Carl Petersen is a candidate for the Los Angeles Unified School Board in 2017. He is also a close observer of school board meetings and a strong supporter of public schools.
In this post, he describes the last school board meeting, where five charters were not renewed. Three of them were part of the Fethullah Gulen charter chain called Magnolia (in Los Angeles), and the two others were Celerity charters. This was quite a shocker for the charters involved because the LAUSD has a long record of nearly automatic renewal of all charters (according to the article, 155 of 159 charters have been renewed).
Carl notes that despite the fact that most students in Los Angeles attend public schools, not charter schools, the agenda of every meeting is dominated by charter schools. It is as though the public schools disappeared and no one noticed.
He writes:
Last year, the charter industry invested “nearly $2.3 million” in “the nation’s most expensive school board elections” to ensure that they were free from the inconvenience of oversight. While the California Charter School Association (CCSA) has stated that they “are deeply concerned that this month District staff have recommended more charter renewal [denials] and material revision denials than they have in the last five years combined”, the recommendations against Magnolia and Celerity should not have been a surprise or seen as a change in policy. In 2014, the Board voted against two other Magnolia campuses “for fiscal mismanagement and a slew of other accounting irregularities.” Celerity had two charter renewal petitions rejected last November. The Board’s interest in the “financial shenanigans” at ECRCHS is a little more surprising, especially since their charter was renewed last year with at least two Notices to Cure outstanding. However, the publicity provided by the Los Angeles Daily News investigative reports most likely made the irregularities more difficult to ignore.
The is no way that the allegations against any of these charters could be considered nit-picking. Neither the LAUSD Charter School Division (CSD) nor the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) felt that Magnolia was providing all of the information that was requested of them. It is important to note that Magnolia had agreed to let FCMAT audit their operations to settle a previous dispute with the LAUSD over the renewal of some of their other charters. The organization holding the charter for Celerity was accused of being a shell. According to CSD testimony at the Board meeting, the Governing Board is controlled by a third party which refuses to cooperate in any way with LAUSD’s oversight. Up until reaching a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the District just prior to the meeting, ECRCHS had refused to terminate their principal after he was caught charging expensive meals, $95 bottles of wine, first class airfare and personal charges on the school’s credit card. Interestingly, the Governing Board was also accused of violating California’s Brown Act, which they appear to have done again when they appointed a team to negotiate the MOU at their meeting on Monday night even though this issue did not appear on their published agenda.
Here is the Board’s complaint about the Magnolia (Gulen) charter schools: http://www.slideshare.net/GulenCemaat/magnolia-science-academy-denial-and-statement-of-facts
If the charter schools had their way, there would be no oversight at all, no supervision, and no accountability for anything they do.
Under Governor Jerry Brown and the state school board, that has the common practice. The California Charter Schools Association is shocked when any school board has the temerity to exercise any oversight, fiscal or academic.
And herein lies a great dilemma. It is a wonderful thing to see these charlatans rejected. The charter movement, especially chains like Magnolia and Celerity (what the hell does that mean? Celery and? Hilarity and cellulose? Velocity and celebrity?), deserve all the disapproval, official and otherwise, we can heap on them.
But I digress . . .
The dilemma is that we have a system that finds their performance “wanting” by using the same stupid metrics that are ruining education everywhere. Among the most egregious sins of contemporary education policy is the assessment of schools, teachers and students by test score. This process is leaching life out of schools, discouraging teachers, and justifying the rise of charters, as they grow in direct proportion to how many schools can be deemed “failures” by virtue of their low test scores. So, what’s killing the goose is also killing the gander. We can’t allow ourselves to cheer too mightily when the gun that is killing our children every now and then also shoots a bad guy.
Carl Petersen has kept us informed on the inner workings of the LAUSD BoE for some time. He is running against Monica Garcia, who is probably the most mendacious of the board members and who has been on the board WAY TO LONG. She is an ardent Broad/Deasy follower and has used endless dirty tricks at the taxpayers expense to promote charter schools. Her backers are of course, the billionaire privatizers.
As to the Gulen schools known as Magnolia Charter Schools, they should have been shut down two years ago when audit reports, both state and internal, showed they were not operating according to the law. CCSA and Caprice Young should be considered accessories before and after the fact and should be joined in a lawsuit against Gulen’s Magnolia charters to recoup some of the misspent public funds.
The one missing element in all the media reports on the charters that were non-renewed was a statement from Monica Ratliff who questioned why the particular charter group being discussed had been receiving the highest rating according the LAUSD’s Charter School Division’s required yearly review. As expected, the head of the CSD hemmed and hawed and really could not give any reasonable explanation, because they was none. This is where the discussion has to go. What’s the point of oversight, either under the purview of the authorizer or from the yearly independent audit, if neither uncovers the kind of mismanagement and potentially fraudulent behavior of their charters? And, from what has already been demonstrated, even when these behaviors are documented, little or nothing happens to rectify the situation.
The law was written so “oversight” is just an empty notion.
More shadowy games:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/10/the-74-is-getting-into-spanish-language-education-reporting-starting-in-los-angeles/
Campbell Brown works hand in glove with Parent Revolution.
I think the reason the CCSA keeps repeating ‘that L.A. Unified has approved 155 of 159 charter renewals over the last five years'” is that this phrase is a dog whistle for charter candidate funders. When Eli Broad, Doris Fisher, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, blah blah blah, see that enough, they’ll start writing checks to campaigns.
The CCSA knows that the board didn’t mysteriously change its policy. The composition of the board changed, and most of the Reformers were replaced. Other than two dyed in the wool Reformsters, in election after election, voters have rejected so-called education reform.
We have new elections in March and the make up of the board will change yet again.
Good points Karen…so what happens to these elected Board members who were placed there by the public which voted for them to be pro public schools, and anti charter, when they become sitting members who then support charters? Who gets to them to change their stances? Did they fool the voting public as candidates, or do they see their own futures (in running for higher office) in more moderate behaviors? (I am being kind and not using a more accurate term which might be ‘turncoats’.)
Just to clarify, the statistic that 155 of 159 charters have been renewed by the LAUSD t came directly from the California Charter School Association. Not surprisingly, I have since seen another article which stated numbers that conflicted with the CCSA. in any case, the number of renewals is alarmingly high.
[…] He was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” His past blogs can be found at […]
[…] Network for Public Education (NPE) Action endorsed him, and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his […]
[…] the Network for Public Education (NPE) Action endorsed him, and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” For links to his blogs, please […]
[…] Network for Public Education (NPE) Action endorsed him, and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” For links to his blogs, please visit http://www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his […]