Push to expand California charter school enrollments provokes backlash
After a quarter century of uninterrupted growth, aggressive efforts by charter school advocates to increase enrollments and to elect sympathetic school board members and legislators have triggered a backlash unlike anything that has occurred since the first charter school opened in California.
Charter schools have drawn an increasing share of California’s approximately 6 million public school students. How this conflict plays out will have major ramifications for the kinds of schools those students will attend in future years.
“What you have in California right now is a charter school community that has a great sense of momentum,” said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter School Association. “Our adversaries can see that our strength is really, really growing. This year we are crossing the 600,000 enrollment barrier, and we have crossed the 10 percent of students in public school threshold. The pipeline for growth seems robust.”
California Charter School Association President Jed Wallace
The push has roused the California Teachers Association to ramp up their demands for more regulation of charter schools, and to pressure Sacramento legislators to require greater transparency in charter school operations. It has launched a campaign titled “Kids Not Profits” – complete with radio ads in both English and Spanish – that declares that billionaires have launched a “coordinated strategy” to divert money from neighborhood schools to “privately run charter schools.”
“Instead of subsidizing corporate charter schools with taxpayer dollars, we should be using the money to strengthen our neighborhood public schools for all California children,” the CTA campaign declares.
“We are not saying get rid of charter schools, period,” said CTA president Eric Heins. “What we are opposed to is the opaqueness in how public money is spent, and that there’s no accountability for many of these schools, and there are a lot of Push to expand California charter school enrollments provokes backlash | EdSource:
