of Violation report applied to your use of a school vehicle seems to reach the same unproductive result.”

(Courtesy: City Charter Schools)

Citing financial woes due to low enrollment and problems with its private facility, the governing board of City High School voted Monday to close the charter school immediately, leaving 116 students scrambling to find new schools.

The school, located in Pico-Robertson on Los Angeles’ Westside, had been offered a location at Dorsey High School through Proposition 39 but turned it down because it was too far away from its middle school, according to Valerie Braimah, executive director of City Charter Schools. Choosing a more expensive option of leasing a private location on the Westside at 9017 W. Pico Blvd., the school struggled with enrollment and experienced electrical and air-conditioning problems at its building, which hurt enrollment more, Braimah said Wednesday evening.

With the only option being to cut staff to the point that academic viability of the school would be hurt, Braimah said the board opted to cease operations at the high school immediately. The school expected 150 students on the first day, but only 125 showed up and more dropped out in the first few weeks, leaving the school in financial trouble, Braimah said.

“This was an extremely heart-wrenching decision. This was not a problem with our educational program, this was an operational problem,” Braimah said.

The high school is part of a network of schools called City Charter Schools that includes City Language Immersion Charter, a dual-immersion elementary school in Baldwin Village, and The City School, a middle school. The middle school has been operating for five years, and the network’s leaders wanted to create a high school to serve its outgoing middle school students, but the school struggled to keep its enrollment up.

Braimah said the school was originally offered space from LA Unified at Emerson Community Charter School in Westwood through Prop. 39, a law that requires school districts to offer space to charters at district schools if it has unused classrooms or facilities. This can lead to charters sharing a building with another school, referred to as a co-location.

Emerson is 2.2 miles away from The City School, but the district changed plans and ultimately offered space at Los Angeles High School, which is 7.5 miles away in the Mid-Wilshire district. After a year at LA High, the school asked LA Unified for another location and was offered space at Dorsey High School, which is 6.4 miles away near Baldwin Village.

“Unfortunately, last year we ended up with a Prop. 39 site at Los Angeles High that was an adequate site facilities wise, but was geographically far for a lot of our families, and so a lot of our 8th-grade class did not matriculate to the high school and we started with a class of 60,” Braimah said.

City High only has 9th and 10th graders because it began last year with a freshman class and planned on adding a new class each year. After being offered Dorsey, the school chose to rent a private facility near its middle school, but the problems with the building added to financial woes and also led to several students dropping out, Braimah said.

“Long term, without a permanent facility in our sights and with the lack of predictability on Prop. 39, this problem really would have persisted. We are still young in our program, and we felt it was better for our kids to have another option that is college preparatory,” she said.

Braimah said the district has been helpful in getting students placed in schools and has extended the magnet enrollment deadline for its students. She also said the school has a partnership with Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy, which has offered to take as many students as are interested and has also offered them free busing to their campus near LAX from a central location.

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside, said late Wednesday, “The only thing that we are concerned about in this moment is the students and families impacted by this closure three weeks into the school year.”

When asked about the Prop. 39 issues and if City High had been offered an adequate facility, he declined to comment.

“When something like this happens, we should all remember that these are all of our kids and everyone has a role and a responsibility to make sure every family has the services that they need to make sure that there is not academic injury that would compound the stress that happens when the school closes,” Zimmer said. “So that is what is most important right now. There will be time to talk about what we need to do in terms of our early warning systems to know about when enrollment is at a point where viability is a question so that we know about it before it becomes a disruption.”

The school employs 10 teachers and three administrators, and City Charter Schools is working to find them new jobs, Braimah said. She also said the goal is to have every student placed in a new school by Friday.

Jacqueline Elliot

By Jacqueline Elliot, Ed.D.

When PUC Schools opened the first start-up public charter school in the San Fernando Valley in 1999, I never imagined we would be at the forefront of a movement that has grown to 274 charter schools in Los Angeles, serving over 138,000 students and thousands of students being the first in their families to graduate from university. On Saturday, these pioneering leaders will come together in Pacoima with thousands of parents and students for a triumphant celebration honoring the rich history of public education reform in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

I was inspired to start Community Charter Middle School to help solve the high dropout rate at the local high schools. Along with the 100 families from the community who desperately sought a safer, higher-achieving middle school, we created a learning environment that was small and focused on meeting every student’s needs. We were quickly successful. Our state test scores far exceeded those of the surrounding district schools within our first two years.

We’ve now grown to 16 schools throughout Los Angeles and serve more than 5,000 students. In what is perhaps the biggest validation of the work we’re doing, we see every year that many of our graduates are returning after going on to pursue a higher education, to contribute to their community in which they grew up. Some PUC alumni are returning to work at PUC and other schools in the community, helping us realize our founding mission to uplift communities. We’ve witnessed firsthand living conditions improving, crime rates dropping and families getting empowered.

PUC is proof of what real collaboration can produce. We never would have opened our doors if leaders from different parts of our education community had not stepped in at the last minute to help. When we were opening our first school in 1999, our facility was not yet ready. Los Angeles Unified gave us two days to find a temporary facility or they would not allow us to open that year. My four teachers and I were about to fall to our knees in the Cal State University Northridge quad, to beg a staff member from the dean’s office to allow us to use a few classrooms until our campus was ready. He agreed and Los Angeles Unified board member David Tokofsky secured free transportation for our 100 students to travel to the university campus for six weeks.

Today, we’re at a critical juncture. The charter movement is a significant force for change in the district. Graduation rates have increased, but too many kids are still dropping out.

Somewhere along this journey, we lost sight of the spirit of cooperation that allowed PUC to open. Superintendent Michelle King has started making significant inroads toward collaboration, most recently by hosting a “Promising Practices” forum with a series of workshops aimed at sharing best practices.

It’s time now for all educators to elevate the discussion from the type of school, be it charter, traditional or magnet, to what makes great schools. We must adopt a student-centric approach where everyone comes to the table with those innovative, scalable ideas that are good for all kids.

What if these forums happened on a monthly basis? Let’s develop formal partnerships between schools, matching up high-achieving models with those in the same neighborhoods that are still struggling, to act as mentors who share best practices.

I was touched by what the principal of nearby Sylmar High School recently told us. He held up a picture of our PUC Sylmar Education Complex to his staff and said, “See this? This is our competition.” He visited our school because he wanted to learn what we were doing to get our great results. It takes a big person to act based on one reason: what’s best for the students. And will PUC learn from him and his teachers? Absolutely.

This rich diversity of perspectives is a tremendous asset to Los Angeles Unified that we shouldn’t waste. Let’s give the students of the nation’s second-largest school district the tools to not only graduate high school but be prepared to succeed in college and life. Let’s make success through mutual respect and collaboration part of the culture of LAUSD.

The charters that started in the northeast San Fernando Valley all shared the common belief that we could do better for our students, no matter what their background. With all the northeast San Fernando Valley charter pioneers—Vaughn, Fenton, YPI, Montague and PUC—creative and aggressive reforms led to dramatic increases in student achievement.

On Saturday, when we celebrate the northeast San Fernando Valley charter schools as pioneers in the national charter school movement, we won’t just be honoring the reformers on the ground, but also the leaders at Los Angeles Unified who supported the schools from the beginning.

It behooves us to remember how it all began. Politics and egos must be cast aside, because collaboration is the only way we will herald a new era of success throughout all LAUSD schools in the years to come. Together let’s bridge past and present, and look to a future where public education is a product of our united efforts, best thinking and collective passion.

Dr. Jacqueline Elliot founded the first startup charter school in the San Fernando Valley, Community Charter Middle School, in 1999, which grew into PUC Schools. PUC serves more than 5,000 students in 16 public charter schools located in the northeast San Fernando Valley and northeast Los Angeles, as well as one school in Rochester, New York. Dr. Elliot is President & CEO of PUC National.

Students at Alliance Margaret M. Bloomfield High School in Huntington Park.

Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is the largest independent charter network in LA Unified, with 28 middle and high schools serving over 12,500 students. Ninety-four percent of Alliance’s students come from poverty, yet the charter management organization has a proven track record of outperforming the district and state schools when it comes to key factors like graduation rates and standardized test performance.

But how scalable is the Alliance model and that of other CMOs like it? Are there answers inside their halls to the big questions that have dogged the district for years? Or are charters actually the problem, not the solution, when it comes to the district’s woes, as some detractors like the LA teachers union, UTLA, have charged.

• Read more about charters: How charters went from a ‘novelty’ to dominate the conversation of LAUSD, and 9 questions and answers about LA’s charters.

