Shiny Things
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill regulating charter schools in the state with the seemingly unlikely support of both the California Teachers Association and the California Charter School Association.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, recently signed a bill revamping the state’s charter school laws. The signing was eye-popping, “political fiction,” in the eyes of journalist Dustin Gardiner anyway—photos taken during the signing show Newsom flanked by both Toby Boyd, president of the California Teachers Association, and Myrna Castrejón, leader of the California Charter School Association.
The charter school industry and teachers unions have been pitted against each other, after all, in California and every other state (forty-three of them plus D.C. so far) that allow publicly funded, privately managed charters to exist alongside—and in competition with—traditional public schools.
But the California law, known as AB1505 came together with the seemingly stranger than fiction support of both charter school and union leaders. Significantly, it offers a roadmap for other states and school districts trying to combat the weed-like growth of school choice schemes.
The law allows school districts more say over where and when charters can either set up shop or expand their existing footprint. This isn’t the multi-year ban on all new charters that some state legislators and education advocates had hoped for, but it does amount to greater district authority over the expansion of school choice.
The new law offers a roadmap for other states and school districts trying to combat the weed-like growth of school choice schemes.
California has more than 1,300 charters, the most of any state, and public school supporters from Oakland to Los Angeles have argued that this has put traditional districts in a precarious position. Charter schools have been allowed in California since 1992, but the industry has exploded in the past ten years—as enrollment has “more than doubled,” according to an article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Ten percent of the state’s 6.2 million students now attend charters.
Nationally, around seven percent of all students attend charter schools, up from 6 percent in 2001.
Pressure from the rapid expansion of California charters came to a boiling point earlier this year, when teachers in both Oakland and Los Angeles walked off the job, in part to protest the proliferation of school choice schemes. A New York Times report from January credited the strike in Los Angeles as being the “first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools by competing with them for students and funding.”
The seven-day Los Angeles walk out ended only after the city’s pro-charter school board agreed to vote on whether or not to push for a statewide moratorium on charters. On January 31, the board voted by a 5-1 margin in favor of asking the state to impose a moratorium on future charter expansion while more research is done on their impacts on the district as a whole.
Teachers in Oakland also put charters at the center of their own weeklong strike, which ended in early March. The city already has the highest concentration of charters in the state, and capping that number was a key win for the Oakland Educators Association.
School districts around the country are facing similar issues brought on by the unregulated spread of charters.
Around 30,000 students have bailed out of Florida’s Broward County schools in the past fifteen years, representing just over 10 percent of the district’s total population. The district is reportedly on the verge of closing or consolidating multiple sites as more and more students leave for charters. A recent Orlando Sun-Sentinel article described school choice schemes tapping into parents’ fears over getting their children into the “right” school.
That fear is a fundamental aspect of school choice, and is arguably at odds with the concept of public education as a public good worthy of support for the benefit of all children. If all parents are encouraged to only look out for their own kids, as school choice purveyors such as Secretary of Education Betsy Devos have argued they should, then what becomes of the districts and students who get left behind?
Parental fear is a fundamental aspect of school choice, and is arguably at odds with the concept of public education as a public good worthy of support for the benefit of all children.
In Los Angeles, a group called We Are Teachers, working to highlight the cost of charter schools, argues that enrollment schemes allow these privately run schools to exclude the most marginalized students, including those in special education programs, while simultaneously draining district coffers of the per-pupil funds needed to serve them well.
This is a common critique leveled at charters. In 2018, a study from Columbia University and the University of Florida found that charters are “less likely” to work with students with special education needs than with traditional school districts, particularly if the charter is a “no-excuses” model, with strict behavior guidelines.
Another criticism of charters is that their growth, mainly in under-resourced urban areas, has been fueled by the use of minimally trained, temporary teachers, supplied by programs such as Teach for America. To address professionalization matters like this, AB1505 will require that teachers working in California charters have the same credentials as their district school counterparts.
Certainly, one charter school accountability law, in California or anywhere, will not repair the damage done to public education since these alternative schools were first authorized. Just days after Newsom signed AB1505, for example, news broke that a group of superintendents in California has “requested a sweeping state audit to investigate potential fraud by the Inspire home charter school network.” The superintendents’ concerns involve the misuse of public education dollars by the Inspire network, including rapidly adding schools in overwhelmed districts with little oversight or accountability.
While AB1505 may not be comprehensive enough to address every emerging crisis regarding the explosive growth of charter schools, it throws an important lifeline to public school and anti-fraud advocates.