Bill Raden: Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

FAILING THE TEST: OAKLAND’S CHARTER SCHOOL TIPPING POINT

Last September’s sensational leak of the Great Public Schools Now Initiative, a half-billion-dollar plan to double the number of charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), sparked a firestorm of controversy. Citing the plan’s potentially crippling fiscal impact on a financially troubled district that already leads the nation in its number of charters (around 230), critics denounced the plan as “an outline for a hostile takeover” and “a declaration of war on public schools.”

The combination of public furor and the LAUSD school board’s unanimous repudiation of the initiative — which was quickly dubbed the “Broad Plan” after its sponsor, Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad — subsequently forced the nonprofit tasked with implementing it to beat a retreat in its rhetoric, if not its intent to transform half of Los Angeles’ public schools into charters.

Rosie Torres, Oakland School Board Member: “What’s going to happen if we continue to have charter schools opening and we destabilize the financing of public schools?”

Yet Capital & Main has learned that a similar private initiative has been on the table for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) for at least a decade. Virtually unknown to Oakland’s parents, and without the benefit of public exposure or open debate by its school board, the Oakland charter expansion scheme has been quietly driving policy under the political radar for a number of years. (The OUSD school board did not respond to Capital & Main’s request to comment for this article.)

Charter schools, which were born of the education reform movement of the 1980s, compete for public tax dollars but are today often run like private businesses and aren’t bound by much of the state’s education code. But what makes such CONTINUE READING: Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron