I recently posted Carol Burris’s analysis of a court decision in California that blocked the sneaky expansion of charters into districts outside the one where they were authorized; the new charters called themselves “resource centers” and were infiltrating districts that did not want them.
Here is a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune on the same decision.
California’s booming satellite charter school industry that has persevered through lawsuits, scandals and turf wars suffered a blow this past week when a state appellate court ruled hundreds of the campuses are illegally operating outside their districts.
At issue now is how 150,000 California students — including 25,000 in San Diego County — will continue their education. The court decision also puts at stake millions of dollars in revenue generated by the charters for privately run organizations.
The 3rd District Court of Appeal overturned a lower court decision in a lawsuit filed by the Anderson Union High School District near Redding claiming the Shasta Secondary Home School (now Shasta Charter Academy) illegally opened satellite charter campus, which are officially called resource centers, in its jurisdiction.
Filed Monday and set to go into effect Nov. 16, the appellate decision reverses the lower court ruling, which sided with the charter that was authorized by the nearby Shasta Union High School District. The lower court said it was legal to operate a resource center, as such schools are officially called, in the neighboring Anderson district to give its independent-study students who live there a chance to use computers, receive tutoring and work on assignments in a classroom setting.
Of the state’s 1,200 charter schools, 275 are “resource centers,” many of them storefronts where students show up from time to time. That means that unless this decision is overturned by the state’s Supreme Court, more than 20% of California’s charter schools will cease to operate or seek some other option to survive.
San Diego public schools will welcome the return of the students in these “non-classroom-based” charters:
Andra Donovan, general counsel for the San Diego Unified School District, offers another option: Returning to district and its expanded catalog of independent-study programs.
San Diego Unified “is fully prepared and has sufficient capacity to absorb those students currently attending these charter schools, with fully robust, higher quality independent study and online learning programs as well as traditional and blended programs,” Donovan said. “Our graduation rate far exceeds that of many of these them and our district provides integrated support not available from these charters.”
These “resource centers” are locations intended to coordinate online instruction, which has repeatedly been shown to be a farce, educationally, an easy way to collect credits without getting an education.
Some districts opened resource centers because it was easy money.
Online instruction offers flexibility to students who want an alternative to traditional schools, and big revenue to charter organizations and authorizers. Districts that approve the charters receive up to 3 percent of their revenue for oversight and other services.
The Julian Union district opened its first charter in 1999, and now enrolls some 4,000 students in its charter resource centers across the region. Fewer then 400 local students attend Julian’s district schools.
The tiny rural two-campus district earned nearly $800,000 in revenue from its Julian and Diego Valley charters in the 2014-15 year, when its total revenue was $6.2 million.
Former Julian Superintendent Kevin Ogden helped establish the district’s first charter school, which took in $18 million in revenue last year, and operates 14 programs in eleven facilities.
Ogden helped usher in Diego Valley and Harbor Springs charters, both of which operate resource centers in other districts through independent study programs that offer as much as four days a week of classroom instruction or as little as a few teacher meetings. The Grossmont lawsuit targets Diego Valley.
Ogden retired about two years ago to take a top job at the Lancaster-based Learn4Life, an organization that includes Diego Valley, its Diego Plus Education Corporation and other charters throughout the state.
Following Julian’s lead, dozens of far-flung charters and resource centers have been authorized by other small East County districts, including some that acknowledged the arrangements were forged mostly for the money.
Does anyone seriously believe that the students who receive diplomas from these sham institutions are getting a high-quality education? Is this the way the U.S. will compete in the global economy? Hey, reformers, this is a farce.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So-called reformers: incapable of telling the truth or acting honorably.
I’ve drawn the same conclusion,
(1) Research that neither addressed nor substantiated a specific “finding”, had in its forward, written by reformers, the added finding.
(2) I suspect an e-mail and attachment sent to me, which identified, as its sender, a researcher affiliated with CREDO Stanford, was fraudulent and included a virus.
(3) The names that the hedge funds affix to the organizations that front for their greed, are crafted to deceive.
(4) Reformers deliberately refer to charter schools as public entities when they know for a fact they are not even quasi-public.
But then, what does one expect from people, driven to cannibalize the kids of the middle class and poor?
