Florina Rodov taught in a charter school in Los Angeles for a year. In this article, she describes her experiences. 

It was an eye opening and nightmarish year.

She taught from 2005-2009 in a New York City public school,and got burned out by the testing, the paperwork, and the cultural contempt for teachers. She heard about the charters and was intrigued.

“On August 2, 2016, in sunny Los Angeles, I interviewed with the amiable principal of a charter school. A former teacher herself, she founded the school with an attorney friend to give middle and high school kids a college preparatory program that offered AP courses, sports, and the arts. The teachers at her school had a voice, she said, and the close rapport between students and staff made it feel “like a family.” I was inspired by her passion — and despite the fact that the school was moving for a third time in three years and had lost its co-founder and a few teachers (all of whom had resigned), I signed a non-union contract on the spot.

“But I soon realized there was a gulf between charter school hype and reality. Every day brought shocking and disturbing revelations: high attrition rates of students and teachers, dangerous working conditions, widespread suspensions, harassment of teachers, violations against students with disabilities, nepotism, and fraud. By the end of the school year, I vowed never to step foot in a charter school again, and to fight for the protection of public schools like never before.

”On August 15, my first day of work, I dashed into the school’s newest home, a crumbling building on the campus of a public middle school in South Los Angeles. Greeting my colleagues, who were coughing due to the dust in the air, I realized most of us were new. It wasn’t just several people who had quit over the summer, but more than half the faculty — 8 out of 15 teachers. Among the highly qualified new hires were a seasoned calculus teacher; an experienced sixth grade humanities teacher; a physics instructor who’d previously taught college; an actor turned biology teacher; and a young and exuberant special education teacher.

“When the old-timers trickled in, they told us there’d been attrition among the students, too: 202 of 270 hadn’t returned, and not all their seats had been filled. Because funding was tied to enrollment, the school was struggling financially.”

Working conditions were difficult. Everyone worked a 60-hour week. The SPED teacher had 48 students.

But that wasn’t all.

“The working conditions made it a test of endurance. The contract with the district that called for our school to get cleaned twice weekly wasn’t honored. The frazzled janitor only had time for us after he was done with the co-located middle school, which was almost never. I watched pieces of pepperoni decay on the stairs and globs of feces dry up on the bathroom wall over several weeks. During a lesson, my smart, sweet ninth graders were distracted by a roach striding across the floor, victoriously waving a cookie crumb in the air with its pincers. Needless to say, the lesson went to the insects.

“But the biggest threat was to our safety. We were in a gang-ridden, drug-infested area — but there was no security guard or emergency plan in place. And even without outside factors, it was quickly becoming a climate of terror inside the school, as well. When a senior grabbed a teacher’s ass, the principal didn’t expel him (she couldn’t afford to lose more students) — so he continued sexually harassing her, and it felt like there was nothing we could do to stop him…

”Last year, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos quipped that picking a school should be as easy as choosing Lyft, Uber, or a taxi. In California — the Wild West of the charter sector because of the schools that pop up indiscriminately — it is that easy. The result is chaos: Schools struggle to establish themselves, teachers quit, and kids bounce around from school to school at a head-spinning rate. One of my seventh graders had attended seven schools over the course of seven years…Due to this school-hopping culture, only 16 seniors remained of the 43 freshmen who had enrolled at our charter in 2013.”

There are no doubt good charters, bad charters, every kind of charter. What is the value of disrupting a nation’s public schools recklessly, without regard to quality or consequences?