Dissension within charter ranks
Disagreement over stricter standards
A multimillion dollar gift from the Walton Family Foundation (see accompanying post) will arm the California Charter Schools Assn. against its many foes, but its immediate challenge is a family feud – a split with the other chief charter advocate in California, the Sacramento-based Charter Schools Development Center.
The Center posted a webinar Tuesday by its executive director, Eric Premack, in an eleventh-hour effort to defeat three CCSA-backed bills that are nearing passage. The bills – SB 645, AB 440, and AB 360 – represent a negotiated compromise with Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, a Santa Monica Democrat who chairs the Assembly Education Committee.
SB 645 and AB 440 await action Thursday in the Legislature’s Appropriations Committees, the last stop before final floor votes. Both would set higher academic thresholds for charter renewals (go here for my earlier detailed explanation), out of recognition that poorly performing charters have continued to operate and get renewed. Charters that don’t meet one of three criteria – a 700 API, a 50 point growth in API over the past three years, or a rank of at least 6 out of 10 among demographically similar schools – would need to prove their case before the State Board of Education. Premack argues that the criteria would ensnare charters serving at-risk students.
Premack is especially critical of a provision in AB 440 that CCSA CEO Jed Wallace asserts would give charters more flexibility to target who they will serve. Under current law, charters must serve student populations reflective of the district, although the law also recognizes the benefits of reaching out to underserved minorities.
Charters in general have been criticized for underserving English learners and special education students.
AB 440 would enable charter petitions to focus on district, community, or specific student groups. Premack argues that districts could set their own priorities or hold it against charters if students picked by lotteries don’t meet the targets. Wallace said the criticisms are either wrong or overblown.
AB 360 would impose new requirements for charters to comply with open meetings, public records, and conflict of interest laws, with exceptions that CCSA fought for. Premack argues current laws should be best left alone.
Wallace said the tougher academic requirements and the compromises with Brownley are in the movement’s interest. In the webinar, Premack said that “the Troika” of bills represents “a poor strategic move” at a time when charter supporters should be united to oppose a raft of anti-charter bills.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
Aren’t some of the measures in the proposed bill likely to address the reasons behind the Feds pulling $11 million in charter development funds?
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Re: The multimillion dollar gift from the Walton Foundation to a charter school advocacy organization. Perhaps the governnment schools should be sold or just be given to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Broad foundation, Walton Foundation, Warren Buffet, et al for them to run and pay operation costs directly. They could openly hire the likes of Arne Duncan, Chester Finn, Marc Tucker and other familiar names as CEO’s to run the corporate oligarch school system. (COSS might be a good abreviation for the national system). School choice advocates might just jump at the idea, for they could choose whichever megabucks Big Daddy’s ideas they admire the most. It would relieve the rest of the nation from feeding their agenda with the tax money for programs with seed money and encouragement to school choice advocates ideas for tax payers to fund. Then the rest of society might be able to offord some form of local public school with local tax money, or parents could continue to choose private schools as they wish.
Now after extricating tongue from cheek , at least there would be clear accountability as to whose agenda is being served.
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Didn’t CSDC become irrelevant many, many years ago in CA? They did some pioneering work early in the movement, but clearly became eclipsed by CCSA. They’re thinking is still back in 1999 and I wouldn’t classify them as a “chief charter advocate” – maybe just a minor player.
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Ouch!
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“Charters that don’t meet one of three criteria – a 700 API, a 50 point growth in API over the past three years, or a rank of at least 6 out of 10 among demographically similar schools – would need to prove their case before the State Board of Education. Premack argues that the criteria would ensnare charters serving at-risk students.”
Mr. Premack is right, of course, that the performance criteria would “ensnare” charter schools that serve “at-risk” students. And that’s exactly what has been happening to regular public schools and districts that serve the at-risk population. It’s why the SIG /RTTT/persistently-low-performing rhetoric, and consequent laws and regulations, are so nonsensical.
It also demonstrates that even charter school advocates don’t see charter schools as the silver-bullet solution to low achievement. An assertion (see Parent Empowerment here) that gets bandied about so carelessly and dangerously.
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KZS: The state Dept. of Ed is arguing that the accountability measures of AB 440 and SB 645 should satisfy the feds, leading to a restoration of the $11 m but so far the feds have not bought the argument.
They want to have all subgroups’ growth on test scores considered on every charter renewal. AB 440 and SB 645 don’t address that.
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When do we get to close (or remove from the district monopoly) the traditional public schools that don’t achieve 700 API, growth of at least 50 points, or a rank in the top four deciles of schools with similar student demographics?
Answer: apparently never.
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I’m not in favor of closing any schools based on low APIs — including charters. But Jim, how exactly would that work, assuming that you’re serious? Schools that serve a critical mass of high-need, challenged students would simply be forced out of existence — and then would the students just be turned loose on the street and not served at all?
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“Assuming that I’m serious”? Why do you suppose one would participate in this blog? For fun?
My point was that traditional public schools are not held to remotely the same standard as what is being proposed for charters. And there is no sign that they will be, even though they often operate largely without any functional accountability framework. There are a half dozen schools in my district that have been on “school improvement plans” for over five years, taking in plenty of new funding but showing little or no progress and with no evidence of significant accountability consequences. (Moving a principal to a different school does not count, in my view.)
