The powerful California Charter School Association collected enough votes to defeat AB 1478, an effort to establish accountability and transparency for charters, introduced by Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat from Los Angeles.
Here is the proposed legislation. It called for transparency and accountability and prohibited conflicts of interest. What a radical proposal! Imagine charter schools holding open meetings, making their records public, and prohibited from financial self-dealing with related companies owned by relatives or yourself! Just like real public schools. But no, the charter industry demands the freedom to use public money as they wish, behind closed doors. And they reward Assembly members to let them do it. After all, freedom from oversight is the civil rights issue of our time!
Charter schools in California take public money but evade any public responsibility. If you want to know how bad things are, read this.
The California Charter School Association reached into its deep pockets to block any oversight for the charter sector, which prefers to take public money without accountability or transparency. CCSA insists that charter schools should be allowed to do what they want, without open meetings or open records. The law would have prohibited conflicts of interest, and the CCSA wouldn’t stand for that.
The CCSA said they defeated the proposal by a “historic margin,” which was untrue. The vote was close. The numbers of yes, no, and abstain were nearly equal. Abstain counts as a no.
Here is the vote:
27 members of the Assembly voted for charter accountability; 26 members voted against charter accountability; 24 members abstained. And they have the chutzpah to call that a “historic margin”?
Those who voted for charter accountability: Ayes: Bonta, Calderon, Carrillo, Chau, Chiu, Chu, Frazier, Cristina Garcia, Gloria, Gonzalez Fletcher, Jones-Sawyer, Kalra, McCarty, Medina, Mullin, Nazarian, O’Donnell, Quirk, Quirk-Silva, Reyes, Rodriguez, Santiago, Mark Stone, Thurmond, Ting, Wood, Rendon
Those who opposed charter accountability: Noes: Acosta, Travis Allen, Baker, Bigelow, Brough, Chávez, Chen, Choi, Cunningham, Dahle, Flora, Fong, Gallagher, Harper, Kiley, Lackey, Levine, Maienschein, Mathis, Mayes, Melendez, Obernolte, Patterson, Steinorth, Voepel, Waldron
Abstentions: No Votes Recorded: Aguiar-Curry, Arambula, Berman, Bloom, Burke, Caballero, Cervantes, Cooley, Cooper, Daly, Eggman, Friedman, Eduardo Garcia, Gipson, Gray, Grayson, Holden, Irwin, Limón, Low, Muratsuchi, Rubio, Salas, Weber
If you live in California, and your legislator voted no or abstained, call your legislator and ask why he or she refused to hold charter schools accountable for use of public funds. Ask how much money the CCSA gave them. Start a campaign to buy back their vote for public schools.
One thing this vote makes crystal clear: Charter Schools in California are not public schools. Charter schools fight accountability, even the most minimal kind. They fight transparency. They don’t hold open meetings. They want the right to engage in financial conflicts of interest.
They don’t root out out fraud. They hide it and protect it.
Charter schools are private schools that make up their own rules. They are not public schools. Public schools have open meetings and open records. Public schools are not allowed to engage in self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
Public schools answer to the public, not campaign contributors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Just keep pouring more money into the black hole.
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Politicians do things for political reasons. Our job is to give them the political reasons. Why were only three seemingly random legislators identified as needing calls? Why, when there were so many votes needed, were people not told to start with their own legislator? Why were key legislators left off the action who have larger influence over their colleagues? Why were the sections requiring compliance with the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act not pulled away from the confusing part of the bill—the only part about which the CCSA had a good (if deceptive) talking point? How was the vote count off by a whopping 10 votes?
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Diane, have you ever considered putting a place on your website where people could post alerts? I posted a note about this 21 minutes ago on your CSBA video article after belatedly seeing another comment there about the bill, but articles gradually scroll down into the older posts section and get lost. You can’t possibly be in a position to read and respond to every comment on your blog, but perhaps you could work with WordPress tech support and figure out a way for readers to call items requiring timely legislative action to your attention, so you can get the word out.
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David, I do read every comment but not the minute it is posted. I was aware of this development,ent al,ost immediately from allies in California but did not see the need to post instantly.
Write me at my NYU address dr19@nyu.edu if you need to get something to my attention at once.
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Thank you!
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I have been a fan of Jerry Brown since 1976….horribly disappointed in him the last few years because of charter support.
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I was a great admirer of Jerry Brown. But he has let the charter industry run riot in his state. He even vetoed legislation to ban for profit charters.
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Did Governor Brown receive campaign donations from the charter industry, too?
I can’t wrap my head around all of these charter-supporting Democrats in California. So disappointing! Here in Virginia, it’s toxic for a Democrat to be associated with the charter industry. We need to make it so it’s toxic in every state!
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Here in my District, it is a stealth campaign by the charter industry. Grayson (see below) in a public statement during the campaign even purported to be surprised when a reporter confronted him with the fact that he got millions from EdVoice. Grayson and candidates like him rely on the fact that no one is paying attention.
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VA parent, that is encouraging. Here in NJ I don’t think Dems are nearly so wised up (neither candidates nor voters). There is probably some movement in that direction. It helps that BDeVos et al right-wingers have allied themselves so noisily w/”school choice”, which is raising ed out of obscurity as an issue, & helping the politically aware realize that charterization is part of privatization/ underfunding of public good. But there are still plenty of Dems who fail to make the distinction between neoliberal and progressive policies.
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I seem to recall Brown’s daughter was involved in one of the charter chains. At this point, though, all we can do is fight Silicon Valley and Eli Broad’s attempts to appoint Villaraigosa as Brown’s successor. It’s a convoluted state of affairs. We have too many billionaires.
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cross posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/California-Charter-Indust-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Conflict_Diane-Ravitch-180131-673.html
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My Assemblymember (Grayson-a Republican turned Democrat) took $2.6 million from the charter industry. He abstained. The other Assemblymember in our area (Baker) , the Bay Area’s only conservative Assemblymember voted “no.” Both Baker and Grayson have an “F” rating from the Courage Campaign and are in the “Hall of Shame,” which rates members on their liberal votes. Here we are in a district with the second most liberal member of the US Congress, Mark DeSaulnier, represented in the California Assembly by conservatives, thanks to the influence of charter money. This will only get worse of the Supreme Court rules adversely to unions in the Janus case.
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Baker is the Bay Areas only “Republican” Assemblymember.
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This makes me very sad to hear this out of California, a leading state in the Resistance, and one that is usually is on the cutting edge of ideas. How did this pro-charter school environment arise? Is it because of the tech sector support in Silicon Valley?
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See my post above. In NorCal, at least, it is all done on the “down low.” So we saw in the last campaign, no outspoken advocacy for charter schools in any of Grayson’s campaign literature, yet he was the one of the two candidates in the general election who got millions of dollars from charter interests and was able to put out a blizzard of flyers and other campaign material, while the other candidate, supported by the teachers unions, was not able to get her message out due to lack of funds.
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Virginia Parent,
Rich techies are a significant part of the reason, but, unfortunately, and this is not a popular opinion on this blog, many California public school parents get frustrated by the continual curriculum changes and experimentation on their kids here. I am battling this locally right now, yet again as I have done so for 3 decades, due to a rushed implementation of Next Generation Science Standards in our high school district as I detail on my blog. This is yet another in a string of failed “innovations” going back 30 years or more to Whole Language reading when my kids started kindergarten, and I am sure there were other issues before then.
The result of this frustration is that some better-off parents take their kids out of public schools and transfer them to private schools. I just saw yet another post to this effect this morning on our local Nextdoor.com site. I went to public schools including the University of California, kept my kids in public schools, and have always fought to try to make them better.
Teachers are usually not the instigators of these problems. I fear that this may stem from the fact that CA is the largest textbook market in the country and everyone is pushing their wares here and throwing money around in Sacramento. If their curriculum/textbook/software is adopted here, it tends to sell elsewhere too.
However educators also often like to think that they are “progressive,” especially in California and like to stay on top of the latest “research-driven” innovations. Our local elementary district adopted a program called Everyday Math several years back (which was supposedly the most researched program available) and then dropped it after it failed miserably. This created significant outcry from parents and led to more enrollment in private schools.
I went to the Dept of Education database (What Works, if I remember it’s name correctly) and looked up the research for this program. This was some time ago, but I believe it had 93 research studies listed for Everyday Math at the time, leading to the “most researched” claim by the publisher, but 92 of them were flagged as being statistically invalid. The remaining one study also had statistical flaws, but the results pointed in the positive direction! The publisher, of course, took this one “validation,” played it up in their marketing literature, and sold it to the teachers. I have to assume that no one ever looked at the “research” before it was adopted.
I could go on all day about how much pain and frustration this has caused parents and kids, but I think the point should be clear.
Unfortunately the end result of all of this is that voters start getting either apathetic or downright hostile, and it negatively impacts school funding at the ballot box. It also allows the abuses that Diane mentions in her speech to go unchallenged because too many people are giving up.
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David: went to your web site to read about NGS. Could not find it in the time I had. Do you have a link?
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The article is at http://eduissues.com/2018/01/27/attention-smuhsd-parents-state-mandated-testing-negatively-impacts-aragons-physics-program but PLEASE, I have a meeting with the Superintendent in another week, and I don’t want random comments coming in from all over the Internet badgering the district.
What I would appreciate knowing is what are the legal requirements on districts to comply with these state mandates and how much flexibility do they have have, i.e., does “local control” still mean anything anymore?? I am a lowly physics and math tutor in my retirement and simply trying to help kids every day deal with the garbage that gets dumped on them. I am most definitely not an expert on the California education code.
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In my experience as a parent, a lot of what you describe is driven by the testing regimen. Curriculum has been narrowed to conform to what is on the tests. In many cases this involves Districts rquiring teachers to devote instructional time to the use of software that replicates the test taking experience, all in effort to boost scores, not necessarily improve learning.
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I agree, Ray, and Diane has commented on this repeatedly too.
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David, I am a teacher in a CA public school and, sadly, I agree with your dismay about how our schools are dealing with curriculum. Ray is right that the SBAC tests play a big role in the curriculum deforms, but what’s most dismaying is that few teachers or administrators voice any concerns with the ensuing bad curriculum. They’re just good soldiers. NGSS is not the fruit of the testing regime (at least not directly) and yet schools adopt it unquestioningly. The new CA history frameworks –again, not linked to any high stakes test – could be another fiasco in the making –they’re akin to the NGSS. In my view they elevate process over actual learning of history. It seems another case of out-of-touch ed school professors foisting their pet methodology on the rest of us, without our input. This weekend the CTA will host their Good Teaching Conference in San Jose. To my dismay, but not surprise, the workshop offerings seem to consist of how to merrily implement Common Core, NGSS and the new history frameworks –not a word of dissent or critique. “Good teaching” is doing what we’re told. Debate is nonexistent. Even CTA, our union, seems to actively quash it. I’m sure many teachers are not even aware that intelligent dissenters exist as they’re frozen out of conferences and professional journals and ed school curricula. Such is the decayed state of our profession.
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Thanks, Ponderosa. I am not rendering an opinion as to whether NGSS is an improvement or not. I haven’t studied it in enough detail yet as I am no longer in the classroom. I just know the obvious: we had a master local physics teacher who devoted years to his craft. All of his excellent effort is going by the wayside. I have taught in several different physics programs previously, and this teacher had hit the right balance for high school students: not as ridiculously complicated and test-driven as AP, but more challenging than what typically passes for “regular physics.”
Along comes a state test deadline and this work is pushed aside in favor of a course developed from scratch with no standards-aligned textbook etc. This put an unreasonable burden on the teachers and saddles kids with other problems that I detail in my article.
Not a smart move! Change in curriculum should be evolutionary, not revolutionary, unless someone has a really GOOD reason to inflict this stuff on the kids. To date, I’m not sure that I have ever seen such a drastically improved program.
Textbooks are always revised over time and teachers should be able to adapt their lesson plans individually as needed for new editions (or do something different if they have a better idea!).
Tossing out everything and starting over is insane!
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PS to Ponderosa: what would the consequences be for you if you ignored some of the standards and taught as you thought best? Clearly you have to make some nod in their direction, but is it possible still to creatively skirt the worst of something? Hopefully your every move is not being watched 😉?
During the Whole Language movement some teachers thankfully continued to teach phonics.
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Thanks DK. I read what you had to say. My beef with most of modern science teaching is that it ignores natural history. All of us will experience certain scientific issues and phenomena. These are the needed focus of high school curriculum.
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David, I think oftentimes there is wiggle room. What worries me most is that I don’t see many educators taking advantage of it. They’re followers. I’m glad there’s a physics teacher at your school who’s speaking up. Sadly it seems to me that such teachers are the exception rather than the norm. I recently attended a county meeting on the new social studies frameworks. The presenter, one of its creators and none-too-sharp (like many of the “authorities”, a failed classroom teacher most likely), told us of the “shifts” we were going to have to make in our teaching. Red alarms went off in my head: ” Wait…what? Who says? Why? What are the qualifications of the people who made these frameworks? What is the rationale for these changes? Where has this new approach been tested and what were the results?” I was brazen enough to ask some of these questions. I did not get satisfactory answers. Not a critical question from my colleagues. Then we had to try a model lesson. I found it stultifying and deeply flawed. I’m going to have to jettison the lessons I’ve crafted and honed over the past 15 years for this crap? Again, not a critical peep from my colleagues. They were there to learn what the new party line was so they could dutifully implement it. I really do think our profession is in a ditch. I’m not sure how to get us out of it.
