How messed up is California’s charter school sector? You won’t believe how much.

How messed up is California’s charter school sector? You won’t believe how much.

By Valerie Strauss
September 9 at 5:00 AM

California Gov. Jerry Brown gestures during a community event in Sacramento. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
Ohio and Utah are known in education circles for having extraordinarily troubled charter school sectors, and the same is true in Pennsylvania, where Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a report this year and declared his state’s charter school law the “worst” in the nation.

But there is another place with a scandal-plagued charter sector that gets less national attention than it should: California, which has more charter schools and charter school students than any other state in the nation, and where one billionaire came up with a secret plan to “charterize” half of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

There is a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California. For example, a report released recently (by the ACLU SoCal and Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group) found that more than 20 percent of all California charter schools have enrollment policies that violate state and federal law. A Mercury Newsinvestigation published in April revealed how the state’s online charter schools run by Virginia-based K12 Inc., the largest for-profit charter operator in the country, have “a dismal record of academic achievement” but has won more than $310 million in state funding over the past dozen years.

There was the scandal involving a charter school principal who also doubled as a National Basketball Association scout, traveling first class to basketball games around the country — and charging his travel expenses to his charter school. Don’t forget the one involving a charter school that closed in 2014 after state auditors found a number of issues, including indications that administrators funneled millions of dollars in state funds to the schools’ operator and her family and friends.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, some of the allegations against the school operator were downright “bizarre.” Auditors questioned the use of school funds to pay a more than half a million-dollar settlement to a former teacher who sued, claiming she had been wrongly terminated after she was ordered by the school director to travel to Nigeria and marry the director’s brother-in-law so he could become a U.S. citizen. The operator’s penalty? She paid “a $16,000 fine for misconduct that includes using public education funds to lease her own buildings,” the Times said.

What these reveal is a state charter law that allows charter schools to operate loosely, with little if any accountability or transparency to the public. The charter lobby in California has successfully fought off legislative efforts to bring more accountability to the charter sector — at least so far.


Now there is a bill awaiting the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown which would require more accountability and transparency from the state’s charters schools. Brown, who has been a supporter of charter schools, has not indicated what he will do, though California’s treasurer, John Chiang, has said the legislation is vital to make charter schools more accountable to the public. Brown, who started two charter schools when he was mayor of Oakland, last year vetoed a bill that would have banned for-profit charters.

This is the first of four posts on the state of charters in California. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Her four-part series will be part of an extended national report on charter schools that will be published by the Network for Public Education in 2017.

You can find a charter in a mall right near a Burger King, where students as young as 12 meet their “teacher on demand.” Or, you can make a cyber visit to the “blended learning” Epic Charter School, whose students are required to meet a teacher (at a convenient, to be determined location) only once every 20 days. There is an added bonus upon joining Epic: Students receive $1,500 for a personal “learning fund,” along with a laptop computer. The enrollment site advertised that students could boost that fund by referring others to the charter chain.

A superintendent can expand his tiny rural district of 300 students to 4,000 by running “independent study” charters in storefronts in cities miles away, netting millions in revenue for his district, while draining the sometimes unsuspecting host district of students and funds. If he is clever, he might arrange a “bounty” for each one opened, while having a side business selling services to the charters. Charters can even providelucrative investment opportunities for tennis stars and their friends. And then there is the opportunity to “cash in” on international students at a jaw dropping $31,300 per student.

Exclusivity can be a magnet that draws families to charters. In districts with poverty, charters with a conservative and patriotic milieu, attract far fewer undocumented kids and students who need free lunch. For the “diverse adverse,” there are charters such as Old Town Academy, whose students are 65 percent white and 6 percent poor, in a district where only 23 percent of the public school students are white and 61 percent receive subsidized lunch.

These examples (and there are many more like them) are not happening in Ohio or Pennsylvania, infamous for their “loosey goosey” charter laws. They are examples from the beautiful and blue State of California, where flowers and charters grow wild.

California has the most charter schools and charter school students in the nation. In 2000, there were 299 charter schools in the Golden State. Last year there were 1,230. Twenty-percent of the students in San Diego County attend its 120 charter schools.

Of the San Diego charter schools, over one-third promote independent learning, which means the student rarely, if ever, has to interact face to face with a teacher or fellow students. One of the largest independent learning charters, The Charter High School of San Diego, had 756 students due to graduate in 2015. Only 32 percent actually made it. The Diego Valley Charter School, part of the mysterious Learn4Life chain, tells prospective students that they “are only required to be at their resource center for one appointment per week (from 1-3 hours), so it’s not like having a daily commute!” The Diego Valley cohort graduation rate in 2015 was 10.8 percent, with a drop out rate of 45 percent. The San Diego School District’s graduation rate was 89 percent.

