Tag Archive for: charter schools

AB 1316 Aims to Destroy Charter Schools

Back in 2019, facing a barrage of legislation that threatened to destroy their institutions, advocates for charter schools reached a “compromise” agreement with lawmakers. The results were sweeping changes, expressed in SB 126, AB 1505 and AB 1507, that mingled common sense reforms with measures that have made it harder than ever for charters to operate in California.

What happened in 2019 wasn’t really a compromise. It was a defeat, accepted in order to avoid an even bigger defeat. But that was then.

Today, in what officials at the California Charter School Association have characterized as “a blatant violation of the deal that we had from AB 1505 in 2019,” and “an existential threat to charter schools in California,” we now have AB 1316. Masquerading as a “transparency” reform, AB 1316 will decimate charter schools across the state.

Weighing in at over 31,000 words, the entirety of this expansive bill is designed to prevent any growth in charter school enrollment, attack home schools, defund online learning programs associated with charter schools, and force the closure of those charter schools that are unable to cope with the avalanche of new regulations.

Among the new rules will be a requirement for tutors to have teaching credentials. The thoughtless cruelty of this can only be explained in light of the underlying goal, which is to make it harder for charter schools to attract talent and effectively teach their students. There are retired and semi-retired professionals, often coming from STEM fields, that can walk into a classroom, pick up a syllabus, and deliver extraordinary, inspiring lessons to students. This sort of excellence is hard to find in a traditional public school where every instructor has to have a teaching credential.

Another worrisome feature of AB 1316, according to the California Charter Schools Association, will be to “prohibit multiple-track schools that offer additional instructional days than students would otherwise receive, and restrict instructional day flexibility for all charter schools that would negatively hurt at-risk students that require scheduling flexibility.” This amounts to putting a stop to the types of innovation and adaptability to student needs that are defining characteristics of charter schools.

AB 1316 also attacks charter schools by requiring them to only enroll students in counties where they’re located. Currently charters operate in regions, often straddling two or more counties. Under 1316 these charters would either have to apply and obtain permission to operate from every county in which they had even one student. AB 1316 would also cap total charter enrollment based on the size of the traditional public school districts where they are located. And it goes on.

The “transparency” provisions in AB 1316 call for new and duplicative auditing of enrollment and expenditures. These audits impose burdensome tasks on charter school staff, which typically – and laudably – do not suffer from administrative bloat. And to pay for them, AB 1316 calls for new fees on charter schools ranging from 3 to 5 percent of revenues. This is a significant amount considering that charters, which are public schools, already have to operate on less money than traditional public schools. A lot less money.

A study just released in 2020 by a team of experts commissioned by the Reason Foundation looked at the disparity in per pupil funding between charter schools and traditional public schools across the United States. In Los Angeles County, where one in four K-12 students go to school in California, district per student revenue was $20,783, compared to charter per student revenue of only $13,488. On balance, charter schools already deliver educational outcomes that are as good or better than traditional public schools, and they do it with 35 percent less money. Now AB 1316 wants to expand that disparity by another 3 to 5 percent.

Perhaps the height of hypocrisy embodied by AB 1316 is the language that takes aim at remote learning. Based on the argument that it costs less to educate a student if you don’t have to provide a classroom, AB 1316 will reduce the per pupil reimbursement to charter operations that offer distance learning. Depending on how the formulas are applied according to this convoluted legislation, schools could see their per pupil revenue decline by as much as 30 percent for students they’re teaching remotely. But that’s not all.

In a brazen display of antipathy towards charter schools, AB 1316 does nothing to reduce the per pupil reimbursements, for remote learning, to which traditional public schools have access. This is a stunning failure to recognize that over the past year of COVID, while public schools shut down in-class instruction and made half-hearted attempts to implement distance learning, across the state the charter schools rapidly innovated and were able to keep most of their students on track.