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Ponderosa, unfortunately the physics teacher who developed the regular physics program at our local high school retired around 2005, but his successors continued to use the study material and homework sets that he developed until this year when NGSS put in its appearance. Unfortunately I am the only one protesting because, as you note, the teachers seem resigned to go along. I tutored students using the old physics curriculum for the last six years, and the new material being distributed is clearly a work-in-progress with muddled explanations and outright errors, not to mention trivial homework problem sets compared to the old course.
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David K (11:10 comment), my anecdotal experience suggests the waves of curricular fads affect private schools too. My first teaching job was in a private academy in upstate NY in the ’70’s. It was easy to tell when ‘whole lang’ had kicked in – a marked difference, little grasp of structural/ grammar components affected 9th-10th graders but not upperclassmen. And most of the younger students were grads of this academy’s lower campus. The difference in private school, of course: these were small classes w/lots of oppty for 1-on-1 & tutoring – & plenty of collaboration among teachers – so it wasn’t so hard to bring them up to speed.
Then as now, priv schs were seen as a way to escape pubsch issues – at that time, the local city district had too-large classes plus racial unrest – but there weren’t many privates & they were cost-prohibitive for all but upper-mid/ wealthy. Now, in areas where non-tradl cheap alts proliferate, they will still be seen as ‘better’ if they have smaller classes & seem safer. W/o regard to curriculum or pedagogy.
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Ray, Ponderosa, & DK, re: misguided curricular fads, the testing effect & potential wiggle room.
Again extrapolating from my measly anecdotal experience, this time as a parent. My kids squeaked thro pubsch just before NCLB annual testing was implemented. All 3 were math-challenged to a degree; Everyday Math was in full swing in primary grades. There were aspects of that curriculum that favored their [artsy] learning style. And plenty of wiggle-room before annual testing. But it seemed only a math-talented teacher could perceive that & make use of it – & only 1 or 2 of them among 18 teachers. The others were strong in reading/ writing/ history & [to some degree] science, but they followed the math curriculum literally, w/o nuance, w/o tweaking for student abilities. Math-instinctive students sailed thro regardless of curriculum; midsch teachers had to do the heavy-lifting to get the not-so-math-inclined into algebra. I imagine annual testing has execerbated that problem.
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Thanks for your information, bethree5!
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One more thought on your note above, bethree5:
I think your “measly anecdotal evidence” is spot on. It just makes perfectly good sense that most elementary teachers would follow the math curriculum closely, and curriculum designers have to realize this. People who choose elementary teaching as a career hopefully do so because they love working with children. That trait and a passion for mathematics do not frequently coexist (though they can), and that is clearly why what you described happens in most places. Unfortunately this situation has all of the prerequisites to create a downward spiral in math ability over time. I have frequently suggested that schools consider using roving specialist math instructors in elementary grades instead of putting the entire burden on a single teacher.
Also, I am still hoping to hear some more detail on districts’ legal wiggle room, but this article is disappearing from view and odds of a reply are rapidly plummeting.
A board member from a neighboring district told me via Nextdoor.com that once CA formally adopts and implements a set of standards, it acquires the force of law, but that it usually takes the filing of a lawsuit against a district to force change. Any other insights on this topic??? I sure hope that teachers’ every move in the classroom is not being watched now! There aren’t enough administrators to do so!
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Vote these corrupt politicians out of office and make their lives a living hell when their still in office. It’s public money, WTF do they get NO accountable, Oh yeas….That POS DeVos.
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Another important part of this bill is the following:
“This bill would expressly state that charter schools and entities managing charter schools are subject to these provisions, except that the bill would provide that an employee of a charter school is not disqualified from serving as a member of the governing body of the charter school because of that employment status. The bill would require such a member of the governing body of a charter school to abstain from voting on, or influencing or attempting to influence another member of that body regarding, any matter uniquely affecting his or her own employment.”
In LAUSD, two large high school conversion charters, Granada Hills and El Camino Real, started off with teachers and parents on their boards who were voted in by their constituents. While this does not guarantee transparency, it offers the opportunity for members of the school community to have access to all aspects of the charter at any time. However, both of these schools unilaterally changed their governance structure. Neither has even one teacher who is presently working at the school on their board. While Granada does have one parent board member, the candidates must be better first by the administration. Not too democratic. El Camino Real only allows retired teachers on their board and parents are not allowed to have a child attending the school during their term on the board.
This bill would have clarified that employees can be board members under the conditions outlined which is in contrast to claims from some charters, like Granada Hills, that they are not allowed on their board.
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re Jerry Brown and the comments above. Jerry Brown owns charter schools in Oakland. He will always vote against making them accountable.
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Politicians do things for political reasons. Our job is to give them the political reasons. Why were only three seemingly random legislators identified as needing calls? Why, when there were so many votes needed, were people not told to start with their own legislator? Why were key legislators left off the action who have larger influence over their colleagues? Why were the sections requiring compliance with the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act not pulled away from the confusing part of the bill—the only part about which the CCSA had a good (if deceptive) talking point? How was the vote count off by a whopping 10 votes?
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The issues and legislation is apparently more complicated than I had originally understood because evidently Charters already are required to be “transparent” under California’s Brown Act, but there’s a matter of enforcement to contend with. And internal politics involving various large entities like CTA, etc. – who and how will the Brown Act be enforced? As well as the unit of charter size too – that transparency really becomes a problem at the CMO level, not individual-Charter level; Charter Management Companies are the entities where real funny business gets shuffled about and it’s at that level that the resistance kicks in.
My neighboring assembly member is Autumn Burke. She receives approximately 10% of the donations in her $250K PAC from Charter-related entities, individual charter-philanthropists and Charter administrators and California’s powerful Charter lobby (CCSA). 25% of that support is from Unions of various stripes and shapes and the ambivalence referenced above about enforcement harks back to Unions too (as in, if you call the whistle on an organization, what will be left for organizing in the future)
This is all hard-ball politics that’s pretty hard for a little-parent to follow. But a vote count where the “ayes” had the majority yet abstentions were about even with ayes and nays both so that the motion ultimately failed? …. that’s some pretty serious legislative shenanigan-ing and that in itself ought to be a red flag about (a) the power of the lobby and (b) a swirling maelstrom of hidden agendas and not-articulated vested interests.
What a mess.
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Mr. Kristofferson: There is a “red-alert” space where issues here of a time-sensitive nature are posted, and it’s the NPE action website. Here’s the url: http://npeaction.org/ and there must be someplace to click to sign up.
They are sending around helpful legislative action tools but as noted above by Karen Wolfe, in this instance the actions may not have been as nuanced as should have been. In hindsight I should have called far more, and different, folks than I did on the recommendations received.
Still, as also noted above, CA’s governor is wholly compromised in the matter of Charters legislation as he has himself vested personal interest in several charter chains. He has vetoed this legislation before and would be expected to again. The vested interests here are entrenched. Our governor’s formerly iconic moonbeams have morphed into gold beams directed his own way, seemingly. I don’t know how else to understand it.
Grassroots education is important. The young parents I know are besotted with the shiny whizz-bangy charter facilities and pluckiness and togetherness among their narrow SES class. Bigger political issues of civil rights and regulation and labor rights and exploitation and thievery and public safety – this just isn’t in the short-term view of busy parents. And without some understanding of the bigger picture ideology here, all these bigger-picture fights are just all going to sink.
I think “transparency” and “accountability” sound high-falutin and not-relevant “to me because we’re-all-nice-and-friends-and-really-liberal-here….” the context is just hard to articulate.
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Thanks for the link, SR. I am still hoping to get an answer from someone, and have also emailed Diane privately, about the ability of local districts to resist state testing mandates. There are many school districts here in CA resisting the Feds and declaring themselves sanctuaries. I find it curious that they will do this to help a subset of students but will not fight something that harms all students!
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This is ridiculous. California is a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT state and yet we can’t stop crap like this? When are people going to wake up to the fact that a “D” behind someone’s name doesn’t mean they’re supporters of public education or anything that Dems have traditionally supported?
I can’t find the list of endorsed candidates, but it looks like both CTA and CFT are endorsing Marc Levine, my POS assembly member. He voted no. That endorsement needs to be REVOKED. Who else on this list is endorsed by the “powerful teacher unions”? I posted on various CTA fb pages, and have heard nothing. We endorse these turds and then act surprised when they stab us in the back. I’m so sick of all this.
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Make noise to the CTA.
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