Upping its campaign to root out what it views as its lowest performing schools, the California Charter Schools Association last week criticized a San Jose school district for allowing a charter school to open two more campuses next year.
“We cannot have an honest discussion about education reform and increasing accountability and then continue to allow chronically low-performing charters to replicate,” Jed Wallace, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), said in a statement. CCSA is a membership organization representing many of the state’s 1,300 charter schools.
CCSA singled out Latino College Prep Academy, a 12-year-old high school charter with low scores on state standardized tests. The school serves about 380 primarily low-income English learners in East San Jose and has ties to National Hispanic University. Last month, the East Side Union High School District gave Latino College Prep conditional approval to expand after no one, including CCSA, testified against it.
CCSA has taken the lead nationally in trying to cull its own ranks. It, like other charter advocates, has been stung by national studies concluding that charter schools on average perform no better than district schools they compete with. However, CCSA’s analyses found that California charters take the shape of a “U” on a graph, with disproportionate numbers of very high ranking and very low ranking schools – “the Achilles’ heel of the charter movement,” Wallace calls them – when