Carol Burris is writing a four-part series about charter schools in California. She recently traveled to California to visit charter schools. She found it difficult to get information on certain charter schools, because some are not located in the district that authorized them. Transparency and accountability appear to be non-existent. A recent newspaper series about the online charter K12, Inc., demonstrated that it makes a handsome profit while delivering poor education. But the state has taken no action.
Public money meant for public schools is freely handed out to charters with no supervision or oversight.
She learned about a charter school called WISE, and it sounded good on paper:
The Wise Academy is tucked away on a Girl Scout camp on the Bothin Youth Center in Fairfax, Calif. Its students attend classes in yurts and barns. Wise, which stands for Waldorf-Inspired School of Excellence, follows the curriculum taught in Waldorf private schools — its students garden, enjoy a games class, and celebrate All Souls Day and Michaelmas.
Students must apply to attend, and its preliminary application makes it clear that parents are supposed to pony up cash. The full application demands that families provide all sources of income. The school’s donate button has a default donation of $2,000. A cash-strapped parent would quickly infer that their family “need not apply.”
How many students attend Wise Academy and how well do they achieve? For the taxpaying public, that is a mystery.
You cannot find this K-6 charter school, which has been in operation for three years, on the state’s Education Department website. Rick Bagley, the superintendent of the Ross Valley School District in which Wise is located, was never informed of its presence as required by law.
The state has thus far refused to monitor charter schools or hold them accountable.
A bill that would have banned for-profit charters in California was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015. An additional bill, which would have prevented financially troubled districts from authorizing charters in other districts, was vetoed by Brown last month. The president of the California State Board of Education, Michael Kirst, worked as a K12 consultant, before his appointment by Brown.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Brown is going to be termed out of office in a few years, but will the voters be given a real choice to vote for or only charter minions from both parties?
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Minion vs minion is one scenario. The only other scenario is minion vs liberal-soon-to-be-turned-neo-minion-once-in-office-by-the-oil-and-charter-wealthy.
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Without an end to Citizens United and extremely tough campaign finance reform, the world of minions who sold their everything, and I mean everything, to the billionaire oligarchs isn’t going away.
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Jerry may be gone, but various of those putting themselves out as potential candidates for Governor are even more dedicated charter school supporters.
The worst among these if the former Mayor of LA, Antonio Villaraigosa. He has much influence in Sacramento and was at one time Speaker of the House of our state of California. He is bonded at the hip with Eli Broad and John Deasy. I have questioned him, and Deasy, over the years at public meetings, and they were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum when asked about charters. The words they both used were from Eli’s playbook….to change public schools to charters “rapidly”…and now with Great Public Schools Now if full swing, this philosophy seems to have permeated LAUSD. The new Supt. Michelle King keeps making statements as to how she welcomes them.
Villraigosa is close to the new head of the Senate, Kevin de Leon, who is far smoother and respected, and he has come out in favor of charters. I cannot name a single Latino legislator who is not supporting charterizing our schools.
In retrospect, I see how Brown stabbed us in the back when he lauded and awarded Refugio Rodriguez, new BoE member and charter school director/founder of the 16 PUC charters, by placing him on the most prestigious state commission on education.
Broad, with Deasy and Austin as his henchmen, and other billionaires who keep in the shadows but are very much involved, and have been for many years, seem to have won the battle in California. They have all the law firms involved, and even manipulate the UC Board of Regents. It is beyond alarming.
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These frauds tried for years to make this happen and when they couldn’t do it through the democratic process, it’s obvious they decided to subvert the process to their goals.
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Exactly, Lloyd. Whether they know it or not, they are following the ALEC script and doing the work of the Koch brothers
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Koch brothers exposed
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The Governor is doing a good job splitting up the CA Democratic party, disheartening his loyal base and further decimating teacher morale. He seems to feel no sense of responsibility to protect and strengthen our commons (e.g., Public Education) for the good of all. I don’t know when he lost his way, but it is a truly depressing and dispiriting situation in CA. Almost all of the SBE members have links to the privatization movement, btw. http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ms/mm/
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Micaelmas? Whachoo talkin bout Willis?
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EXACTLY! It’s a Christian feast. Separation of church and state, anyone? Waldorf charters (publicly funded) do all types of these fests, as their pedagogy is Christian in origin. How is that legal???
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For those of you not residing in California, you know what it is like to be in my shoes. You know what it is like to have a powerful politician campaign on the side of public education during election season, only to use charter scams to dole out public monies to greedy family, friends, and contributors once in executive office. You know how it feels. You know that feeling of being cheated, of being swindled, of being stuck in an abusive relationship with no way out, that feeling is indelible. It’s permanent.
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Yes, dear Leftie, and other teachers in the LA area, you, we, and the public have been, and are in perpetuity it would seem, “cheated”…as is the taxpaying public which is paying for all of this political coup. We have NO voice in this takeover. It is completely taxation without representation.
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California has Eli Broad. California has Silicon Valley. California has problems, problems by the billion.
Everyone out here greatly appreciated Carol Burris’ visit.
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Diane,
It is a legal requirement to provide income background of your student body. California school districts are very demanding in the charter renewals of not-for-profit schools (like WISE) and one of the biggest sticking points is how the school is serving the poorest students. They know that poverty affects achievement and they expect transparency and results, particularly in the realm of test scores. Some parents may choose not to fill out the finance portion application thoroughly, just as they may withhold the fact that their student may live in a non-English speaking home (sometimes out of fear of deportation). This practice can limit the number of resources the student has at their fingertips, but it is entirely up to the parents to disclose.
I’m not sure how one can read into the “ponying up of cash” expectation Burris intimates. While volunteerism and giving is encouraged to 501(c)3 fundraising organizations associated with these small charters it is illegal to require or demand that parents give. I am disappointed that the critical expectation that community service and active parent participation is given such a negative spin by Burris. Isn’t that a positive step towards supporting students and creating a safe learning environment?
If a class is full in a district charter, applications go on a waiting list and a lottery system is used. You may end up with a class of 22 boys and 8 girls (because no child is discriminated against in this system) and teachers make those ratios work, regardless. This applies to students who apply with 504s, IEPs, SSTs, suspension and expulsions on their record. There is a growing conversation that many students with these needs are fleeing the neighborhood public schools because of their stress level to be dancing monkeys on testing days is arresting their learning. It is also the case that some children are taken off of their ADHD medications once arriving at schools like Waldorf charters and begin to function successfully within the classroom structure. The evidence is rich should this writer be so inclined to inquire beyond a website and downloading .pdfs of “hard” evidence.
Furthermore, every new charter school that receives a Cal DOE start-up grant is audited because the State of California wants to see how EVERY penny is being spent and how it is supporting the students learning. An auditor will visit a new charter over a period of 3 days, organize intensive interviewing staff, students, parents, board members and pour over the books several months in advance. This happens after the first 3 years of their founding so that data can be aggregated. If the school is not listed in the state directory, it is because it is in this process. Surely it is listed as a school by its district, which Burris failed to mention.
This so-called investigative reporter is seeing what she wants to see with limited research in the process. I look forward to reading more of Burris’ work, because the WP article linked to your post has glaring omissions and misrepresentations of this particular school (WISE in Fairfax) and this is unfortunate. I would hope that she would seek to understand more about these small non-profit schools, in future, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(I am not employed by or affiliated with WISE.)
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If you are not employed, then how are you able to get information that the rest of us cannot? Please share Financial information and other school related data so that we can determine for ourselves how well these schools are following the California Education codes.
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Excellent question, Mark.
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A quick review of their online application process also revealed that they ask for a student’s IEP and discipline history on the application. That surely is illegal? Is this publicly funded school able to follow the law? If not, then its pedagogy is, as one of its founders described it, a “boutique” experience for certain families and children.
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SPREAD THE WORD because state lawmakers and voters everywhere need to know right now that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals.”
The report documents multiple cases of financial risk, waste, fraud, abuse, lack of accountability of federal funds, and lack of proof that the schools were implementing federal programs in accordance with federal requirements.
Throughout our nation, private charter schools backed by billionaire hedge funds are being allowed to divert hundreds of millions of public school tax dollars away from educating America’s children and into private corporate pockets. Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order for hedge fund managers to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) 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 to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable 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, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money. Moreover, as the NAACP and ACLU have reported, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
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Today’s CA State Appellate Court ruling affirming the illegality of schools like Wise Academy. Stay tuned for California Charter School’s Assn. Supreme Court appeal. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/sd-me-charter-ruling-20161017-story.html
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