Teachers Won in California. What’s Next?

Will a new quintet of bills be sufficient to appropriately regulate California’s charters?

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Among other phenomenal January 2019 wins, members of United Teachers Los Angeles gained a moratorium on new charter authorizations, as well as the initiation of state legislation to regulate the privately-managed charter school industry.

Similarly, in Oakland, the school board there is poised to pass a resolution for a five month moratorium on new charter authorizations as part of the agreement reached between the district and the Oakland Education Association that concluded a strike in early March, 2019. The agreement also calls for the state legislature to revisit charter accountability laws.

Thus, on February 22, 2019, four new bills addressing the need for charter school accountability, transparency, and local control were uploaded to the California Legislative Information website.

AB 1505 would end the ability of charter schools to appeal to a county or the state board of education if a local school district refuses their petition. In the past, the state and county boards of education, often with appointed—not elected—board members, were able to defy the decisions of local publicly-elected school board members. Local districts are tuned to the demographic trends of their communities, know the facilities of individual schools, and are often in the best position to determine if a charter is a needless duplication of programs the public schools already provide. Charters approved from “on high” create battles over school site space and redundant programming that cannibalizes public school enrollment.

As both Los Angeles and Oakland teachers have argued, simply slowing charter growth will go a long way toward halting the defunding and depopulation of existing public schools.

AB 1506 revisits a statewide charter cap from the original 1992 California Charter Act, which allowed for a maximum of 100 charter schools in the state, and which was lifted in 1998 with AB 544. Currently, charter schools number just under 1,400 in the state of California. In the last few years, thirty-four charter schools have been authorized in Oakland, representing 30 percent of the student population in the district. This was enough to siphon $57.3 million from Oakland Unified, which administers eighty-seven fully public schools. Additional cuts to Oakland public schools (under AB1840), and fought by the community, but voted on by the school board directly after teachers returned to the classroom, look to trigger closure of twenty-four public schools out of the eighty-seven, which will be catastrophic for Oakland Unified if enacted. AB 1506 might allow that charters that are part of a franchise may be permitted to be counted as one school, however, depending on how the language is interpreted.

AB 1507 would prevent remote charters operating outside the authorizing district’s boundaries and AB 1508 would requires charter applicants to provide analyses of financial, academic, and facilities impacts on nearby public schools.

Joining these four bills is SB 126, which will enact what should already be the case: charter schools will be subject to open records and open meetings laws and conflict of interest restrictions as any entity that receives public funding should. This fast-tracked bill recently gained newly sworn in Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature without much comment or dispute.

Will this quintet of bills be sufficient to appropriately regulate charters?

As both Los Angeles and Oakland teachers have argued, simply slowing charter growth will go a long way toward halting the defunding and depopulation of existing public schools. Holding Los Angeles Unified to their stated class size caps was a key contract negotiating point that Unified Teachers Los Angeles fought hard for—previously, the district simply ignored class size limits until middle and high school teachers found themselves with forty and even fifty students.

California public schools are funded under the Local Control Funding Formula, with a base grant attached to each pupil and then concentration grants awarded according to numbers of low-income, foster youth, or English language learner students. When a public elementary school set up to teach 1,000 students only enrols 600, as students are siphoned to charters, the district attempts to save money by ballooning class sizes and cutting electives and resources that go to “extras” like full-time nurses or librarians or art classes.

Los Angeles has 227 charter schools with 110,000 students—about one-sixth of its student population—and Oakland has forty-four charter schools with 50,000 students—about half the district’s students.

Families sending their children to a public school end up being given short shrift while children in charter school enjoy small class sizes. Charter schools can often save even more money on facilities by demanding co-locations, which shoehorn charters into a “depopulated” public school that the opportunistic charter has claimed has “empty” classrooms. The host public school will end up absorbing infrastructure costs like landscaping, custodial tasks, and utility bills.

Another way public schools are asked to do more with less is the provision of services to special needs students. If, as is often the case, a charter is not equipped to provide education to special needs students it deflects these children back into the school district. There, public schools are mandated to teach special needs students and to hire specially trained teachers and aides and maintain equipment in order to do so.

White flight to private or charter schools also defunds public schools. The reasons for this flight, and many of the solutions for overcoming it, lie outside the boundaries of what can be enacted in law. But making sure that public schools with modern facilities, well-trained teachers, and excellent programs to support and inspire students will always be necessary to draw families to enroll their kids.