There’s a lot more to AB 1316, but this reality – that distance learning is now a robust educational alternative, destined to attract increasing numbers of students into charter and home school networks – is the true motivation behind AB 1316. Written by politicians in the pockets of the teachers union, AB 1316 is designed to protect their monopoly grip on public education in California. AB 1316 must be opposed at all costs.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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Breaking the Progressive Union Monopoly on Public Education

It’s hard to imagine a worse time for public education in America. The COVID-19 pandemic has cost millions of K-12 students a year of education, and Joe Biden has been elected president. At a time when innovation in public education is needed now more than ever, Biden has appointed Miguel Cardona to serve as Secretary of Education.

To understand why Cardona, who previously served as the Commissioner of Education in Connecticut, is not going to improve education in America, just consider the endorsements he’s received.

From Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association: “…he promises to respect the voice of educators as we work to safely reopen school buildings, colleges, and university campuses, while also forging a path to transform public education into a racially and socially just and equitable system…”

From Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers: “…he’s made strengthening public education and fighting for equity his life’s work… Dr. Cardona, a former AFT member, will transform the Education Department to help students thrive, a reversal of the DeVos disaster of the last four years.”

If the leaders of America’s two biggest labor unions representing teachers are enthusiastic about Cardona, you may rest assured America’s K-12 education will not improve. Consider their buzzwords. “Respect the voice of educators.” “Transform public education into a racially and socially just and equitable system.” “A reversal of the DeVos disaster.”

The only thing that was a “disaster” about the DeVos years was that she had to deal with an implacable, hostile federal education bureaucracy, limiting her accomplishments. But DeVos did no harm. With Cardona at the helm, expect attacks at the federal level to resume against school choice.

Fixing public education can take many forms. The libertarian solution, which as usual wastes a lot of energy because it will never happen, is to privatize all schools. The theory, apparently, is that wealthy individuals and gigantic corporations will pick up the tab for schools in low income cities, and parents of middle income and above will happily pay private school tuition. To be fair, this scheme would probably work better than what we’ve got. But even if you accept the economic model, and are indifferent to a total fragmentation of K-12 education, there are overwhelming logistical and political obstacles.

Privatization isn’t the only way to introduce healthy competition into America’s system of K-12 public education, however, there also are charter schools and voucher programs. Both of these are considered mortal threats by the unions that control public education in America today, which means they are great ideas.

Charter schools receive public funds, but are largely independent of the school districts in which they are located. They are typically not employing unionized faculty, which means teachers are accountable to principals and can be fired if they aren’t delivering results. Parents are able to remove their children from charter schools as well if the schools aren’t delivering results. This additional accountability is the reason charter schools, overall, have delivered superior educational outcomes while costing less per pupil to operate.

School vouchers, or education savings accounts (ESA), also rely on public funding, but according to a program where the money follows the student. A parent can enroll their child in a private, religious, charter or traditional public school, and use either a voucher or funds from their education savings account to pay the tuition.

School vouchers/ESAs offer a more sweeping solution, since they permit public funds to be allocated, at the choice of the parent, not only to charters and traditional public schools, but to all schools including private and religious ones. These vouchers can also be directed to virtual school operators, or virtual operators working in partnership with the burgeoning micro-school or pod school movement, and in some cases even with home schoolers.

If there is one thing that Biden’s appointee Miguel Cardona can be counted on to do, it will be to oppose any expansion of charter schools or voucher/ESA programs. At a time when innovation in education has never happened so fast, Cardona will be a staunch union operative, shutting down school choice wherever and however he can.

In the United States there are around 7,000 charter schools serving not quite 3.0 million K-12 students. This represents about 6 percent of all students. The state with the highest percent of charter school enrollees is Arizona, at 16 percent. Some states, including Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, have no charter schools at all. Union dominated, deep blue California, surprisingly, has 9 percent of its K-12 student population enrolled in charter schools, although recent legislative attacks are, at the very least, going to keep those numbers from increasing.

The proliferation of vouchers, ESA, and tax credit scholarships in the United States lags well behind charter schools, with barely over a half-million student participants so far. Moreover, of these, the majority are recipients of tax credit scholarships, which does nothing to benefit low income families. Rollout for vouchers has been hindered not only by the unions, but by tepid iterations whereby state legislatures are willing to enact ESAs for example for learning disabled students, but are afraid to make them universally available. Nevada has gone furthest in making ESAs universal, with 93 percent of students qualifying. Florida has the largest ESA program in terms of participation, with about 12,000 enrollees. But these are small numbers.

