In an effort to portray a far-reaching bill as a compromise between charter schools and teacher unions, Gov. Gavin Newsom invited leaders of both groups as well as state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurman to recent signing ceremonies for Assembly Bill 1505.

In remarks at the event, Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, asserted that the new law “affirms that high-quality charter schools are here to stay and that the charter model — one that embraces accountability in exchange for the flexibility to innovate — is worth protecting and is of tremendous value to the students we serve.”

But what Newsom and Castrejón sought to depict as a balancing act was instead seen in most news coverage as the biggest blow yet to the California charter school movement, which began slowly in 1992 but now includes 1,300 schools that educate about 660,000 of the state’s K-12 students.

One modification to the original bill by Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, was a huge win for charter schools. It allows charter applicants and charters seeking renewals to appeal rejections from local school boards to county and state officials. A provision on requiring all charter teachers have formal credentials was revised to give charter schools until 2025 to comply.

Trustees can cite fiscal concerns in opposing charters

But the single most important part of the new law is the provision most sought by teacher unions and most feared by charter advocates. That is language that allows district boards to reject charters solely on financial grounds.

In an era in which annual school spending has soared — up from about $67 billion in 2014 to a record $102 billion now, a 52 percent increase — it would nominally appear that charters don’t have much to worry about from such a provision. Yet many state school districts are struggling to make ends meet now as much as they did during the Great Recession a decade ago, when state spending plunged nearly 20 percent in a single year.

Analysts say one reason districts are in trouble has to do with the increase in special-education students, who cost significantly more to educate and whose statewide budget got a 21 percent boost in May.

But the main headache is the enormous cost of the Legislature’s 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. It mandates that districts increase their CalSTRS payments by 132 percent from 2014-15 to 2020-21. Yet partly because of a significant increase in the number of retiring teachers getting pensions, the actual hit on district budgets over that span is much worse — 196 percent, the Legislative Analyst’s Office said earlier this year.

Pension bailout eating up surge in school funding

This has had the effect of pushing the total cost of compensation to 90 percent or more of the operating budgets in some districts, with by far the state’s largest district — Los Angeles Unified — among the hardest-hit. In May, LAUSD officials warned that a state takeover by 2022 was likely unless voters approved a parcel tax. Voters opposed the tax despite a heavy lobbying campaign. LAUSD’s fiscal reserves may not even cover the next three years unless state education spending keeps going up, district watchers warn.

But the problems are statewide. The state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team — which helps districts in distress — has had to focus on problems in the counties of San Diego, Sacramento, Oakland and more.

In response, a union-led coalition is seeking to qualify a November 2020 ballot measure modifying Proposition 13, the state’s famous 1978 tax-limitation law. It would allow the valuation of commercial properties to go up each year to reflect their value instead of the maximum 2 percent increase allowed under Proposition 13, generating potentially $5 billion or more in new annual funds for schools. 

The coalition had already qualified a similar measure for the 2020 in fall of last year, but decided to withdraw it because of the fear that its harsh potential effects on small businesses would make it a hard sell.

The California Teachers Association is having one of its best sessions in years, winning support for a crackdown on charter schools and unusual direct state assistance for districts to pay for ballooning pension costs – freeing up money for teacher raises. But a long-percolating push by the CTA and its allies to renew the reading wars of the 1980s and 1990s by weakening requirements that prospective reading teachers demonstrate mastery of phonics education has quickly stalled.

A gut-and-amend had turned Senate Bill 614 from a measure that would promote early childhood education into an attempt to decrease the qualifications needed to teach reading. But the revised measure was put on hold after the Oakland branch of the NAACP blasted the bill for making it even more likely that students in poor neighborhoods would have unqualified teachers.

The sponsor of SB614 – Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Baldwin Park – rewrote the measure so it would remove language in the Education Code that requires prospective reading teachers to pay for and pass a test demonstrating their knowledge of how phonics work. 

In phonics, students are taught reading by learning the sounds that groups of letters make when spoken. This approach was dropped by California in the late 1980s in favor of “whole language” instruction in which students are expected to figure out the correlation between letters and pronunciation through experimentation. In 1994, the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson went back to phonics after concluding that “whole language” had hurt test scores.