Why apply such a life-or-death rule solely to charters, when they are the schools that have a built-in accountability mechanism of parent choice? If they are not doing a good enough job, families will leave and they will close. I don’t see why the state government should close any charter school, except for health and safety issues, financial impropriety, or some other kind of gross mismanagement.
I don’t support the current structure of the API system, but it seems to be another unfortunate consequence of the sort of government micro-managing that attempts to substitute for any kind of choice-based accountability. My preference, before closure is considered, would be to open these “failing” schools up to other forms of management not controlled by the district monopoly, to see if they can be improved. Or to have enough charter options available that students are not “turned loose on the street” if a district school closes for any reason. (As we know, schools close more often due to budget reasons than API.)
Near me is a “failing” school that was closed this year, not because of its performance, but because of declining enrollment, even though the birth rate in the attendance area has grown for some time. Since the district has unfailingly opposed every charter proposal that it has received in the last 15 years, those students now have no choice to but to move, take long commutes to the remaining district schools, or join their neighbors in parochial school. I believe that the more student-centered approach, after years of unsuccessful efforts by the district, would have been to invite in new, independent management to try to make the school more attractive to parents throughout the area who are craving new options. Of course, that would mean giving up the students and the funding that the district arrogantly sees as “their own”. Many districts around the country are trying to do this sort of thing. It is certainly not guaranteed to succeed — particularly when the measure is API, rather than parent willingness to send their child to the school. But as I suggested in the first line of my preivous post, changing to non-district management ought to be on the menu of options.
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As in, were you serious or making the comment for effect? The latter seems to be the case.
The charter movement is based on the notion that charters should outperform public schools. I’m not sure how that came to be, because that wasn’t the original idea at all, but it has been that way for a long time. In December 2001 I attended an informational event on charter schools at which Reed Hastings spoke specifically about that. His message was that charter schools are supposed to be outperforming public schools, and let’s be honest, they’re not, so we (the charter folks) need to try harder.
It never has been clear to me how it came to be that charter schools were supposed to be outperforming public schools, which of course pits them in competition and adds to the incentives for a lot of dishonest behavior — but Hastings treated that as a given. As we know, charter schools were originally intended to work in supportive partnerships with public schools, rather than trying to defeat them in a contest. Somewhere along the way, that changed.
So that’s why apply such a life-and-death rule to charters and not public schools. Again, I oppose the life-and-death rule as well as the ruthless competition and attempt to defeat public schools, as described by Hastings in that long-ago speech.
Evidence is all around us that charters don’t accept the most challenging students — specifically because of their effort to defeat public schools in this competition — so that’s why the students in the closed-down public schools would never have the option of attending a charter.
As the charter movement is based upon an effort to defeat public schools, as Hastings so clearly described that evening nearly 10 years ago at Delancey Street in San Francisco, a responsible school board would of course attempt to keep charters out of the district.
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What a curious way to change the topic from “Who already has genuine accountability, and who doesn’t?” to “Who wants to ‘get rid’ of whom?” OK, let’s assume that the first topic is resolved. If a charter fails to meet parent and student needs, people quit coming and it disappears. No question about it, that’s accountability. If a traditional “assigned” school fails to meet parent and student needs — hmmm…well, we’re not sure what happens in that case. Usually, nothing of substance.
Now on to the new topic: Really, who cares if some charter advocate – back in 2001 no less! — said that charters would “defeat” public schools? (Except, of course, district administrators, who care deeply, because they have a direct financial interest in keeping charters out.) I sure don’t care if the charter that someday, someday, someday will get into my district ends up taking students from the district. I appreciate the sentiment that charters, at some point in the past, perhaps were intended by some to somehow “work in supportive partnerships with public schools”, but the math isn’t all that confusing. If a child attends a charter, he (and more important, the dough that he represents) is not going to the local district monopoly. That, and nothing else, is why so many school districts like mine have opposed every single charter from day one. They were never planning on some kind of kumbaya “supportive partnerships”. They hated the very idea of anyone coming in and violating their monopoly.
I don’t care if Safeway wants to “defeat” Trader Joe’s or simply co-exist with them. I just appreciate being able to choose, as we do in almost every other domain of our lives. I know that this point is extraordinarily difficult for the defenders of the one-size, central-planning status quo to understand (or maybe just acknowledge?), but people want school choices that extend beyond what their often-incompetent monopoly district provides. And it is indefensible, in the minds of increasing numbers of people, to take taxpayer money while refusing to permit any alternatives.
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No, the topic was not changed at all. The point was that you wanted to know why there was no talk of shutting down public schools if they didn’t reach 700 API, while that’s proposed with charter schools. I responded that it’s because the charter movement and its supporters have turned charters into a force that is supposed to outperform and defeat public schools.
Reed Hastings is not “some charter advocate.” He’s a former president of the state Board of Ed and one of the major forces behind the California charter school movement. The fact that he said this nearly 10 years ago, in an earlier time in charter history, gives it more import – this view has been deeply entrenched in the charter movement for that long and longer.
District administrators don’t have a direct financial interest in keeping charters out. They don’t personally benefit financially one bit from keeping charters out. The schools and students they serve do benefit from keeping charters out, because charter schools drain resources from and thus harm the other schools in the district and the students in those schools. But again, district administrators aren’t personally affected and have no direct financial interest. They have, as they should, a professional interest in combating a force that aims to do harm to the schools they operate and the students they serve.
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