Altogether, less than 7 percent of the K-12 students in America have any choice whatsoever. The rest are condemned to attend unionized public schools where they are increasingly subject to indoctrination instead of education, where teachers cannot be held accountable for poor performance, and the union dominated management claim the only path to improvement is to spend more. But there is an alternative.

Red state legislatures, or citizens directly in the 24 states that allow citizen legislation via ballot initiative, can pass laws empowering charter schools and voucher/ESA programs. Here are the general points that would need to be covered in such enabling legislation:

Restructuring K-12 Education – Implement Vouchers/ESAs

1 – An education savings account shall be created for every K-12 student.

2 – These accounts shall be credited annually with each student’s pro rata share of K-12 education funding.

3 – The parents of K-12 students shall be able to direct that money to a participating school whether it’s a public, charter, or accredited private or parochial school.

4 – The money, if unspent, shall accumulate to be used for college, vocational, or any other accredited educational expense.

Restructuring K-12 Education – Empower Charter Schools

1 – Charter schools can be approved by the following entities: The state board of education, any county board of education, any school district school board, and any public or private accredited university.

2 – Charter school permits shall be granted for 10 years – this in order to make it easier for charter schools to secure financing to build or remodel school facilities.

3 – There shall be no cap established by the state or any public agency on the number of charter schools, or the number of charter school students.

4 – Virtual charter schools that support pod schooling or micro-schools shall not have their applications denied on that basis.

5 – Renewal applications for charter schools that are denied by school districts shall have the right to appeal to any county, state, or university-based authorizing entity.

6 – No charter school application or renewal shall be denied on the basis of the financial impact it will have on the school district in which it is located.

If there is any issue that could attract bipartisan opposition to the Biden’s progressive agenda, this is it. Citizens should mobilize and demand education reform. The teachers’ unions now have a friend in the White House, but they’d better watch out. The grip these unions have on America’s public schools, and the damage they’ve done especially over the past year, is something that parents are not going to tolerate. And it won’t matter what political party they belong to, or what various progressive values they cherish.

Education reform is a pathway towards realigning American politics. Get busy.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Rescuing Public Education in California

Depending on who you ask, California’s K-12 system of public education would be doing just fine if taxpayers threw another $30 billion (or more) per year into its insatiable maw, or, it is a failed model mostly because the teachers’ union agenda has ruined everything, from a crippling administrative overhead to mandating a curricula more obsessed with leftist indoctrination than with basic education.

In either case, though, there is agreement that big changes are necessary in order to restore to California’s K-12 students an education that offers them the skills and personal growth that will prepare them for life in the 21st century.

Big challenges are best addressed by big ideas. But California’s state legislature is a place where big ideas go to die, especially when it comes to education. Fortunately there is another path, which is through a state ballot initiative.

There is precedent, in the form of Prop. 38, a school voucher initiative that was put before California voters in 2000. It would have required the state to pay $4,000 per year per pupil attending private or religious schools, while greatly reducing the regulations governing the schools. The overall financial impact was unclear, with the possibility that in the long-run, public spending on K-12 education might actually decrease, since the $4,000 payment might be just enough to induce significant numbers of parents to shift their children into private and religious schools, allowing the much more expensive public school system to shrink.

While Prop. 38 was easily defeated by the unions that lined up against it, the creativity of the proposal illustrates how many options are available to a determined coalition of reformers. And while voters weren’t ready for radical education reform back in 2000, they may be more than ready in 2022. The success of in-home learning, the new distance learning tools, the ridiculous curricula being mandated these days, and the shameful behavior of the teachers’ union over the past year have primed California’s electorate. They may just need to be presented a thoughtful, viable product. What form could it take?