Union cited difficulty of phonics requirement

But the latest attempt to undermine phonics training isn’t driven by unhappiness with phonics per se. According to teacher-blogger Rachel Hurd, a 13-year CTA member, in internal communications, the union cited two primary motivations for seeking changes.

1) “The pathway to becoming a teacher in California loses a significant share of candidates at each testing juncture. … Given that candidates also reported that the tests are a financial hurdle and a logistical challenge, there is no doubt that they have a noticeable impact on the pipeline for becoming a teacher in the state.”

2) “The abysmal first-time pass rates for native Spanish speakers, African Americans, and male teacher candidates.”

These rationales outraged George Holland Sr., president of the Oakland branch of the NAACP.

NAACP, reading experts were highly critical

“We must better prepare educators to meet the bar – not eliminate it. Passing SB614 would disregard the science of reading, data about the causes of teacher turnover, the National Reading Project findings, … the California Guidelines for Dyslexia, and the California Constitution,” he wrote on July 5.

Three dozen reading experts from across the nation also issued a letter the same week saying there was overwhelming evidence that phonics worked best.

Rubio’s bill was supposed to be heard by the Senate Education Committee this month. Instead, it was pulled at Rubio’s request before Senate staffers had even finished an analysis of its new content.

It could possibly resurface later in the session.

The 2018 race for state superintendent of public instruction may not have an incumbent but is likely to feel like an encore of the 2014 race, pitting a Democrat aligned with the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers against a Democrat who backs reforms opposed by the unions.

In 2014, Tom Torlakson – a former teacher and state lawmaker – won a second term, touting higher graduation rates and somewhat better test scores. He defeated former Los Angeles charter school executive Marshall Tuck 52 percent to 48 percent in a race in which $30 million was reportedly spent, triple the campaign spending in that year’s quiet governor’s race.

With the strong support of wealthy Los Angeles area Democrats who have been fighting for changes in L.A. Unified and who remember the job he did running Green Dot charters, Tuck is running again.

Subbing for termed-out Torlakson is Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, who has worked closely with teachers unions on many fronts – most notably joining in maneuvering last summer that helped kill a tenure reform bill that had gotten off to a strong start in the Legislature. He has also opposed efforts to more closely monitor how education dollars are being spent under the Local Control Funding Formula. The law was supposed to be used specifically to help districts with high numbers of English language learners, students in foster care and students from impoverished families to improve their academic performance. But civil rights groups say the extra dollars often have been used for general spending, including for teacher raises.

Thurmond was also among lawmakers who expressed interest in helping teachers deal with California’s high housing costs, proposing legislation to award $100 million in rental grants to teachers in need. It didn’t advance.

Tuck may have better shot than when he challenged incumbent

The conventional wisdom is that Tuck has a better chance than in 2014 because Thurmond has much lower name recognition than Torlakson. But that could be erased with a heavy television ad run by the teachers unions using the same anti-Tuck themes as in 2014: Making the argument that the charter schools he led are part of a corporate scheme to take over public education. 

If Tuck, 44, gets his way, the debate will focus on his reform agenda – the idea that charters serve as healthy competition for regular schools; the need for much better oversight of how the Local Control Funding Formula is used; adopting teacher tenure reform; and accountability standards that make it easier to judge whether a school is improving.

Thurmond’s website emphasizes his view of California educators doing battle with President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over what he describes as their intent to “gut” and “defund our public schools.” Thurmond, 49, a military veteran who was a social worker before running for office, also said teachers need “bonuses and other incentives” to address the shortage of qualified instructors.

Complicating the Tuck-Thurmond race is the likelihood that for the first time in the 21st century, a prominent Democratic gubernatorial candidate is running as an anti-union reformer – which could make schools a more prominent issue in the 2018 election cycle than is normal.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who repeatedly tangled with the United Teachers Los Angeles while seeking authority over L.A. Unified, has already won the endorsement of the state Democratic lawmaker recognized as the leader of education reform efforts: Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego.

The CTA endorsed Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in the governor’s race and Thurmond for superintendent in October. The CFT did as well in December.