These questions were raised to new levels of importance about a year ago when an early draft of what was to become the Great Public Schools Now funding plan for Los Angeles schools was leaked to the press and sent shockwaves through the educational world. The plan called for expanding independent charter schools at LA Unified to serve half of all its students.

The plan received significant backlash and has since been modified to include all kinds of successful models, including traditional district schools, but the early draft raised an interesting question: Could charter schools be scaled to size to overtake district schools?

Independent charters already serve 107,000 of the district’s 665,000 students, but there has yet to be a charter management organization that has proven ready and willing to declare itself a scalable, cookie cutter model that could replace district schools.

Alliance is certainly not ready to declare itself that. In fact, Alliance has no plans to add any new schools over the next four years, according to Dan Katzir, Alliance’s president and CEO, who has been in his role since March 2015. Katzir said in his interview for the job he floated the idea of pausing on adding new schools.

“The fact of the matter is even if we stop growing for four years, we need to catch up with our growth from a systems perspective, an infrastructure perspective and a behavior and cultural perspective,” Katzir said.

Katzir also added that even if Alliance doesn’t add new schools, it will continue to grow because six schools in the network are still adding grades in the coming years.

However, despite the pause on growth, Alliance does believe its model is replicable. On its About Us webpage, the title reads, “Proving exceptional at scale is possible.” And Katzir said, “We can scale. We are bigger than 75 percent of other districts in the state, so we can scale.”

ALLIANCE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Ninety-eight percent of Alliance students are African-American or Latino, 94 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 9 percent have special needs and 17 percent are English learners. The district as a whole during the 2015-16 school year was 82 percent Latino and African-American, 77 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, 12 percent have special needs and 22 percent are English learners.

In the 2014-15 school year, 95 percent of Alliance seniors graduated high school, compared to 72 percent at district schools. On the 2015 Smarter Balanced standardized tests, 57 percent of Alliance juniors met or exceeded the English language arts standards, compared to 48 percent for juniors at district schools, and 28 percent met or exceeded the math standards, compared to 20 percent at district schools. On the 2016 tests, 68 percent of Alliance juniors met or exceeded the ELA standard, compared to 54 percent of LA Unified juniors, and 31 percent of Alliance juniors met or exceeded the math standard, compared to 25 percent for the district. Alliance schools stack up even better compared to neighborhood schools located near them on the 2016 tests. According to Alliance data, its schools performed 82 percent higher in math and 48 percent higher in ELA than neighboring district schools.

Alliance also says that 95 percent of its seniors are accepted into college and 100 percent graduate with the requirements to apply to UC and CSU colleges — known as the A-G standards. During the 2013-14 school year, 28 percent of district seniors graduated having completed all A-G courses, although that number is set to significantly jump this year due to a $15-million credit recovery program.

A MODEL THAT VALUES AUTONOMY

One thing that Alliance leaders stress is that their model isn’t really an exact model, because autonomy and freedom to innovate form a cornerstone of the belief system. Each Alliance principal has the power to hire and fire the staff and has full control over the school’s budget. Katzir said 90 percent of every dollar Alliance receives goes directly to the school, and the home office takes 10 percent for administrative costs.

“What’s happening at one school is different than what is happening at another. So the school has some autonomy to figure out how to hit their markers, and we are trying to figure out what the trends are that can support the most number of people,” said Alliance Chief Development and Communications Officer Catherine Suitor. “There’s a level of autonomy at the school so the school can turn, and the teachers have a level of autonomy, so it goes all the way down. It’s like, how to do you make decisions close to students and look at students? I really would say that is probably the biggest difference.”

The Alliance home office sets the bar for achievement, the overall Alliance values, training and educational approach, but principals are given significant freedom in how they run the school day-to-day. Alliance leaders also credit the small size of their schools as key to their success. The average Alliance grade has around 150 students. The smaller scale allows for each student to receive personalized attention.

“There are small classrooms here. I know all the students, I know all the parents by name. I can tell you a story about every single child in this building,” said Ani Meymarian, principal of Alliance Margaret M. Bloomfield High School in Huntington Park.

Jennifer Dzul, a recent graduate of Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School, transferred to an Alliance middle school after going to a large LA Unified elementary school and said the small environment was key to her success. She is set to begin as a freshman at Brown University this month.

