California’s Tangled, Corrupt Charter School Sector
Charter schools—created to embody the idea of innovation without the constraint of bureaucratic regulations—have been spreading across our cities for twenty years, and it has now become as clear as can be that, if we have to have privatized charter schools, we can’t do without the protection of some rules. (I myself would prefer to assign responsibility for educating our children to the public schools—publicly owned and operated and accountable to democratic governance.)
Carol Burris, a former, award-winning, New York City high school principal and now the director of the Network for Public Education, just visited California, where she traveled around interviewing people on all sides of the charter school controversy. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post has published (in four parts here, here, here and here) Burris’ story of “the never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California.”
Most alarming is the practice of establishing satellite charter “resource centers” or “learning centers”—places in shopping centers or other accessible sites where older students who study online come occasionally to meet with a teacher. These are often sponsored by tiny elementary school districts who have no intention of overseeing the charters they authorize, but who are instead in it to pad their own districts’ budgets with extra cash—per-pupil state fees paid to sponsors. In part four of her report Burris writes: “Readers who have been following this series on charters are familiar with the storefront charters and not-for profit shells of K12 (the huge online for-profit chain) that are growing in number across the state. Many of these charters have terrible graduation rates—some as low as zero percent. Students rarely check in—some, like Epic, have the requirement of going to a center only once every 20 days. Their explosive growth has been driven by corporations courting small, rural elementary districts with promises of additional revenue with little to no impact to the school district. The corporation then operates charter ‘learning centers’ or ‘resource centers’ mostly or exclusively to generate revenue for themselves and their authorizer, even though the schools are not in the authorizer’s district and do not serve their residents.”
In part one, we learn: “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 California’s Tangled, Corrupt Charter School Sector | janresseger:
