Broad Coalition of Lawmakers, Parents, Educators to Speak Out Monday in Capitol
About 3 Bills Needed to Halt Waste, Fraud and Secrecy in Charter Schools
Media Teleconference on SB 808, AB 1478, AB 1360
Set for Same Time as News Conference: 10 a.m. Monday
SACRAMENTO – In a news conference Monday at the Capitol to demand more public control of taxpayer-funded California charter schools, a broad coalition of state lawmakers, parents, educators and community supporters will speak out about three pending bills that seek to ensure charter school accountability, transparency, and accessibility to all.
Media representatives who can’t attend the 10:00 a.m. news conference in the Capitol can listen to it in a media teleconference, then ask questions on the phone afterwards.
News conference speakers will include state Senator Tony Mendoza, author of SB 808, ensuring that charters could only be authorized by the school district in which they would be located; Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, author of AB 1478, requiring charters to comply with the same transparency and accountability laws as traditional public schools; and Assembly Member Rob Bonta, whose AB 1360 would prohibit discriminatory admissions practices and ensure due process in pupil discipline at charter schools.
The three bills are co-sponsored by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers and other groups, including, for AB 1360, Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), California School Employees Association (CSEA), Public Advocates and Public Counsel, while CSEA is also backing AB 1478.
Other speakers include CTA Board member Terri Jackson, a teacher in the East Bay; Gemma Abels, a CFT Vice President; Oakland parent Kim Davis, who helped found Parents United for Public Schools; Liz Guillen with Public Advocates group; and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, who will address how the lack of charter regulations is hurting students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the school board has endorsed the three bills.
WHAT: News conference and media teleconference with a broad coalition supporting three pending bills to ensure California charter school accountability, transparency, and accessibility for all students.
WHEN and WHERE: News conference is 10:00 a.m. Monday, April 24, in Room 1190 at the Capitol.
***MEDIA TELECONFERENCE LOGISTICS***
TIME: 10:00 a.m. Monday, April 24
CALL-IN NUMBER: 1-888-299-7212
PASSWORD: 4228984
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for posting this. I look forward to seeing what they are wanting. If there requests are fair I’ll support this. Did this coalition seek charter school input, do you know? I’m all for transparency and democratic processes!
I was also thinking that every charter school parent should be rallying for transparency and accountability. And it should be exactly the same transparency and accountability that public schools provide. Why would a charter parent want to keep secret the finances of a charter or its pattern of MIA students? Are charter school parents really so cowed or so corrupt that they say “as long as my kid is getting a decent education, I don’t care about what corruption is happening”?
It reminds me of all the die hard Trump voters who agree that he should be above the law and support the Republicans when they shut down investigations into some of his dealings.
The charter cheerleaders say these bills will “kill” charters. (The 74) In other words, they’re saying charters are built on a foundation of waste, fraud and abuse, so as far as transparency and students rights are concerned it’s, “you want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.”
Like NCLB charter school idea was experimental. And, both have failed to keep their promise to improve the public schools education system.
The California Legislature created charter schools as a massive implementation of an ideology without regard to the unintended consequences of creating a publicly funded privately managed charter school system designed to compete with the public school system for enrollment.
A promise of charter schools and choice is that ending public monopoly would improve public education with competition.
California charter school law experimented with the ideology of free market of choice to replace highly regulated public school system. California requires public schools to participate in the Federal breakfast program that feeds enrolled eligible students. Many charters feed some of their students but as they have choice, some charters let their students go hungry.
And, deregulation can mean sometimes the restriction of competition. For example, both Oakland and West Contra Costa school districts passed parcel tax measures that in part fund their School Board’s charter schools. But, since the charter school laws and rules do not address parcel taxes, both West Contra Costa School District and the Oakland Unified School District had no legal basis for asking for their Charter schools to pay their fair share of the cost of putting on a parcel tax election and paying for the County to collect the parcel tax revenue when these two school districts’ won their elections. The charters in these two districts benefited from passage of the parcel taxes, but didn’t have a requirement to contribute to the cost the districts paid for their parcel tax elections. In Oakland the cost of an parcel tax election, and subsequent collection by the County of the collection and distribution of the parcel tax money, cost the District over one-half million dollars. Benefiting charters at the expense of public schools made these two public school systems less competitive and shows the need to increase the regulation of charter schools.
Choice? Not. Fascism…YES!
What effort is being made to bring Gov. Brown into the dialogue?
He has vetoed twice bills passed by the legislature for charters’ accountability. Last year he held the bill until the last day of the legislative session, for his veto. The reason given was that it was the same proposal as two years previous. Why would he not do this again?
Such vast amounts of public tax money are being skimmed away by charter schools and sent into corporate and private pockets that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report that, because of their lack of accountability to the public, charter schools pose a risk to the Department of Education’s goals. The report finds that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its favorable 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 dollars that are intended to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets and to the bottom lines of hedge funds.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools at all 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. That’s common sense to any taxpayer: Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money but have virtually no public record accountability of what they do with the tax money they divert from genuine public schools.
There are many tactics used by many charter school operators to reap profit from their schools, even the so-called “non-profits”, such as private charter school boards paying exorbitant sums to lease building space for their school in buildings that are owned by corporations that are in turn owned or controlled by the charter school board members or are REIT investments that are part of a hedge fund’s portfolio. There are many other avenues of making a hidden profit from operating private charter schools.
In addition to the siphoning away of money from needy schools, reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children of color; and, very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students. Based on these and other findings of racial discrimination in charter schools, the NAACP Board of Directors has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice.
Therefore, in order to assure that tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there is no racism in charter schools, charter schools should minimally (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that the charter schools are accountable to the public; (2) be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) be required to operate so that anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
Those aren’t unreasonable requirements. In fact, they are common sense to taxpayers and to anyone who seeks to assure that America’s children — especially her neediest children — are optimally benefiting from public tax dollars intended for their education. But, after the internal scams of charter schools become exposed to taxpayers through routine public reporting, the charter school industry will dry up and disappear, and the money that the charter school industry has been draining away from America’s neediest children will again flow to those in need.