“It was very different in that I got to know everybody on a personal basis. The school was so small I was really able to get everybody’s name and learn where they came from, versus elementary school where I have my group of friends and that’s it,” Dzul said. “The academics were a little harder, but because the classes were so small, the teachers noticed when you didn’t do the homework or when you were struggling because they didn’t have to worry about a lot of people.”

Martin Alcarez recently graduated from Alliance Marc and Eva Stern Math Science High School and is off to Stanford this month. His older brother also attended the school, and although he was more interested in attending the larger Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet, his mother convinced him to go to Alliance.

“At Alliance, not only were the teachers communicating with the students, but they were communicating with the parents, and not just about bad things. Because oftentimes at other big high schools, teachers only communicate for bad things,” Alcarez said. “At Alliance, my mom noticed that they really cared for students. Oftentimes teachers would call and say, ‘Oh, your son is doing really well in school and we are giving him an award.’ All those things that don’t seem significant, but they played a huge part in my mom making me go to Alliance.”

Diana Tejeda, a Spanish teacher at Bloomfied, also said the small environment has helped her grow.

“My friends at other schools that are not specifically charters, they feel like there is no room for growth. ‘No one comes to visit my classroom very often. I don’t know who to ask for help, it’s just like a stagnant situation. I go to work, I do my work and I teach.’ Whereas here I receive constant visits from the counselor, from the principal, from the vice principals and from other students that tend to come and walk in,” she said.

CONTROVERSY IN BATTLE WITH UTLA

As the largest charter network in LA UnifIed, and as the issue of how big and how fast charters should grow has come to dominate much of the conversation around the district, Alliance has found itself a target of UTLA. In March 2015 a unionization effort was launched and Alliance has found itself embroiled in a legal battle.

UTLA took a number of complaints to the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB), claiming that Alliance leaders were illegally blocking unionization efforts, at Alliance has lost some rulings before PERB and a state judge, who issued a temporary restraining order against Alliance. State lawmakers also recently approved an audit of Alliance’s finances to see if it was using public funds in its battle with UTLA. For more, see these stories:

• UTLA files complaint against Alliance charters over unionization
• State lawmakers approve audit of Alliance schools’ use of funds in battle with UTLA
• JUST IN: Judge issues restraining order against Alliance in union battle

The situation is still playing out in the courts. Along with the significant backlash that the early draft of what became the Great Public Schools Now plan received, it proves that no charter network, regardless of how successful their students become, is going to quietly grow without finding itself embroiled in political controversy surrounding charters.

“This isn’t just any union. This is UTLA, which is on the record as wanting to destroy charter schools,” said Katzir when asked why Alliance leaders are opposed to unionizing. “And so if you, a parent who is a plumber and a union member, believe that you have made a choice to be here, we believe that one of our elements of success is the relationship between the administrators and the teachers, and the flexibility to be innovative and customize the work for the kids and communities that we serve. Given what we have seen from UTLA, we think a lot of what we have at Alliance would be at risk here.”

Charter school supporters outside LA Unified headquarters in 2012. (Courtesy: CCSA)

Over 2,000 parents, students and supporters of charter schools are expected to attend a “Rally in the Valley” on Saturday to advocate for pro-charter policies, as well as to celebrate the 25th anniversary of charter schools coming to LA Unified. The first several charter schools to open in the district were in the San Fernando Valley, including Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima, where the rally will begin.

The rally, which is being hosted by California Charter Schools Association Families, will include a march from Vaughn Next Century Learning Center at 9:30 a.m. to nearby Vaughn G3 (Green Global Generation) before a public program that will feature speeches from LA Unified school board member Monica Ratliff and Congressman Tony Cardenas. Board members Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez are also scheduled to be in attendance, as well as Assemblymember Raul Bocanegra and the four candidates running to replace Ratliff on the LA Unified board. Ratliff, who represents the East San Fernando Valley where the Vaughn schools are located, announced in June that she will be running for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council.

“Ratliff has proven herself to be a thoughtful, independent voice on the board and so results focused. She has been a model for what her community is looking for from a school board member,” said Jason Mandell, spokesperson for the California Charter Schools Association.