The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a $7.5 billion 2017-18 budget this week on a 5-1 vote with Superintendent Michelle King

But despite the upbeat rhetoric, a crisis is looming in the nation’s second-largest school district as enrollment falls from a projected 514,000 in 2017 to 480,000 in 2020. Since the state’s main education funding formula is based on average daily attendance, this could force mass layoffs of teachers or even drastic measures like shortening the school year. A $422 million deficit is anticipated in 2019-20, with red ink after that for as far as the eye can see.

None of this comes as any surprise. A blue-ribbon commission’s report issued in November 2015 said L.A. Unified was facing fiscal disaster because of the enrollment declines, which are primarily due to falling birth rates, and because of the cost of pensions and retiree health care benefits. Employee retirement benefits will claim 8 percent of the school budget in 2017-18 and more than double that sum in coming years as the state’s 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ratchets up required payments from districts and as more of the district’s aging workforce retires.

These costs are the primary reason that while the 2017-18 LAUSD budget is nearly 7 percent larger than for the just-concluded school year, the plan still only penciled out after 121 layoffs or “separations,” mostly for holders of clerical positions. About 180 employees will be reassigned, many to part-time duties.

Blue-ribbon panel warned of disaster in 2015

Since the grim 2015 report was issued, three developments have cast L.A. Unified’s finances in an even harsher light.

The most significant is charter school advocates backed by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and other wealthy reformers taking over the LAUSD school board in a May election, defeating teachers union-backed candidates who have generally controlled the board in recent times. Broad wants half or more of Los Angeles students in charters, double the current amount. While reformers have a case that this would be better for students, it would sharply reduce state funding under control of district officials and thus make it harder to forge any comprehensive response to the coming budget crisis.

The second development is a legal challenge mounted by civil rights groups that alleges the district has misspent vast amounts of state funds that were supposed to go specifically to help English-language learners, impoverished students and students in foster homes.

Filed in July 2015, the claim initially seemed unlikely to succeed. The previous month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson had overruled a subordinate and held that Local Control Funding Formula dollars could be used for teacher raises – suggesting the restrictions on how the funds could be spent weren’t as strong as reformers believed.

But in May 2016, the Department of Education that Torlakson oversees held that L.A. Unified had improperly diverted $450 million in Local Control dollars.

The third development is the election of Donald Trump as president. Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, federal funding for education programs in all 50 states seems likely to significantly decrease. Federal dollars covered 9 percent of California’s education spending in 2016-17.

Despite a mixed bag of support for the many propositions on California’s voluminous ballot, legalized recreational in-state marijuana use appears to be headed from far-off dream to dawning reality. 

“Last month, the two most prestigious California public opinion outfits — the Field Research Corporation and Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) — both pegged support for Proposition 64 at 60 percent,” Ed Kilgore noted at New York Magazine. “Field nostalgically noted that its first poll of California on the subject, in 1969, showed only 13 percent support for legalization. A new PPIC survey in October showed legal weed pulling a mere 55 percent with 38 percent opposed. That’s still a 17-point margin. Indeed, there has only been one bad poll for Proposition 64.”

A decisive year

Although California has long been forced into the role of bellwether state by policy activists hoping to go national with Golden State victories, broader change in a pro-pot direction has been largely recognized as nearly inevitable given the sheer size of the market for pot that Prop. 64 would legitimize and expand. “Californians are on the verge of tripling the number of American adults who can legally acquire marijuana without interference from doctors, dealers or cops,” Reason magazine’s Matt Welch observed at the Los Angeles Times. “If Maine and Nevada voters do likewise, as seems probable, that would further expand the zone of recreational freedom to cover nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population.”

Pro-pot advocates have cast a broad net this election season. “Voters in five states — Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada — will decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana for adults,” as NBC News reported. “Medical marijuana is on the ballot in Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota.”

“Two national surveys released in mid-October confirm that, with the Pew Research Center revealing that 57 percent of U.S. adults say the use of marijuana should be made legal — while 60 percent were opposed a decade ago. The latest Gallup Poll showed that support for legalizing marijuana is at 60 percent, the highest ever recorded in this survey. After Colorado and Oregon became the first states to allow the recreational use of pot, in 2013, support for legalization reached a majority for the first time.”