Reformer=Privatizer.
Reformer=innovator, entrepreneur (new lingo) same as Reformer=Privatizer.
I am convinced that there are some “masters of the universe” out there who don’t like human children because they don’t provide an immediate return on investment; and where that “return” is supposed to be monetized in some way. Under that thinking:
What good are children if they can’t care for themselves right out of the shut, don’t make money, and offer no guarantee that they won’t have problems and need vacuous help for a very long time? What kind of idiot would want that, much less try to fund it?
Education, of course, is a “giveaway” to those who fail to deliver on that return. It’s a waste of money, especially where learning is difficult and takes a long time–can’t we find some way to speed it up and make it less costly?–the accepted measure of both learning and teaching is that same return. Failed again. Oddly, everyone (stupidly) still seems to want it, and some even want it to be FREE (????). If that’s the case, then we have to do SOMETHING to make money on it.
Split and conflicting foundations, that is, where education is rooted in BOTH democracy and capitalism, assumes that SOMEONE at least understands the significance of the democratic aspect of it. Instead, so many notes on this forum reek of a view towards rapacious capitalism alone that is in fact predatory of all else that, for some reason, resists a horribly reductionist view of not only capitalism but of humanity and, by that view, of human children and what it means to thrive humanly.
IT’S UP TO EACH OF US NOW AS INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS TO SPREAD THE WORD to our state and local lawmakers and social media friends everywhere because they 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.
This is a fairly new insider expression of “worry” about on-line schools
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “A Call to Action to Improve the Quality of Full-time Virtual Charter Public Schools.” June 2016. http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Virtuals- FINAL-06202016-1.pdf.
Improving the quality of online charters is impossible. By definition, they are bad schools because they remove the human element from learning.
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While each district is different, you are incorrect to assume that all “resource centers” are “intended to coordinate online instruction.” Many are designed to supplement independent-study and give resources to students who may not have easy access to traditional classrooms. They are also designed to give students extra instruction – such as tutoring and extra-curricula activities – that they would NOT be able to get in traditional public schools.
Our daughter attends a fantastic charter school in CA – a NON-PROFIT charter that depends on parent-donated funding and volunteering to make it a success. I am intimately involved in my daughter’s education through her IS and my opportunities to volunteer in her classroom. She has the opportunity to participate in Choir, Music, Drama, Chess club, STEM & Robotics. She’s learning Spanish and French starting in Kindergarten. The school’s Parent Teacher Org. pays for an art program that involves the entire school in collaborative and individual artistic endeavors AND an award-winning school-wide STEM program — ENTIRELY parent funded. The classrooms are small and allow for more parental involvement, which leads to greater success for the students. There is NO online component of her learning – and they are considered a “satellite” location. Our students receive human instruction by CERTIFIED Teachers 4 days a week and are pushed to learn independence and responsibility through their IS instruction – supervised by their parents. And our charter is NOT “the exception that makes the rule” — nearly all the charters in our area have higher testing and graduation rates than ANY of the public schools, and the others are on-par. There is tremendous over site by the issuing districts and we have good communication with our governing school board.
The ridiculous way our school boundaries have been drawn, our “assigned” district school for her crosses another school district and has some of the WORST scores in the country – 3/10 on ‘Great Schools’. I would pay for a private school before ever sending my children to that sham of a school. How can you possibly argue that charter schools are “damaging” District schools – when the very demand for charters stems from basic fact that public schools are FAILING children, and have been long before charter schools became popular. Throwing more money at bureaucratic lobbyist institutions will not create better education for students in CA. Choice for parents, innovative and flexible curricula, and greater parental involvement is the only way education is going to be elevated in this country. Yes, charter schools should be held to district standards – but limiting geographic options only hurts STUDENTS and parents.
Learn some facts: for each student that enrolls in a charter school – 20% of the federal education funds go directly to that student’s “home” school district. Charter schools give parents who live in poorer and more rural areas options for their children, as they aren’t forced to attend schools with terrible performance rates. There are children who don’t perform well under traditional 5-day a week common-core structure, who are given options through charter schools that foster their success. Charter schools are IN DEMAND for the very simple reason that public schools are to large and bureaucratic to meet the wide variety of needs posed by diverse students.