The rally comes after a year of increased tension between LA Unified’s charter supporters and traditional school supporters, as well as some more peaceful moves recently. In February, 23 charter operators sent a letter to the school board complaining about what they said was increased scrutiny of charter schools during the application and renewal process. Another point of conflict was an early draft of what became the Great Public Schools Now plan to fund successful school models at LA Unified. The early draft called for expanding charter schools to enroll half of all the district’s students in eight years and was met with strong opposition, including from board President Steve Zimmer, but has since been amended to include magnets, district schools and other successful models.

Since taking office in January, Superintendent Michelle King has sought to ease tensions between charters and traditional supporters. Her efforts culminated in a “Promising Practices” forum in July that brought together charter leaders and traditional school leaders to share ideas and practices. At the forum, Zimmer gave a speech that was seen by many charter leaders as a call for détente when he said both sides should “work together” to make students’ dreams come true.

Despite the forum, conflict still exists. The LA teachers union, UTLA, recently launched a media campaign that includes an anti-charter agenda and also announced a 10-point plan that includes a push to change state law to increase oversight of charters.

Aside from celebrating charter schools, the rally “will also call upon elected representatives in local and state government to support pro-charter policies, including the expansion of high-quality charters, better facilities for charter students, and an end to the politics and rhetoric challenging parents’ right to choose the best public school for their children,” according to a press release from California Charter Schools Association Families.

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.

This is part of a series looking at the various types of schools in LA Unified. Read more on charters, magnet schools and affiliated charters. 

Question: What is an independent charter school?

Answer: Independent charter schools at LA Unified are publicly financed but independently run educational institutions. Charters are authorized and overseen by a local school district, county school district or the state. The schools must come before their authorizing board every five years for renewal, and their authorizers make sure the school’s finances and educational approach are in order.

Charter schools are tuition free and are open to all students who apply. By law they may not discriminate for enrollment based on academic performance, race, economic background or special education status. Some have waiting lists and enrollment is based on a lottery.

Q: How many independent charter schools are there at LA Unified?

A: At the beginning of the 2016-17 school year there were 228 independent charter schools authorized by LA Unified serving over 107,000 students, or roughly 16 percent of the student body. LA Unified has the most charter schools and students of any district in the nation. In the 2014-15 school year, there were an estimated 41,830 students on charter waiting lists at LA Unified, according to the California Charter Schools Association.

In the state of California, there were 1,228 independent charter schools in the 2015-16 school year, and roughly 3 percent of them were for-profit, according to CCSA. No charters at LA Unified are for-profit.

Q: Do charter school students perform better than students at traditional schools?

A: On the 2015 and 2016 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) standardized tests, independent charters outperformed the district in all key categories.

On the 2015 tests, 40 percent of independent charter students met or exceeded the English language arts (ELA) test standard, compared to 33 percent of district students. On the math test, 27 percent of charter students met of exceeded the standard, compared to 25 percent of district students. On the 2016 tests, 46 percent of charter students met or exceeded the ELA standard, compared to 39 percent for traditional schools, and 30 percent of charter students met or exceeded the math standard, compared to 28 percent at district schools.

Q: What about other metrics, like graduation rates and A-G completion?

A: Charters also outpace the district in graduation rates and completion of A-G courses, which are a series of required classes that must be passed with a C or better in order to be accepted into California’s public universities.

According to the California Charter Schools Association, charter schools had a cohort graduation rate of 84 percent in 2014-15, compared to 72 percent for the district. And A-G completion with a C or better for charters was 78 percent in 2013-14, compared to 28 percent for the district. However, the district has predicted large gains in A-G completion last school year due in part to a $15 million credit recovery program, and preliminary data show the graduation rate will be 75 percent.

Q: Are there demographic differences that should be taken into consideration when comparing these numbers?

A: Yes. In some areas, charters and the district match up closely on demographics, and in some areas they do not.

One key difference is in special education. Recent numbers show that in the 2015-16 school year, special education made up 11.04 percent of enrollment at charters and 11.96 percent at the district after years of gains by charters. But there is a key difference in that the district still has a larger number of students with moderate to severe disabilities, who are more costly to educate. The district’s enrollment of students with moderate to severe disabilities in 2015-16 was 4.72 percent, compared to 2.1 percent for charters.

On race and key subgroups, independent charters and the district match up closely. See this map of the location of charter schools by poverty level (courtesy EdDataZone) and this map showing charter locations in neighborhoods by race.

The below graphics outline how charters and district schools match up demographically:

Q: Why are some people and unions against charter schools?