Business first

Entrepreneurs have already begun a rush to fill current and perceived appetites for a new generation of recreational weed products and services. “Startups are cropping up throughout the Bay Area that put a signature Valley spin on the age-old practice of selling marijuana, offering sleek on-demand delivery apps for users and high-tech software for growers and dispensaries,” the San Jose Mercury News recently noted. “The business models are risky — marijuana is illegal under federal law and stigma around the drug prevents cannabis startups from scoring funding from many major investors. But with recent polls suggesting Californians are poised to expand marijuana consumption beyond medical use, experts expect cash to pour into the industry.”

Already, changes to state law governing how licenses are granted to new marijuana businesses have helped open the floodgates. “New pot businesses have been springing up under medical marijuana licensing rules signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown last year,” the Sacramento Bee reported.  

Jump ball

Analysts have remained divided, however, on the partisan implications of legalization. While many traditional Republican critics have suggested that more permissive drug laws are of a piece with an expansive entitlement state, libertarian supporters like Welch have countered that more free-market innovations are likely to follow in Prop. 64’s wake. “What’s the 2016 equivalent of medical marijuana shops?” he asked. “Charter schools come quickly to mind. Wherever the one size is not fitting all to the end user’s satisfaction, there is an opportunity for governmental bodies to allow for some real or metaphorical outside lab work. Beware any entity that would prematurely close such experiments down.”

But as the number of state charter schools has more than doubled — to 1,228 — over the past decade, grumbling has been building from traditional schools. This summer, that grumbling has translated into efforts to sharply increase regulation of charters.

Charter school advocates see this as a barely disguised effort to stop their movement in its tracks. The lack of strong regulations is behind the popularity of charters, they believe, allowing schools to focus on what works in classrooms as opposed to what the education establishment thinks is best.

Education establishment has long list of gripes

But defenders of traditional education say charters’ huge growth could never have occurred if there was an establishment conspiracy to subvert them. And they also cite several specific areas where they say their concerns about charters are specific and well-documented.

At a recent Senate Education Committee hearing, school officials — most notably Dina Wilson, director of the charter school office of the Los Angeles County Office of Education — offered a long list of complaints. The most prominent:

• Charter schools aren’t required to provide detailed financial information or to create comprehensive budget and facilities plans.
• Charter schools don’t have to follow laws requiring other schools to serve lunch, including subsidized meals for students from poor families.
• Charter schools have far more leeway in disciplining and expelling students, operating without the appeals process that regular schools must follow.
• Many charter schools don’t have high percentages of students from impoverished families who are often more costly to educate.

Charter advocates countered by saying the flexibility and freedom that they were criticized for having were not a problem with the hundreds of thousands of families eager to enroll their children. Advocates saw political motives — i.e., the animus of politically influential teachers unions — as being behind troubles some charters were having with authorities. 

The most specific accusation of charter mistreatment came from the CEO of Thrive Public Schools, a San Diego charter school organization. Nicole Assisi said despite having a track record of success and a strong planning document, first San Diego Unified and then the San Diego County Office of Education turned down Thrive’s request for a new charter. The reception was different from the State Board of Education, Assisi said. It unanimously approved the new charter, overruling the local decision-makers.

ACLU criticizes charters over admissions

But charter schools also face criticism from outside the education establishment. The ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates released a report on Aug. 1 that said about one-fifth of California charters were violating the law that they must be open to all students by having enrollment requirements — mostly involving academics — that public schools cannot impose.

The California Charter School Association responded by issuing a statement acknowledging problems that needed to be resolved. “We agree with the ACLU and Public Advocates that charter schools must be open to any student interested in attending, and no student or group of students should be excluded or discriminated against as a result of enrollment and admissions policies at any public school, including charter public schools,” wrote Jed Wallace, president and CEO of the charter association.

Wallace disagreed with the argument “that all essays, interviews and requests for student documentation for enrollment are per se discriminatory or exclusionary.” But he also wrote that all charter schools should review their policies to ensure “there is not even a perception of bias or discrimination in admissions and enrollment processes.”

California Senate candidate Kamala Harris has kicked over a hornet’s nest in a big but contentious settlement with the nation’s largest online charter school. Not only has K12 refused to admit wrongdoing, despite Harris’s public allegations, but the organization has also disputed how Harris characterizes the size of the settlement reached. 