Sixteen percent of the students in Los Angeles attend charters, which has cost the district half a billion dollars in the last 10 years. Los Angeles County is home to 26 “independent study centers,” including the California Virtual Academy (CAVA), run by the for-profit K-12, which enrolls 3,634 students in Los Angeles County alone. CAVA just agreed to a $168.5 million dollar settlement with the state for false advertising and “cooking the books” with attendance.

Over 25 percent of all students in Oakland attend charters, in which African American students are dramatically underrepresented. Sixteen percent of the students in Los Angeles attend charters, which has cost the district half a billion dollars in the last 10 years. Los Angeles County is home to 26 “independent study centers,” including the California Virtual Academy (CAVA), run by the for-profit K-12 Inc., enrolls 3,634 studentsin Los Angeles County alone. CAVA just agreed to a million dollar settlement with the state for false advertising and questionable attendance claims.

How many is enough when it comes to charters, given the scandals and problems, and the lack of evidence of overall success? It appears as if there are more charters than California needs, but there are certainly not as many charter advocates want.

Eli Broad, who made his fortune building tract housing and selling insurance, is a Los Angeles multibillionaire who has given a fortune to charterize the city and the state. His involvement drew national attention when his foundation’s plan for charter school expansion in Los Angeles was leaked to the Los Angeles Times. It proposed the following goals “(1) to create 260 new high-quality charter schools, (2) to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats, and (3) to reach 50 percent charter market share.”

The term, “market share” refers to children.

The Broad plan is to be actualized by a nonprofit called Great Public Schools Now, which keeps its funders hidden on its website. However, the leaked report included a list of billionaires both within and outside of the state from whom it would solicit funds. Despite public outcry when it was leaked, Great Public Schools Now is raising money and pushing its agenda.

No organization, however, better exemplifies the aggressive push to charterize the state of California than the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). The theme for their 2016 California Charter School Conference was March to One Million by 2022. Their conference goal was to “unify the charter community, whatever role they play.” Every kind of charter, regardless of effectiveness, can join the parade.

And that parade is well-funded indeed. In 2014, CCSA reported its incometo be $22,120,466. Although it is a membership organization, only $1.6 million came from charter school dues. That year, CCSA received nearly $17 million in gifts, grants and contributions. CCSA also has another name, the California Charter School Consortium, and under that name it received a $5.8 million grant from the multibillion dollar Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2014.


CCSA does not disclose its funders on its website nor on its 990 form, but given its board of directors, who makes the list of big donors is not difficult to guess. This year’s board includes Joe Williams, founder of Democrats for Education Reform; Gregory McGinty, a director of the Walton Education Coalition; Gregory McGinty, executive director of policy for the Broad Foundation; Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of the Hastings Fund[1]; and Christopher Nelson, managing director of the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund.[2] Prior board members include Reed Hastings of Netflix and Carrie Walton Penner, an heir to the Walmart fortune.

The real power, however, sits in CCSA’s related organization, CCSA Advocates, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) whose mission is to increase the political clout of charter schools on local school boards, on county boards, and in the state capital of Sacramento. In California, charter schools can be authorized at all three of those levels — local, county and state. Both CCSA and CCSA Advocates work together to thwart legislative efforts that would increase charter oversight, such as AB 709 that would make charter board meetings public, allow the public to inspect charter school records, and prohibit charter school officials from having a financial interest in contracts that they enter into in their official capacity. All of the above are expected of public schools.

AB 709 is on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting action.

The California Charter Schools Association also fought the SB 322 bill, which would give charter school students the same reasonable due-process rights afforded students who attend public schools, as well as SB 739which would put some restrictions on the ability of a district to open up “resource center” charters in other counties, which led to the abuses described earlier in this report.

The efforts of the California Charter School Association Advocates do not end with the opposition to bills such as those described above. CCSAA is a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars that influence California elections, both big and small.

The primary function of a not for profit 501(c)(4), according to the tax code, is to promote the social welfare. Although a 501(c)(4) may participate in some political activities, such expenditures cannot exceed 50 percent of the organization’s budget.

Does CCSAA promote the social welfare as its primary mission? Although its website has general information promoting charters, its donate button deposits donations directly into two political action committees (PACs).

In addition to those PACs, CCSAA also runs a super PAC, known as the California Charter Schools Association Advocates Independent Expenditure Committee, which has raised nearly $169 million since it began in the summer of 2011.

The list of big donors to CCSA Advocates’ Super Pac will not surprise those who follow the California charter world: Doris Fisher, $3,400,000; Eli Broad: $1,205,000; Reed Hastings, $3,684,500; members of the Walton family, $2,092,500; John and Regina Scully, $1,529,500; and Barbara Grimm, $1,236,400. Ms. Grimm, whose family fortune was made in agriculture, stepped up her donations after her blended learning (computer-based instruction) charter, with its “edible education program,” won an award from CCSA.

Then there are the PACs that donate to the Super Pac, as well as the individual donors outside the state, such as John and Laura Arnold of Houston, $1 million; Michael Bloomberg of New York City, $425,000; and Stacy Schusterman of Tulsa ($75,000), who is the chairman of Sansone Energy and who also sits on the board of The Charter Growth Fund.

Does this massive spending make a difference?

Carl J. Petersen is a candidate in next year’s Los Angeles Unified School District 2 board election. He became a public education activist while fighting for his two daughters who are on the autism spectrum. Petersen had this to say about the influence of CCSA in Los Angeles:

The California Charter School Association and their allies poured nearly $2.3 million into last year’s LAUSD election, helping to make them the nation’s most expensive school board election. Given this influence, is it any surprise that the LAUSD Charter School Division, which is responsible for overseeing the largest charter system in the country, is headed by a former staff member of the CCSA or that the district has only revoked one charter in the past three years?

The spending by CCSA Advocates and its PACs, one of which goes by the acronym PTA (Parent Teacher Alliance), has affected primary races across the state. No doubt November will bring another influx of cash and spending.

And so the citizens of California stand at the crossroads. Do they follow the Broad Plan and trust in billionaires to shepherd the education of their children in loosely regulated charters? Or do they slow down and create responsible policies and rules that serve both the taxpayers and children of the state well?

Another state-funded $28 million grant cycle to start new charter schools has begun. No doubt the school entrepreneurs will be lining up to grab the $575,000 in start-up cash, generously provided by the taxpayers of the Golden State.

[1] a private foundation of Netflix’s Reed Hastings.

[2] a San Francisco-based philanthropy created by Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap, Inc.

(Correction: The introduction to the guest post said Brown was mayor of Sacramento. It was Oakland.)

LAUSD Charters, Workplace Bullying, Teacher Jails, UTLA And Privatization
https://youtu.be/3lVHOw5fOVQ
Carl Peterson, a Los Angeles supporter of public education and Michael Dominguez a UTLA teacher who was bullied and forced to retire early spoke at a conference on Charters, Privatization and the Defense of Public Education on July 30, 2016.
They discuss the siphoning off of public money to charters and the support of privatization by elected school board members who are also supported by the UTLA. They also discuss the workplace bullying of teachers including teacher jails and also an organized campaign to drive senior teachers out of the profession. They discuss the role of the UTLA leadership and the failure to fight these assaults and also the growing threat to public education from co-location and more charters schools funded by billionaires like the Broad Foundation and other pro-privatization forces.
This statewide education meeting was in Richmond, California
Production of Labor Video Project
http://www.laborvideo.org

AFT Weingarten Who Takes Money From Gates And Privatizers Pushing Common Core And Labor-Management Partnerships "Walking The LIne" For Privatization
http://www.aft.org/news/aft-grants-will-give-teachers-voice-common-core
11/10/2014
AFT grants will give teachers a voice on Common Core
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The AFT has awarded AFT Innovation Fund grants for teachers in New York and Connecticut to offer solutions to problems with their state's rollout of the Common Core State Standards. The New York State United Teachers and AFT Connecticut were awarded the grants in a competition that was announced in July at the AFT convention.

"These grants are about giving educators some seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice," says AFT President Randi Weingarten. "Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation and their developmental appropriateness, particularly in the early grades. We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different, as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."

Along with the AFT, the judges were Bianca Tanis, an elementary school special education teacher in New York state and a co-founder of New York State Allies for Public Education; Jeanne Oakes, a presidential professor emeritus of education equity, University of California Los Angeles; and Kevin Welner, a professor in the school of education at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"The grant applicants had wide latitude, including critiquing the Common Core standards or writing new ones. It's significant that the judges thought the best ideas primarily involved finding better ways to make the standards work for teachers and students," Weingarten says.

NYSUT will use its six-month, $30,000 grant to make recommendations to address the state's botched implementation of both the Common Core State Standards and assessments. A union task force will review and critique the state's math and English language arts curriculum materials, developed by outside vendors, which have received a torrent of critical comments from teachers. These materials are seen as developmentally inappropriate, too prescriptive, and frequently riddled with errors and inconsistencies.

The task force also will scrutinize the state's process for developing standardized tests; probe whether practitioners were involved in the local implementation of the New York State Common Core Learning Standards and development of curriculum; and consider whether the state's professional development afforded teachers enough support.

"Given the profound problems with the state's materials used for the initial Common Core rollout—units that weren't developed with educators—we're anxious to roll up our sleeves and get to work on a critique aimed at improving the materials and making sure they are developmentally appropriate for students," says NYSUT President Karen E. Magee, who is an AFT vice president.

The task force's critique will be shared with state policymakers; the state legislature; parent organizations; student advocates; and education professionals.

With its six-month, $26,000 grant, AFT Connecticut will address the unmet need for developmentally appropriate instructional strategies for students in the primary grades. The union's working group will also make recommendations for teachers on how to help students with special needs and students with disabilities reach the standards.

"Teachers have not had enough time to fully understand the standards and develop curriculum, and it's been especially difficult for teachers with special education students and English language learners," says AFT Connecticut President Melodie Peters.

The resulting report will be shared with state policymakers and teachers who are anxious to receive Common Core guidance.

Both of the grants announced on Nov. 10 also support the AFT's July 2014 resolution on the Common Core State Standards, "The Role of Standards in Public Education." Among its recommendations is a call for state-level boards made up of a majority of teachers to monitor standards and to use feedback from parents, educators and students to evaluate and continuously improve the system.

[AFT press release]

- See more at: http://www.aft.org/news/aft-grants-will-give-teachers-voice-common-core#sthash.ZS2DRVJ4.dpuf


"Walking The LIne" For Privatization
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randi-weingarten/walking-the-walk-for-work_b_7629374.html
Randi Weingarten
President, American Federation of Teachers

Walking the Walk for Working Families
Posted: 06/20/2015 8:22 pm EDT Updated: 06/21/2015 5:59 pm EDT


As we fight our way back from the recession, it's clear that our economy isn't working for everyone. Too many are out of work or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Too many don't have the skills they need for the jobs available in their communities. Too many get the skills they need only to be saddled with crippling debtor faced with unaffordable housing. For too many, the American dream is out of reach. Meanwhile, the rich get richer and government grows increasingly gridlockedas money drives politics.

As a union, the American Federation of Teachers takes on these issues. Indeed, our members and those we serve count on us to fight back. So, yes, we confront corporations like Pearson in front of their shareholders for business policies that lead to gagging teachers and spying on children. We protest for-profit colleges like Corinthian that leave students with a worthless degree and a load of debt. And we call out hedge fund managers who denounce teachers' pensions as they profit from teacher pension funds.

At the same time, with the same passion and commitment, we're working with willing businesses, communities and allies in government to break through the inertia and get America back to work. This work isn't loud or provocative, but it's vital for our communities, our union and our nation.

We're working with a coalition of public and private partners to turn workers' pension funds -- monies essential for a secure retirement -- into engines for economic growth and job creation. Beginning in 2011, we've led a commitment, in partnership with other unions and through the Clinton Global Initiative (an instrumental convener), that has resulted in more than $14 billion of investment by pension funds in U.S. infrastructure.

So far, $11.5 billion has been used in projects nationwide to produce a steady return. At least 50,000 jobs have been created and more new jobs are on the way, with a total of 140,000 expected, including 15,000 jobs for the renovation and upgrade of LaGuardia Airport. That's right -- the airport New Yorkers love to hate will soon be getting a much-needed makeover.

Former President Bill Clinton characterized the idea as a long-overdue model: "It's the proper way to invest in our economy because it works. These types of investments are a better job-growth strategy than financial transactions."

While we're creating these good jobs, we're working to give people the skills they need to fill them. In the past four years, one of our labor partners, the North America's Building Trades Unions, has trained nearly 1 million workers.

And just last week, the AFT announced a five-city compact to expand high-quality career and technical education. Building on a successful and growing approach in New York City, we are jump-starting CTE in Miami; Peoria, Ill.; Pittsburgh; and San Francisco, with grants from the AFT Innovation Fund. In each city, unions, businesses, community colleges, school districts and local government are coming together to support and expand CTE pathways that match the local labor market.

The goal is to create a human pipeline, connecting students, the skills and knowledge they need, and the available jobs of today and tomorrow. Students get career and college options, and employers get employees with great qualifications.

Obviously, no sector is closer to our heart than public education, including how we recruit, retain and support great educators for today and tomorrow. Which is why we also are creating partnerships to address one of our biggest challenges -- affordable housing.

In McDowell County, W.Va., the eighth-poorest county in the nation, we're working with a public-private partnership that we spearheaded three years ago to reverse a severe lack of housing for teachers and other professionals. Together with the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and other private sector partners, we are raising funds to build a $6 million complex where teachers and other professionals will live.

On the other coast, in San Francisco, educators can no longer afford to live in the same neighborhoods where their schools are located. The city's median rent is now an astronomical $4,225 a month. The median home price is now more than $1 million. So, we are partnering with the school district and the city to develop housing on school district-owned land, increase rental assistance and expand existing homeownership assistance programs.

As the AFT embarks on its 100th year, we are continuing our long-standing tradition of advancing the common good, which includes fighting to reclaim the promise of public education and affordable and accessible higher education, but also working to ensure all Americans have the opportunity to achieve their American dream. That is 21st-century unionism -- calling out the excesses, rebalancing our economy and walking the walk for working families.