Restructuring K-12 Education – Implement Vouchers/ESAs

There are two ways to restructure K-12 public education in California. The first takes the form of vouchers, or, to put it into terms more palatable and less pre-stigmatized by the unions, a new system “where the money follows the student.” An education savings account (ESA) is set up for every family with children who are between kindergarten and 12th grade, and the money is paid to whatever school they attend – private, parochial, public, public charter, “micro-school” or homeschool.

The particular details of such a proposal were worked out in SB 1344, introduced by Senator John Moorlach in 2018. While this bill never made it out of committee (what a surprise), it was thoroughly researched and offers raw material to build on. SB 1344 would have created education savings accounts funded with the state’s existing “basic grant” for eligible children which currently is over $10,000 per year. The money would go to any accredited nonprofit private school. If the basic grant was not used up by a family, it would accrue in their ESA to be used for college. Home schoolers would not be able to collect the basic grant, but the money would accumulate in their ESA and could be used for college.

One group that is working on a education reform initiative for November 2022 is the the California School Choice Foundation, based in Pasadena. Michael Alexander, president of the foundation, identified four key provisions:

1 – An education savings account would be created for every K-12 student in California.

2 – These accounts would be credited annually with each student’s pro rata share of Prop. 98 funds (40% of the California General fund).

3 – The parents of K-12 students will be able to direct that money to a participating school whether it’s a public, charter, or accredited private or parochial school.

4 – The money, if unspent, would accumulate to be used for college, vocational, or any other accredited educational expense.

Alexander acknowledged there is much still to be worked on in such an initiative. For example, there would have to be a way for schools to bypass the many new state curriculum mandates that have alienated millions of parents. And there would have to be a provision that would prevent the state from using accreditation as a weapon to shut down competing public charter and private schools.

Restructuring K-12 Education – Empower Charter Schools

While education savings accounts might have a more sweeping impact, in the meantime California’s charter schools need help. With enrollment stalled now for several years at around 10 percent of California’s roughly six million K-12 students, charter schools face a gauntlet of obstacles to being opened and staying open, thanks to a legislature in thrall to the teachers’ unions.

With the passage of AB 1505 last July, the future of charter schools in California is more uncertain than ever. Aggressive advocacy in support of charter schools appears to be nonexistent, since even the California Charter Schools Association, inexplicably, took a “neutral” position on AB 1505. The provisions of this law are pretty bad. In particular, it makes it possible for any school district to deny a charter school application or renewal. It allows districts to close charters that cause “negative financial impact” to school districts. It requires all charter school teachers to have state teaching credentials, and it places a moratorium on opening additional virtual charter schools.

That this disastrous law was heralded as a “compromise” by the media and by advocates for charter schools shows just how powerful the teachers’ union has become in California. Apparently it could have gone much worse. Every one of these provisions is flawed, starting with the absurd contention that charter schools have a negative financial impact on traditional public school districts.

California’s public schools, especially in the immigrant communities and inner city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, are overflowing. The teachers’ union can’t have it both ways: Either they need smaller classroom sizes, or they want to get rid of charters. Whenever a charter school opens, presumably the classroom size diminishes accordingly in the nearby traditional public school. And charter school funding passes through the districts, where they keep a portion of the per charter school’s student revenue, even though they don’t have to instruct those students. Therefore charter schools should improve the financial condition of school districts, while also relieving overcrowding.

Requiring charter teachers to have credentials is also a deeply flawed requirement. Often highly skilled and highly motivated professionals, either retired or making a career change, become teachers in charter schools. They often offer inspired, expert instruction to students. Forcing them to take a year or more to earn a state teaching credential will deter many of them from ever deciding to teach.

Equally harmful is to deny applications to start new virtual charter schools. The advances in distance learning mean cost-effective virtual instruction has arrived, and when matched with parents that want the in-person instruction of pod schools and the resources of a major charter institution, virtual education is a revolutionary innovation. The only reason the teachers’ union opposes this breakthrough is because it is, like all charter schools, a threat to their monopoly on public education.

Here are some of the provisions that would be included in an initiative constitutional amendment to protect charter schools and stimulate their growth:

1 – Charter schools can be approved by the following entities: The state board of education, any county board of education, any school district school board, and any public or private accredited university.

2 – Charter school permits shall be granted for 15 years – this in order to make it easier for charter schools to secure financing to build or remodel school facilities.

3 – There will be no cap established by the state or any public agency on the number of charter schools, or the number of charter school students.

4 – Virtual charter schools that support pod schooling or micro-schools shall not have their applications denied on that basis.

5 – Renewal applications for charter schools that are denied by school districts shall have the right to appeal to any county, state, or university-based authorizing entity.

6 – No charter school application or renewal shall be denied on the basis of the financial impact it will have on the school district in which it is located.

These points, like those that might better enable the establishment of education savings accounts, need a lot of work. But reforms are necessary if charter schools are to resume a trajectory of growth in California.

Charter schools enjoy passionate support among the communities, mostly in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where they have changed the lives of the students and families they serve. But among the broader electorate, there is less awareness of their benefits, and voters are vulnerable to the union canards of profiteering (false, they’re all nonprofits), fiscal harm to public schools (false, if anything they help the overcrowded inner city schools), and selectivity (false, students are admitted via lottery.

One way to expand the appeal of charter schools to voters would be to emphasize the ability of charter schools to minimize curricula that has enraged parents across all demographics – namely, Common Core math instruction, victim group indoctrination instead of history, and politicized, agenda-driven sex education. Another way to expand the appeal of charter schools is to emphasize the breakthrough potential of virtual charter schools offering the resources needed by the burgeoning network of pod schools and micro-schools.

Californians can continue to allow a public sector union to wield monopoly power over the billions that flow each year into the state’s K-12 system of public education, or they create competition either in the form of vouchers/ESAs or in the form of a greatly streamlined process to enable new charter schools. The initiative process makes that choice real. But if that choice is to face voters in November 2022, then by the end of this year proponents will have to submit a ballot proposition to California’s Secretary of State. It must be in the form of an initiative constitutional amendment that will withstand withering court challenges.

Can they do it? Who will step up? And if so, what form will it take?

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Huge Waiting List for Orange County Classical Academy

In the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, there is an unforgettable scene, where parents and children anxiously await the results of a lottery. A lucky few will be able to enroll their children in a charter school. These New York City schools only have capacity to admit one in twenty of the applicants.

Charter schools are public schools and receive public funds, but they have the freedom to design innovative curricula. As documented in Waiting for Superman, as well as in more recent studies, charter schools on average deliver better academic results for less money. And since every charter school attracts students based on parental choice, underperforming charter schools do not last.

Across California, where barely ten percent of K-12 public schools are charters, the Waiting for Superman scenario plays out year after year. A new charter school in Orange County, the Orange County Classical Academy, offers yet another example. The upcoming 2021-2022 academic year will only be this primary school’s second year of operation, but they have over 500 applicants on their waiting list with only 60 slots available.

The Orange County Classical Academy opened last fall with 360 students, comprised of two 30 student classes at each grade level from kindergarten through fifth grade. Their plan is to add a grade level each year in order for the existing students to advance all the way through 12th grade while staying at the school. Hence for 2021-2022 they will add two 6th grade classrooms and grow the student body to 420 students. Their retention rate is nearly 100 percent. While five students disenrolled, it was because their families moved out of state.

“Our curricula is something many parents are desiring,” said Semi Park, headmaster at OCCA, who acknowledged the need to open more schools to accommodate the demand. But doing that is a tough battle. Charter schools face a hostile political climate, due to unrelenting opposition from the teachers’ union.

When OCCA’s charter was approved, pro-charter members held a 4-3 majority on the board of the Orange County Unified School District. In a contentious meeting back in January 2020, opponents of the school chanted “we will remember in November.” They made good on their promise, since in November 2020 the union backed candidates, grossly outspending the pro-charter candidates, clawed one seat back. The district now has a 4-3 anti-charter board of directors.