In a statement, Harris accused the school of bilking families and Sacramento alike. “K12 and its schools misled parents and the state of California by claiming taxpayer dollars for questionable student attendance, misstating student success and parent satisfaction and loading nonprofit charities with debt,” she said, according to the Associated Press. CEO Stuart Udell fired back with a statement of his own, denying K12 had broken any laws and claiming that Harris’s office had blown K12’s behavior — and its monetary concessions — out of proportion. “Despite our full cooperation throughout the process, the Office of the Attorney General grossly mischaracterized the value of the settlement just as it did with regard to the issues it investigated,” he said.

Protracted confrontation 

Each side swiftly traded barbs over the supposed $168.5 million settlement, which has yet to be approved by a California court and includes just $8.5 million in direct payments. “The terms of this settlement could not be more clear,” a Harris spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “K12 must expunge the $160 million in debt it had imposed on California charter schools.” Udell, however, maintained that the $160 million could not be expunged from K12’s books because it had never been entered into them:

“On a call with investors, the company’s CEO called the $168.5 million figure ‘shameless and categorically incorrect.’ Instead, K12 put the settlement amount at $2.5 million, subtracting that $160 million of so-called debt relief and another $6 million that K12 agreed to pay the attorney general’s office for the cost of putting together the lawsuit.”

But K12 has faced scrutiny from other Golden State officials as well. “State school superintendent Tom Torlakson recently announced that the department of education had contracted with the state controller’s office to audit the California Virtual Academies,” 14 schools affiliated with K12, according to EdWeek. “The superintendent said the probe will focus on a number of areas, including whether the nonprofit California virtual academies are ‘organizationally separate’ for K12, a commercial entity; whether attendance, enrollment and dropout figures are accurate; and whether expenses are tallied accurately.” As the state attorney general’s office told the site, “That its settlement is separate from the comptroller’s probe and will have no impact on it going forward.”

Investigative journalism

Although Harris has burnished her status as Senate frontrunner by leading a broad investigation into the for-profit schooling industry, K12 first ran afoul of Sacramento because of an investigation three months ago by the Bay Area News Group focused on the company. K12 drew the group’s attention as it “raked in more than $310 million in state funding over the past 12 years operating a profitable but low-performing network of ‘virtual’ schools for about 15,000 students,” as the Mercury News observed. 

“This news organization’s investigation into K12’s California schools revealed the company reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding while graduating fewer than half of its high school students. It also showed that kids who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged onto K12’s software may have been counted as ‘present’ in records used to calculate the amount of funding the schools get from the state.”

In the wake of the report, further trouble for the education behemoth has loomed on the horizon. “The California-based schools still could face action from the state Department of Education, which has brought in the state controller to conduct an audit,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “And the schools’ teachers have launched a union organizing drive.” Even the California Charter Schools Association, often a reliable ally of charters, lashed out, condemning “the predatory and dishonest practices employed by K12 Inc. to dupe parents [by] using misleading marketing schemes, siphon taxpayer dollars with inflated student attendance data, and coerce CAVA School nonprofit employees into dubious contracting arrangements,” the paper added.

But a big topic has never seemed to come up: the fact that LAUSD’s finances are in such grim shape the district could be headed for bankruptcy. That was the conclusion of a panel of experts asked by district leaders to do a de facto audit in response to criticism that the school board and then-superintendent Ramon Cortines weren’t being realistic about medium- and long-term costs of LAUSD’s operations. In November, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the panel’s report and printed key details:

The group, which met in private over the last several months, concluded that L.A. Unified will face a budget deficit of $333 million in the 2017-18 school year, an additional $450 million the following year and $600 million more the year after that.

 

This year’s general fund totals about $7.1 billion. …

 

If declining enrollment “cannot be reversed, the district’s future planning will be characterized by constant down-sizing and loss of revenue until the district reaches a new equilibrium at a lower, but sustainable, level,” the report said. If the district can’t adapt, it can’t remain viable, according to the report. …

 

L.A. Unified also spends more than it should on cafeteria operations and compensation for injured workers, the report said.

 

The panel made numerous recommendations, including: improving student and teacher attendance, offering an early retirement program, advocating for increased funding and reducing the total staffing in line with declining enrollment.

