Mayor, please explain this school reform thing - Bill Boyarsky

Mayor, please explain this school reform thing - Bill Boyarsky

If wants parents to support his plan to convert 250 Los Angeles schools into charter schools, he needs to explain why he thinks this would be an improvement.

I sort of understand charter schools. Basically, private organizations—Green Dot is the best known—take over public schools and, using public funds and donations, run them free of many of the LAUSD rules and restrictions. But I can't tell you how they work and I have a lot of questions about them. More important, most parents do too.

The mayor has to answer these questions. He got the school board to approve the scheme. Here are some questions parents—or grandparents like me—want answered:

Why are charter schools better? Education scholar Diane Ravitch wrote in the Times that "Charter schools vary in quality from excellent to abysmal." You told Patt Morrison on KPCC that the schools would "meet a metrics driven plan" on making improvements. That's no answer.

Will parents have anything say in running the schools? Be specific, without all the clichés about consultation.