A: The majority of LA Unified’s independent charter schools do not have union labor, so teachers unions tend to oppose their existence. Charter schools also receive their funding directly from the state, so as the number of charter schools in the district has grown, the operating budget of LA Unified has shrunk, causing some school board members and educational leaders to see charters as a threat to the stability of public education.

Q: What is an affiliated charter? Is that the same as an independent charter?

A: No, they are not the same. An affiliated charter is still directly overseen by the district, and the district controls its budget. But the “affiliated” status gives school leaders more flexibility. Click here to learn more.

Q: What is a charter management organization (CMO)?

A: A CMO is an organization that operates multiple charter schools, while a freestanding charter school is a standalone school not directly associated with any other school. According to CCSA, at LA Unified in the 2015-16 school year, there were 170 independent charters at LA Unified that were part of a CMO and 51 that were freestanding. Click here to see a map from EdDataZone for details on where CMOs and freestanding schools are located.

Q: Are charters growing at LA Unified?

A: Yes, charters are growing, and more have been added to the district every year since the Charter School Act of 1992 was passed. This graphic charts their growth:

Waiting to speak about a Green Dot charter school.

Charter families have lined up at dawn in biting cold winds holding babies. They’ve sweated it out for hours standing around ice chests or taking turns under canopies. They’ve waited hours—sometimes nearly a full a day—to get into an LA Unified school board meeting. Then, they wait hours more just to be heard.

School Board President Steve Zimmer is out to change that, especially since next week’s school board meeting on Sept. 20 is expected to have many items involving charter schools.

“First and foremost, I want folks to know that we are committed to changing that so they will not be waiting all day and not know when their items will come up before the board,” Zimmer said at the last board meeting. “We are actively trying to get better on this.”

It’s an idea that will help all speakers on any topic who come to address the LA Unified meetings, but it will specifically help charter school families. Many of the agenda items that draw the most speakers involve charter renewals or questions about charter schools that the school board oversees. Parents, teachers and students come to sign up to speak to the school board.

The once-a-month marathon-length school board meetings typically go from 9 a.m. for closed session personnel items until well past 9 p.m. Zimmer promised the public and his fellow school board members that when he was elected as president for the second year he would try to fix the long waits by the public.

“When charter items are being heard, having folks wait all day is not something we want to continue,” Zimmer said.

During the open section of their Closed Session meeting on Aug. 23, other school board members weighed in on rectifying the situation about 54 minutes into the meeting. Board member Monica Ratliff considered making a motion or resolution to come up with a solution.

“I feel like we talked about it, but I do not feel like it’s moving forward and I’m concerned that it’s not happening,” Ratliff said.

Zimmer assured Ratliff and the other board members that the request would be followed. Board member Monica Garcia suggested that the district’s Charter School Office also help notify the schools on the agenda.

“There should also be some trust that when you say something is going to happen, that it actually happens at that time,” Garcia said.

Jason Mandell of the California Charter Schools Association said he welcomes the new procedures planned by the school board because the long waits have resulted in complaints and frustration for the charter school families. He said he has been notified of a “time certain” for charter school issues for the next meeting. And although his group would prefer an entirely separate meeting for charter issues, this is a step in the right direction, he said.

“Anything is better than it was before, and overall we are happy because it is easier for families, teachers and school leaders to speak to the school board without having to wait eight to 10 hours,” Mandell said.

Board secretariat Jefferson Crain said emails will be sent to 1,600 people who receive school board news that will indicate specific times for agenda items, most likely after 6 p.m. to make it easier for working parents and teachers.

“Despite past efforts and speaking directly to some people, they still chose to come at 6 in the morning,” Crain said. “We do not want to have a separate meeting for specific types of issues.”

Superintendent Michelle King said her office would conduct a survey to get some input into how to best solve the long lines and waiting issues.

Zimmer said, “We want to make the best way for people to be heard. I want the maximum amount of people to speak and don’t want folks here late into the evening.”

He added, “Clearly the way we did it last year is not something we want to continue.”

The next regular board meeting is set for Sept. 20 with closed session items discussed at 9 a.m. The open session is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. at the School Board Auditorium at 333 S. Beaudry Ave. Charter school items will have a “time certain” starting at 6 p.m., and the order of business will be posted on Sept. 14.

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.