District must pay $493 million in 2020 for pensions

The experts’ report focused on costs that Los Angeles Unified officials could in theory contain or reduce. But it didn’t focus on a key reason that the district’s finances are about to get much worse because it is dictated by state law: the 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

While Brown in 2011 had released a pension reform blueprint that called for government agencies and their employees to roughly share the costs of pensions going forward, the CalSTRS bailout had far different terms. It requires total annual contributions to CalSTRS to go from $5.9 billion in 2014 to at least $10.9 billion in fiscal 2020-21. Of that additional $5 billion a year, 70 percent is to be provided by school districts, 20 percent is taken from the state general fund and 10 percent from teachers’ paychecks.

In Los Angeles Unified, the financial burden this adds to the district budget is immense, as LA School Report noted in 2014 after the bailout was enacted:

While teachers and school districts across the state will see their contribution rates increase, LAUSD, the largest school district in the state, will pay the lions-share.

 

The rescue, which will help address a $74 billion shortfall in the teachers pension fund, requires school districts to radically raise their contributions to the fund from the current rate of 8.25 percent, to a rate of 19.1 percent by 2020. Teachers will see a more modest step up, from 8.15 percent to an eventual 10.25 percent of their salary, over the same seven year period. The state’s contribution will rise from 3 percent to 6.3 percent.

 

But in real dollar terms, the pension contribution price tag for LAUSD is steep: it will eventually more than double by the end of the phase-in period, from its current payment of $213 million per year, to $493 million per year by 2020.

 

“It is a daunting thought,” Dennis Meyers, executive director for governmental relations at the California School Board Association, told LA School Report.

Children entering charter schools in Los Angeles already outperform peers who attend traditional public schools, then pull ahead even a bit more, especially those attending charter middle schools … .

 

Pupils who enter charter elementary or high schools displayed significantly higher test scores, relative to counterparts entering traditional public schools at the same grade levels, the report said. Elementary students in charter schools benefit from slightly steeper learning curves, relative to peers remaining in conventional schools, researchers said. Charter high schools were no more or less effective than traditional schools in boosting student performance.

 

Charter schools, while publicly funded, operate independently of many state requirements and the administration of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Some 274 charter schools operate in L.A. Unified this fall, more than any school district nationwide.

 

The four-year study of 66,000 students at charter schools in Los Angeles Unified — one of the largest research projects yet on charters — offers generally positive news about their quality of education.

The $490 million ‘Great Public Schools Now Initiative’

The study is sure to be invoked by Broad and others unhappy with the quality of education in the nation’s second-largest district. In September, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of a 44-page report prepared for Broad called “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative” that corroborated earlier stories that Broad hoped to increase from 16 percent to 50 percent the number of L.A. Unified students in charters, which would require the creation of an estimated 260 new schools. A key passage in the executive summary:

The opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion of high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles. Thanks to the strength of its charter leaders and teachers, as well as its widespread civic and philanthropic support, Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.

According to the Times account, the report cited …

… numerous foundations and individuals who could be tapped to raise money, including the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bloomberg, Annenberg and Hewlett organizations. Among the individuals cited as potential targets for fundraising were Eli Broad, Irvine Co. head Donald Bren, former entertainment mogul David Geffen and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

 

It also suggested a strategy of grassroots organizing and civic engagement designed to generate more interest among parents in charter schools.

UTLA, CTA gear up for public-relations war

The California Teachers Association and its largest chapter, United Teachers Los Angeles, are ramping up for the challenge. The UTLA has already launched a picketing campaign against the plan. At a November rally, CTA President Eric Heins said, “We are here to say to Eli Broad and to Walmart that our schools are not for sale. … The 325,000 members of the California Teachers Association stand arm in arm with UTLA and with CFT to say no to Eli Broad, to say no to Walmart, and to help build the schools that all L.A. students deserve.”

The CTA has won support from Diana Ravitch, a high-profile education reformer and author who’s made an odyssey from harsh union critic to someone who agrees with the union claim that there is something unsavory, corporate and ominous about a school reform movement organized by billionaires. That’s how she characterized Broad’s effort on her website.

“Will the [LAUSD] board go along with Eli’s silent coup or will they choose someone to represent the public interest?” Ravitch wrote.

