Thank you, Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, for writing a bill to ban for-profit operators of virtual schools.
The bill, Assembly Bill 1084, “would prevent charter schools that do more than 80 percent of their teaching online from being operated by for-profit companies or hiring them to facilitate instruction. If passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, the legislation would effectively put companies like K12 out of business in the Golden State.
“Our taxpayer dollars should be spent in the classroom to help our students, not used to enrich a company’s shareholders or drive up its profits,” Bonilla said in an interview.
But K12 spokesman Mike Kraft railed against the proposal, calling it “another cynical effort to take away the rights of parents to choose the way their kids are educated.”
How cynical are those “special interests” who want to take away K12 Inc.’s ability to profit while providing inferior education!?
That company is K12 Inc., a publicly traded Virginia firm that allows students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged onto its software to be counted as “present,” as it reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding while graduating fewer than half of its high school students. Students who live almost anywhere south of Humboldt County may sign up for one of the company’s schools.
Assemblywoman Bonilla was acting in response to a brilliant series of articles by Jessica Calefati in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing the profitable but educationally bankrupt K12 Inc., the corporation founded by the Milken brothers and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
I hope Assemblywoman Bonilla and the media will review the abundant research on K12 Inc, such as the Credo study or the NEPC study. What she will learn is that students in online charter schools lose ground and fall behind their peers in real schools.
If California chooses to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on bad schools to enrich the stockholders and the Milken family, shame on the legislators and the governor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Susan Bonilla ran for a vacant state senate seat in 2015 and lost to the corporate supported conservative (fake) democrat Steve Glazer, who bragged repeatedly in an endless food of flyers that he was going to end the ability of labor unions to go on strike.
Glazer was supported by a super pack that was funded by oil companies and also a conservative California oligarch – not Eli Broad but another nut case autocrat.
I voted for Bonilla.
Glazer, who outspent her with support from the superpacs and by a flood of lies and false accusations, won.
Glazer boasted that he was not supported by special interests while special interests indirectly supported him with boatloads of cash. All of Bonilla’s flyers were paid for by her campaign. Every flyer that arrived in daily in our mailbox that supported Glazer came from the one oligarch or the superpac funded by big oil. And Glazer’s supporters sent out at least ten to fifteen flyers for every flyer Bonilla sent. Everyday, there would be several flyers in the mailbox supporting Glazer and bad mouthing Bonilla with lies (that I fact checked).
I wrote about this election here: https://lloydlofthouse.org/2015/04/12/evidence-of-a-corporate-reformer-pretending-to-be-something-he-isnt/
There has to be a better way to educate registered voters that vote so they are better informed.
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Bonilla, a former teacher, also was involved in the Vergara debacle. Here are some articles that tell about her stance re the Broad/Welch Vergara lawsuits.
California bill tackles teacher tenure, firing, layoff rules | The …
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/…/article68720617.htm…The Sacramento Bee
Mar 29, 2016 – Teacher employment rules face court challenge in Vergara lawsuit … But Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, says she believes her …
Rethinking the rules on teachers and tenure – LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/…/la-ed-teacher-tenure-20160405-story.html
Los Angeles Times
Apr 5, 2016 – Now, Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla (D-Concord) has seen the light, … A lower-court ruling in the Vergara case agreed with the plaintiffs that …
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Bonilla is the puppet for CA Supt of Schools Tom Torlakson.
It was Bonilla who sponsored CA Bill 484 forcing all school districts to use the SBAC tests. If it wasn’t for the Ed Code 60615, right to Opt Out, all children would be glued to the keyboard for these tests.
She assumed her Assembly position when Torlakson won his seat at State Superintendent.
http://asmdc.org/news-room/press-releases-statements/california-moves-to-new-student-testing-system-as-bonilla-s-ab-484-is-signed-into-law
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How many thousands of students have been harmed by this K12 snake oil scam? They should not only be driven out of business, they should have to pay an even bigger price for harming children and ripping off tax payers.
The bigger question is… What is the parent’s incentive for enrolling their children in this kind of school?
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The School says it caters to students who are not a good “fit” for the public schools. I assume this means students with behavioral issues, being bullied at school and other reasons why they may not want to attend their local pubic school. Some parents are also attracted by the sales job which states that students “learn at their own pace.” It is also an attractive option for kids in rural districts. So I think many parents have good intent, but unfortunately this school does not deliver a quality education to their kids, according to graduation statistics and other measures.
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No one faces the fact that a large contingent of students who are enticed to use virtual schooling are the children of immigrants who either work in the fields as pickers, or those working at minimum wages as service employees…e.g. many single mothers who are hotel maids. I have worked with this population of students for many decades and find that often their parents take them out of school to follow the crops, or to work with them in the fields. Also, some need the older kids to stay home and take care of the younger ones since the parents cannot afford any kind of day care situations. This remains an invisible group to most educators. But in California this is a very significant number of children.
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Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is that they pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxies who then pocket the public’s tax money. Another unbelievable practice is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more, again and again.
So far, one state supreme court has ruled that charter schools aren’t really public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public through a school board that’s elected by the public. Similar lawsuits should be filed in all other states.
Still, charter schools insist that they are public schools. Well, if they are as they claim, then charter schools should (1) be under the direction of a school board that’s actually elected by the public, and, (2) be required to at least file with the state board of education the same quarterly and annual audited public domain financial reports that real public schools file so that the public can see how charter schools are actually spending the public’s tax dollars. That’s only reasonable, isn’t it? It’s certainly not an undue burden since real public schools file such reports without complaint.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being diverted away from educating America’s kids and are ending up in private pockets.
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Pearson won’t like this either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_Academy
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This bill is definitely a step in the right direction. I don’t like the 80% teaching part as fraudsters like the Milken brothers can get around that and claim only 79% of instruction is online. Read the book “The Den of Thieves” by James Stewart- a great expose of the Milken brothers – each received 98 counts of racketeering, insider trading among other offenses but only Michael went to prison. It makes me extremely angry we are giving them OUR tax dollars for these crooks to profit off of our public education system. It will be interesting to see if this bill passes and if Governor Brown signs or vetoes the bill. Brown has been a keynote speaker a number of times at the Milken Institute where the corporate elite discuss ways to amass their profits.
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Hi Kathleen…long time since we have had contact. Hope things are copasetic.
What are your thoughts on the Torlaksons these days? Am I imaging that Tom is sitting way too quietly while Eli’s plans are blossoming? In trying to think these California things out I often think of our conversations three years ago. And certainly about the last Torlakson election. I am non plussed that they both appear to want to make government, particularly in Sacramento, the family business. Even though Rhee and her husband prosper with their 23 Charters there, our seat of government could use a good scrubbing…like the Aegean Stables.
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Will governor “charter school” even accept this fairly weak law aimed at stopping blatant fraud. I surmise that the law was written weakly in hopes that it would not offend Jerry Brown’s neo-liberal ideology regarding school policy. His love affair with charter schools and hate for public schools is amazing. I really dislike the modern democratic party. https://tultican.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/governor-charter-school/
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If anyone is following this – the Bonilla Bill has been released from the Education Committee. The documented abuses that led to the introduction of the bill are so bad that even the California Charter Schools Association agrees that reforms are needed. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/breaking-news/ci_30072460/california-virtual-academies-bill-targeting-profit-operator-k12
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