According to the Orange County Register, opponents of OCCA on the school board claimed “the projected enrollment is overly optimistic.” That clearly wasn’t the case. But other objections made by opponents to OCCA reveal a teachers union – and progressive mentality in general – that may be sharply out of touch with what parents want.

One of the board members at Orange Unified who expressed concerns about OCCA was Kathryn Moffat. Her remarks might typify how opponents view charters in general, and OCCA in particular.

Quoting from the Orange County Register: “Kathryn Moffat, the school board’s vice president who voted against the petition, said she is concerned given the school’s curriculum is developed by Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan, it will have a religious and cultural bias. Given the school will be publicly funded, it’s inappropriate for the board to accept the petition.”

Echoing rhetoric that spews nonstop from California’s leftist teachers unions, Moffat went on to say that after researching the curriculum, she found “the focus to be on western civilization, and Judeo-Christian concepts, values and beliefs to the exclusion of others.”

But there is a difference between adopting a curriculum that emulates time-tested classical education techniques that were in common use until just a few decades ago, and putting an inordinate “focus on western civilization.” Similarly, there is a difference between teaching values based on Judeo-Christian concepts, and operating a religious school.

When headmaster Semi Park was reached for comments regarding the curricula at OCCA, the overall impression she conveyed was that “classical education,” which the teachers union attempts to stigmatize as “exclusionary” is actually a well rounded, practical course of study.

“Classical education has a different mission,” she said, “our goal isn’t just to get students into a great college, our goal is to raise them into virtuous citizens. Virtue is one of the most important aspects of classical education, and it isn’t just the religious aspect. Aristotle defined virtue as the highest form of happiness. Classical education teaches moral virtue and intellectual virtue. But you must teach moral virtue first. As our students learn to be honest and responsible, they are then able to develop their intellectual virtue.”

Park described the study of intellectual virtue as having two parts, human and nonhuman. “The human is when students learn about themselves and their relationship with others,” she said, “the nonhuman is learning about the world.” She described how the curriculum involves recitation and memorization, where the students are not only graded on memorization, but they are also graded on their posture, tone, confidence, and voice level.

As for practical content, the students study a broad range of subjects, including literacy (learning how to read), literature (reading good classic novels), writing, grammar, math, history, geography, science, art, music, and Latin. As Park put it, “there is no time to get bored.”

Objective data on how OCCA’s student body will perform on standardized academic achievement tests will be available sometime this summer, although the tests being administered this May are less comprehensive than normal because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Which segues into the topic that no report on a K-12 public charter school can ignore; how did OCCA fare during the pandemic?

Schools that remained open in California for in-person classes, which would be most nonunionized schools (which are mostly charter and private schools) were required to offer distance learning to parents who preferred that option. At OCCA, according to Park, 98 percent of the parents wanted their children to attend in-person classes. OCCA followed all of the guidelines regarding cleaning and disinfecting, masks, etc., and there have been only 10 cases of COVID, five of them asymptomatic and the other five mild cases. This certainly compares favorably to rates in the general population, i.e., there is no evidence keeping OCCA open for in-person instruction resulted in any excess infections.

As OCCA prepares to enter its second year, and supporters of OCCA consider how to cope with a political environment that overwhelmingly favors the agenda of the teachers’ union, the fact that more than twice as many children want to attend OCCA than the number of slots available is the most telling variable. Classical education develops the whole person, preparing them to succeed in life. Unsurprisingly, that’s what parents want for their children.

As Semi Park put it, “We are very humbled and grateful to see such a high demand.”

Waiting For Superman has come to Southern California.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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Resistance is NOT Futile

The union assault on charter schools in California has intensified, but resistance is not futile. Parents, students, conscientious teachers, lawmakers and concerned citizens are stepping up. There are many ways to fight for charter schools, which represent one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal performance by California’s K-12 system of public education.

In an April 2019 report in the respected website CalMatters entitled “Charter-mageddon: Lawmakers advance a raft of union-backed charter school curbs,” the ongoing battle between charter school advocates and their foes is updated as follows: “While the two sides have battled for decades—typically to a draw—the political momentum has shifted in favor of organized labor this session.”

