Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools

A new report on California’s online charter schools says that the state is “wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by funding these schools at a level far above their costs.”

The report, published Tuesday by a California-based nonprofit research and policy organization called In the Public Interest, also says that the “track record of online charter schools has been uniformly negative for every demographic subgroup of students” despite the promise of online education.

“In a time when school districts everywhere face the heartbreak of knowing they cannot provide all the services their students need and deserve, it is critical that lawmakers act as conservative stewards of the state’s tax collars by focusing funding on the schools where it can do the greatest good for the greatest number of the state’s students,” the report says.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated. About 10 percent of public school students in California attend charter schools — both brick-and-mortar and online. According to the report, nearly 175,000 California students in 2018-19 were enrolled in online charter schools, representing 27 percent of all charter school students in the state.

The charter sector in California — which has more charter schools and more charter students than any other state — has long been troubled. Though charter schools are designed to operate outside the rules of school district bureaucracies, the state allowed them to expand for years with very little oversight despite continuing controversy over financial scandals and other problems.

In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law the most substantial changes to California’s charter school laws since passage of the original California Charter Schools Act in 1992. Among the changes was a two-year moratorium on new online charter schools till the end of this year. The state legislature will have to address the issue of whether to extend the ban on new online charter schools in the current session, which ends in September. CONTINUE READING: Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post