The Los Angeles Times has generally been very supportive of
privately managed charter schools, but in an editorial today it
dares to suggest that charter schools should not expand at the
expense of public schools.
In areferendum passed in 2000, intended to make it easier to pass bonds to support public schools,
charter advocates slipped in a little noticed proviso that required
public schools to provide space for charters. As we know, charters
are not governed by the rules and regulations that govern public
schools. But charter schools end up getting more space than public
schools, and causing overcrowding in public schools, where most of
the children are. “That’s because charter schools, which
are often subsidized through foundation grants, tend to have much
smaller class sizes. The charter schools contend that they should
be given a room for each class, even if that class has 15 students
while a classroom of the same size at the traditional public school
might have 30. They also claim that preschool classrooms and parent
centers should be counted in the formula under which charter space
is allocated.”
The Times is quick to note that some
charter schools get high test scores, not noting that the small
class sizes might have something to do with it.
Is it fair to compare a school where classes are 15 to a school where classes are
30?
Is it fair to compare an underfunded public school to a
well-resourced charter school that is backed by billionaires and
their foundations? At some point, even the Los Angeles Times
editorial board will recognize that the billionaires have no
intention of providing equality of educational opportunity for all
the children of Los Angeles. They like having little showcases,
underwritten by the public, pretending to be public schools, but
limited to the children they choose. It is a vanity project, but
its long-term effect will be to damage public education and to harm the great majority of
children, whom the charter advocates don’t want and don’t care
about.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent comments. People need to be aware. I honestly think the wool has been pulled over the eyes of parents.
That reminds me, where’s George Buzzetti?
Flerp, I am back. Someone is playing serious games. I just discovered a way back onto the blog as I have been blocked and Diane could not fix it. I cannot get the blog through inbox only through all mail. I never use all mail as I assumed that inbox was all the mail.
Anyway, If you read the lawsuit on this issue that is exactly the point. Number of children or number of rooms no matter how many children you have in them when they are normal classrooms. Charter schools might have 10-15 in a classroom in which might normally have 30 or more. Do you count children in a room or just rooms is the question. Charter schools in general are a joke and that is why they are being pushed as this is nothing more than both another profit center and the controlling of minds as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kim Il jung have taught us in only modern times and do not forget the Madrassas we set up for fundamentalism in Pakistan and other places that now come back to haunt us. This is what charter schools and in California the Federal Waivers for the so-called CORE schools of which LAUSD is one and the new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) which are the means that will be used nationwide to promote the final destroying of accountability and discrimination in funding with the bonus packages which are just another form of catagorical funding. The funny, in a sick way, thing about this is that catagorical funding was put in place because districts would not spend money on important subjects like textbooks, instructional materials and supplies and special education. So now that we made them spend the money because they would not let us again trust them to do it right when they are proving in real time to be the worse districts and therefore the ones who should not be trusted for anything. Look at the latest DOE OIG report on the total lack of accountability of charter schools in Florida, Arizona and California at all levels. Then we have had top level people from CDE in public state that the State of California will not be doing any oversight as only 20% of their budget comes from state funding the rest comes from the feds only for oversight on NCLB and RTTT. In fact, I got him to state in public that this was the equivalent of Criminal Justice Realignment and that this was Educational Realignment. We, CORE-CA, are deeply involved with law enforcement in correcting some of the major problems with Criminal Justice Realignment. Educators are not and therefore they do not know the extent of the mess there is such as people now being convicted to up to 42 years in county jail which are cages. This is the future of education also if people do not wake up.
Strange how all of a sudden, school districts all across America were having a “utilization crisis” as if large numbers of their kids had been kidnapped by aliens and their schools now stood empty. The utilization lies flew thick and fast as Chicago closed 50 schools, and all of these crises were traced back to that Broad Foundation playbook on how to close schools.
True, I can’t remember the last time a. Charter school was closed. They reconstitute public schools to try for better performance but nothing is done to charer schools. Reconstituton doesn’t work but something is done, not to charters.
Forgive me, layman here from the other side of the country. Are the charter schools which share space with the public schools getting an equivalent amount/ per student as the public schools? If so, how could they afford a classroom for 15 students which is needed by the district for a group of 30 students?
The district norm is something like 30 students per room (but in reality it’s more like 40). But charter schools get to count 24 as full.
So if a charter says they need rooms for 48 students, they get 2 rooms. A traditional school gets one, under Prop 39’s requirement to provide equitable facilities. Not very equitable, huh? When parents choose a school, which room do you think they’d rather their child learn in?
Also, charter schools pay their teachers much less, often with no benefits, and get a lot of private funding, so their per pupil expenditure is often higher.
I have seen charter schools in LAUSD receive from $3,200-9,000/student. I have never met a charter school operator who knew what the districts income/student was. Clueless is not the word for it. When CORE-CA was in PSC 3.0 the district people told all the other appliers that they did not need to know what their revenue was just spend the money. CORE-CA was the only group who had the 40 column wide and 988 column deep school budget and had it analyzed to the last dollar. How do you budget when you do not know what you have or what the district receives so that you have a bargaining position with them? Charters are a scam and LAUSD had 240 of them in 2010 according to the L.A. County Office of Education (LACOE) manual listing all schools. It must be more than 280 now. And since when does a very small organization have any buying power or such? Never is the answer so let’s make them all small school districts with no accountability because we can trust them, RIGHT!!!!
On a related matter, consider co-location between a charter and a public school. From one teacher’s perspective:
Link: http://insidecolocation.tumblr.com