This is an understatement. On April 4th, three charter-killer bills cleared the State Assembly’s Education Committee, and all of them have a good chance of moving on to the Governor’s desk, where Gavin Newsom is considered far more likely to sign them than former Gov. Brown would have been. These bills, as reported in CalMatters, “would give local school districts the sole power to authorize charter schools [AB 1505], create state and local caps on the number of charters allowed to operate [AB 1506], and put strict limits on charter school locations [AB 1507].”

A March 2019 report, written by Larry Sand and published by the California Policy Center, entitled “Chartercide in California,” not only discusses how the teachers unions are attacking charters, but also relates how charter schools are delivering dramatically better educational results in some of the most disadvantaged communities in California. He writes:

“According to a 2017 report from the California Charter School Association, Oakland charters, home to 30 percent of the city’s students, performed on average in the 45th percentile on the state administered standardized tests, while Oakland traditional public schools (TPS) performed at the 25th percentile. In Los Angeles, where 26 percent of all students are charter-educated, a 2014 study showed that the city’s charter school students receive the equivalent of about 50 more days of learning in reading and 79 days of math than students in the city’s TPS.”

The war on charter schools has raged for over twenty years in California. The teachers unions have contended that because public school revenue is allocated based on attendance, charter schools take away badly needed funds. But these same unions typically complain that classrooms are overcrowded, which means charter school enrollments has nothing to do with the financial challenges facing traditional public schools.

Rather than face the true challenges – out of control pension and retirement healthcare costs, and out of control hiring of administrative and support personnel that never see the inside of a classroom – the powerful teachers unions are out to kill charter schools. For years, the unions fought a low intensity war against charters, based on the assumption that their relentless push to unionize the charter schools would allow conquest from within. But then the U.S. Supreme Court made the unionization push more difficult.

The urgency of the union campaign to kill charter schools has been elevated by the recent Janus vs AFSCME decision, which permits individual teachers to opt out of paying union dues, or even union “agency fees.” And it’s not going to end there. Additional cases are working their way through the courts, such as Uradnik vs IFO, which would take away a public sector union’s right to exclusive representation, or Few vs UTLA, which would nullify many steps the unions have taken to thwart the Janus ruling.

Resistance is NOT futile – pressure state legislators

Despite the incredible power of the teachers unions – the three major ones combined, CTA, CFT, and CSEA, collected over a half-billion in revenue last year– it is not a sure thing that these bills will pass into law. And despite the mega-majority of Democrats – who now occupy more than 75 percent of the seats in both chambers of California’s state legislature – these bills can be stopped. Because supporting charter schools is a bipartisan issue. Democratic politicians fear losing union money, but they also want to do the right thing. Allowing charter schools to continue to offer educational alternatives, especially considering the dismal performance of California’s public schools, is the right thing to do.

An example of what can be done to help prevent passage of charter-killer legislation is a resolution opposing anti-charter legislation, available on the CPC’s “CLEO” website, where practical information on nonpartisan government reforms are compiled to serve as a resource for local elected officials in California. This model resolution, provided by the California Charter Schools Association, has been adopted by the Orange County Board of Education, the Sacramento County Board of Education, and the Riverside County Board of Education. It addresses AB 1505, which would deny the ability of charter school applicants rejected by school district boards to appeal to the county or state boards of education.

Resistance is NOT futile – join the parents union

Another way to demand changes is to join the growing “Parent Union,” an organization of “parents uniting with community members to ensure that all students receive an outstanding public education regardless of their zip code of residence. We strongly believe that it is every parents’ right to choose the best quality public education for their child whether it’s District Schools, Public Charter Schools, Home School, Magnet Schools, Independent Studies or Online Learning. We believe that there is power in the Collective voice of Parents.”

With a motto “When Parents Unite, Students Win!” the parents union has already attracted over 1,000 members in Orange County. As this powerful movement spreads across California – and it will, because traditional public schools are failing, and everyone knows it – state and local legislators will come to view meaningful education reform as necessary to their political survival. That day cannot come soon enough.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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