The California Legislature passed a bill banning for-profit charters. The sponsor is Assemblymember Kevin McCarty of Sacramento. The bill is aimed primarily at the virtual charter school run by for-profit K12 Inc.
Last time such a bill was passed, Governor Brown vetoed it. Having opened two charters when he was mayor of Oakland, he is very protective of them. This is a stain on his otherwise progressive record.
Even the California Charter Schools Association has endorsed this bill.
The San Jose Mercury News ran a powerful expose of K12 Inc. in 2016.
“SACRAMENTO — For-profit companies will be banned from running charter schools in California if Gov. Jerry Brown signs a hard-fought bill that won final approval from the state Legislature on Thursday.
“The proposal is the latest of several attempts to crack down on what critics say amounts to profiteering at the expense of children and taxpayers, the subject of a 2016 investigation by this news organization. Its passage came only after proponents were able to forge agreement between two groups that are almost always at odds: teachers unions and the trade association representing charter schools.
“The exposé in the Mercury News highlighted the need for reform,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat who serves on the education committee.
“That investigation zeroed in on K12 Inc., a for-profit operation based in Virginia and traded on Wall Street that manages publicly funded charter schools in California and other states. The K12-run network California Virtual Academies, the largest of its kind in the state with an enrollment of roughly 15,000, graduated fewer than half of its high school students, the news organization reported, and some teachers said they were pressured to inflate grades and enrollment records.
”This news organization’s probe also found that children who logged onto the company’s software for as little as one minute per day were counted as “present” for the purposes of calculating the amount of taxpayer funding the company would receive from California.
“As with policies from immigration enforcement to fuel standards, the Legislature’s approval of a for-profit charter school ban is at odds with the policies of the Trump administration. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is not only a vocal supporter of for-profit education, but her husband disclosed they were early investors in K12 Inc.
“Assembly Bill 406 would change California’s charter school law to prohibit for-profit corporations and for-profit educational management organizations from running the state’s taxpayer-funded and independently run schools — even if the schools themselves are technically nonprofits.
LCalifornia currently has about 35 such charter schools, according to McCarty’s office. In 2016 K12 settled a lawsuit with the state for $168.5 million over claims that it manipulated attendance records and other measures of student success.”
Governor Brown has until September 30 to sign or veto the bill.
Jesse Calefati’s reporting for the San Jose Mercury News is education journalism at its finest, independent and owing nothing to philanthropists or investors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane: I’d like to send you something for your blog. It is an open letter from award-winning history teacher Jeff Lantos to Austin Beutner, Superintendent of LAUSD, presenting “Ten Strategies that Improved Outcomes” in his fifth grade classes. I have Jeff’s permission to send it to you. Btw, you are one of the education authorities he cites. (The letter is too long for me to post it as a comment here.) You may contact me to let me know the best way to send it to you. AR
Who needs to be a for-profit when being a not-for-profit can be just as if not more than rewarding financially speaking?
That’s a good point.
Eva Moskowhips makes about half a million per year off her supposed nonprofit
Non profit has become a mechanism for paying large salaries to company officials while avoiding sales, property and corpoorate income taxes.
College Board President David Coleman makes over $700k per year at the non profit he works for.
Non profit status is badly abused these days.
I wish we had journalism of the Mercury’s quality here in Los Angeles, and I wish I knew why Jerry Brown has insisted in the past on throwing money away to K12 Inc. so the company can cheat young Californians out of an education. Brown otherwise deeply cares about the future of California. I wonder if my school would have a librarian or a nurse today if K12 weren’t poaching funds.
Because the California Charter Schools Association supports this bill, everyone else must be cautious and suspicious.
Is this bill a Trojan Horse? I think the answer is yes.
There must be language in the bill that will help the CCSA expand and add more charters schools while closing more K-12 public schools.
http://www.ccsa.org/blog/2018/08/california-charter-schools-association-celebrates-landmark-legislation-banning-for-profit-charter-sc.html
Here is the link to that Bill — any lawyer/teachers here who might read it and find the Trojan Horse?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB406
Thank you, Lloyd. I read everything you post.
“If both houses approve a bill, it then goes to the Governor. The Governor has three choices. The Governor can sign the bill into law, allow it to become law without his or her signature, or veto it. A governor’s veto can be overridden by a two-thirds (66.6%) vote in both houses.”
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/bil2lawx.html
The state Assembly voted 60 to 16 – there are 80 members in the Assembly so the bill passed by 75% of the total vote.
The state Senate voted 28 to 7 – there are 39 members in the state Senate so the bill passed by almost 72%.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB406
According to California law, Brown cannot veto this bill. It is a done deal.
Privatizing neoliberals in blue California try to distance themselves from their rightwing roots by stating opposition to for-profit charters. That excuses them, they suppose, from allowing charter transparency and accountability, and from opposing so-called nonprofit charters. That’s the Trojan horse, the tacit support of nonprofit charters. There’s no tricky language in AB 406 that I can see permitting more money or land grabs. It is, however, what neoliberals call triangulation, finding ground on the right that’s just far enough left to pass for progressivism in the minds of many.
This bill is not the end of or moratorium on all charter growth that we need, and is not the requirement for financial transparency we need, but it is a big step forward, not back, and is not a stab in the back.
Hope it works … but if they put the fox, the charter pirates, in charge of watching the chicken coop, the growth of charter schools and keeping the for-profit frauds out, then that will be responsible for an epidemic of charter school flu.
In this case, with privatization vaccines not developed and chicken soup for the public soul in such short supply, chicken soup for the soulless fox is better than nothing.
” . . . even if the schools themselves are technically nonprofits.” <–I hope that holds. CBK
I was hoping this was a way of keeping the nonprofit for profit organizations out of the education business, but there’s always an angle.
I don’t know why I get my hopes up, it seems that there is no integrity in government, just self interest. (The only positive is when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. You should have seen my smile when they ”arrested” my former Congressman, Chris Collins – a man who, as Erie County Executive, got rid of the WICK program and refused to properly fund the local zoo so the animals couldn’t have fresh fruit and vegetables and were forced to subsist on dry pellets. Was he surprised when he was voted out of office after one term. The only reason he got elected to Congress was because they gerrymandered his district.)
Now that it has been explained to me that this bill reads fair, my thinking changed to this:
This bill legitimizes private sector corporate charters because of the fact that the legislature overwhelmingly approved it even if the language appears fair.
It doesn’t matter if the bill’s language is balanced and fair, the fact that the bill was passed, is one step toward turning these disruptive charters into normal and accepted because they still exist through legislation.
The only good private-sector charter is a closed charter.
The only good private-sector charter is one that does not receive public funding.
The only good charter is one that is a public school charter inside of a public school district with an elected school board and unionized teachers teaching at that public school charter are in charge and tests that rank and punish do not exist.