Broad’s defenders describe his school reform ideas as very comparable to President Obama and his push for school and teacher accountability. But the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (which counts the CTA as its biggest affiliate) and the American Federation of Teachers (the California Federation of Teachers is its biggest affiliate), reject that comparison.

Obama’s recent decision to sign the Every Student Succeeds Act, a national education framework replacing 2002’s No Child Left Behind law, would appear to back up the NEA’s and AFT’s view. It pulls back sharply from federal accountability requirements imposed on states and individual school districts.

The new law swept to bipartisan passage because of an unusual coalition of Democrats who joined teacher unions in saying too much class time was being spent on testing and Republicans who said Congress should not be a “national school board,” in the phrase of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former secretary of education.

Charters are public schools that generally work outside the statewide schools system, cutting out much of the red tape. The picture shows the future Accelerated Charter Elementary School at 3914 S. Main Street in Los Angeles.

Now a group of legislators closely linked to the public-employee unions is seeking to put new limits on charters. A key goal is to force all the charters to be run as nonprofits, taking away a key reform model.

Reported the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:

“The public is paying for them,” Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, D-West Covina, said afterward. “The accountability ought to be there and the protection for the employees ought to be there.”

Four Democrats, flanked by representatives of the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers and the California Labor Federation, announced four new pieces of legislation the legislators said will ensure the charter schools fulfill their stated mission.

Hernandez introduced Assembly Bill 787, which would not allow charter schools to be run for profit. Instead, it allows a charter school to operate as, or be operated by, a nonprofit public benefit corporation. …

Assemblyman Mike Gipson, D-Compton, introduced Assembly Bill 709, which explicitly states that charter school board meetings are covered by California’s open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act. …

State Sen. Mark Len, D-San Francisco … introduced Senate Bill 322, which would make it explicit that charter schools are to comply with a number of other laws covering public schools. …

State Sen. Tony Mendoza, D-Montebello, introduced Senate Bill 329, which tweaks the language of existing law regarding accounting in public school districts.

Red tape

Charter-school defenders claim all the new red tape would defeat the purpose of charter schools, which are highly popular with students and parents. In a statement, the CCSA responded to the flurry of new bills:

The proposed legislation highlighted today by the California Teachers Association (CTA) intentionally misrepresents the realities of charter schools in order to stem the success of our growing movement of charter schools in California. Fortunately, the success of charter schools speaks for itself, and is well documented by independent research. Parents, the broader public and responsible policy makers all understand that charter schools are public schools and that charter schools are performing very well with students, providing life changing opportunities to the students who need them the most. That is why there are more than 91,000 students on waiting lists for California charter schools.

This proposed legislation attempts to spread misperceptions about charter public schools. And we believe current laws address concerns raised and these proposals are unnecessary.

The truth is that all charters schools are public schools just like traditional district schools. They are tuition-free and open to any student who wishes to attend. Charter public schools give parents and students a choice in their education. They are diverse and reflect the communities they serve. Charter public schools are held accountable by their authorizer (usually the local school district) and by the families they serve.

Test scores

A key for the CCSA is test scores:

Perhaps most importantly though, and missing from the overarching discussion, is that charter public schools are getting strong academic results with the students they serve, and in many cases are performing better in comparison to traditional district schools, and remarkably so with the neediest students. As recently as last week, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), the nation’s foremost independent analyst of charter school effectiveness, released a comprehensive Urban Charter Schools Report and offers unprecedented insight into the effectiveness of charter public schools. Similar to the findings from the report, Charter School Performance in California that CREDO also released, we are once again encouraged that independent research confirms California’s charter schools are performing well, especially with historically underserved students, and are improving over time (see also: Charter School Performance in Los Angeles). These strong academic results are clearly a driving force for the parents who are making their voices heard in their desire to send their kids to charter schools.

Gov. Brown

If these bills pass, a key hurdle will be getting a signature from Gov. Jerry Brown, long a charter supporter. While mayor of Oakland, he even started two charters, the Oakland Military Institute and Oakland School for the Arts.

Just after he was elected in 2010, a spokesman said, “The governor is very proud of the two schools he founded in Oakland more than a decade ago. These schools have served  thousands of Bay Area students — many the first in their family to go on to college — and he remains committed to their success.”