Remember the stories about the long waiting lists to get into charters?
Baloney.
In Los Angeles, more than 80% of all charter schools have vacancies.
Yet the billionaires are still spending to try to open more charters, in the absence of need or demand.
Please read this article in California-based Capital & Main, which contains a fascinating statistical analysis of charter school saturation.
The evidence suggests, writes Larry Buhl, that charter schools are now stealing students not only from public schools but from other charter schools.
Total student enrollment across the Los Angeles Unified School District has been declining for years, due partly to the high cost of living, which is pushing out families from the city. The latest LAUSD Superintendent Budget showed an overall enrollment decline of approximately 100,000 K-12 students districtwide — at the same time enrollment in charter schools increased dramatically over the past 14 years.
According to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), 118,820 students are being served at 249 charter schools throughout LAUSD. The CCSA also reports that there are more than 16,000 students on a wait list for charters authorized by LAUSD, and nearly 20,000 on wait lists for all charters in greater Los Angeles. The waitlist estimates are based on reported counts given by charter leaders; CCSA says that its estimates take into account duplicate students applying to multiple schools.
Unless there are a few standout charters that every student is applying to, those wait list figures are hard to square with district data that show widespread under-enrollment across LAUSD charters.
A November 2018 LAUSD interoffice memorandum on charter school enrollment showed that more than 80 percent of the 224 district-authorized independent charter schools were under-enrolled:
- The aggregate enrollment projections from the schools anticipated that 128,374 total students would be enrolled. The official Norm Enrollment figures show that the actual number of students for 2017-2018 was 112,492 students (or 15,882 fewer students than the schools projected).
- Approximately 34 of the 224 schools either met or exceeded their enrollment targets, while the remaining 190 did not. This trend appears consistent with both small and large charter operators.
* * *
With more charters chasing fewer students, marketing and outreach have become increasingly crucial to enrollment.
More money for marketing means less money for instruction. This is insane. It is very expensive and wasteful to maintain a dual school system.
Want to know which charter schools failed to meet their enrollment target. Look here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter schools are a commercial enterprise.
If there is anything that a commercial enterprise does best, it is lie through its teeth about how much demand there is for its product.
(I said “ldquo;teeth” just to be nice.)
BINGO! You are right.
Funny, I was thinking of a less politic “B” word than “baloney” to characterize this mendacity.
Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
BY
ERIC BLANC
There are many good reasons to oppose Cory Booker’s bid for the presidency. One of the main ones is his long-standing drive to destroy public education.
For close to two decades, Cory Booker has been at the forefront of a nationwide push to dismantle public education.
According to Booker, the education system is the main cause of our society’s fundamental problems, rather than, say, inequality and unchecked corporate power. As he explained in a 2011 speech, “disparities in income in America are not because of some ‘greedy capitalist’ — no! It’s because of a failing education system.”
Public schools, Booker continued, are also responsible for mass incarceration and racial injustice. To combat such evils, Booker has openly praised Republican leader Betsy DeVos’s organization American Federation for Children for fighting to win the final battle of the civil rights’ movement.
Scapegoating underfunded public schools for deeply rooted racial and economic problems makes little sense. But it’s been a ticket to the top for Cory Booker. In fact, it was by hitching his star to the corporate-backed “education reform” movement that Booker first rose to prominence.
The son of wealthy parents who were among IBM’s first black executives, Booker’s big political break came in September 2000, when he was tapped to give a keynote speech to the archconservative Manhattan Institute. Calling the Newark school system “repugnant,” Booker claimed there was “great evidence” that large groups of children “cannot succeed in the public school system.”
Yet rather than improving this system by increasing school funding or building public “community schools,” Booker made a hard case for charter schools as well as school vouchers, i.e., state funding for parents to pay for private schools…
http://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/cory-booker-charters-public-schools-president
Cory is well … can’t say it here.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan: I have a very dirty mind. I know what you’re thinking.
Booker continues to support charters despite their repeated failure to deliver. He forgets that he got an excellent public school education at his public high school in New Jersey.
“According to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), 118,820 students are being served at 249 charter schools throughout LAUSD. The CCSA also reports that there are more than 16,000 students on a wait list for charters authorized by LAUSD, and nearly 20,000 on wait lists for all charters in greater Los Angeles. The waitlist estimates are based on reported counts given by charter leaders; CCSA says that its estimates take into account duplicate students applying to multiple schools.”
Self-reported from charter schools TO a charter lobbying outfit. No independent verification at all. Is anyone surprised the charter lobbyist numbers don’t line up with actual student enrollment?
Yet every single ed reformer repeats the “waiting list” claim over and over and over.
Charters are the pet projects of billionaires and corporations seeking to commodify our young people. In addition to their ability to advertise, they have the means to buy representatives to forward their agenda. This does not mean there is a need for this privatized service. More schools dilute the impact of public dollars. It is the public schools that are the most efficient, and effective. In the charter market we have reached the point of diminishing return. More inefficient and ineffective schools are not a benefit to anyone.
Where the funds come from to pay those fees isn’t entirely clear. A spokesperson for LAUSD said that it’s impossible to know how much money charter schools in the district spend on marketing, because there is no line item for that expense.
In an email, Brittany Chord Parmley, spokesperson for CCSA, said, “Each charter school’s marketing budget and capacity varies and we do not have figures, guidelines, or recommendations on what this should look like from school to school.”
No one knows and the public isn’t even permitted to ask. This is a model of “good government”, I must say.
I suppose one could work backward. Add up the scant information charters are required to report and then the money left over is in a general slush fund that could be spent on advertising, or anything else.
Or they could just actually report where their public funding goes.
“No one knows and the public isn’t even permitted to ask. This is a model of “good government”, I must say.”
Just like the Pentagon is a model of good patriotic gubmint, eh.
“Chuck Bankoff, who runs Kreative Webworks, a California-based marketing and strategy firm devoted to school promotion and branding, said that charter schools are seeking his services because of the growing difficulty in getting new students.”
You have to hand it to ed reformers- they have created thousands of jobs for adults in and around charter schools. There are whole entities in and around Columbus who are funded solely from money that used to go to K-12 students- lawyers, accountants, marketing, “consultants”. They created an entirely publicly-funded private sector industry.
It’s starting to trickle out how top-heavy this “governance model” is and it shouldn’t surprise anyone. A thousand flowers bloomed. Too bad so few of them are actually blooming in the schools.
Mold is blooming in too many public schools as a result of disinvestment and devotion to privatization. Mold is toxic, and not healthy for children or anyone else.
Many of these under-enrolled charters are co-located on district campuses. That means that our bond funds were spent to renovate these campuses to accommodate the charter based on projected enrollment. So, those charters with huge under-enrollment are leaving a bunch of renovated classrooms empty which were most likely ones that the host school were kicked out of. What a mess!!!
The demand for seats in charter schools, far exceeds the supply here in WashDC. See this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dual-language-charter-schools-attract-the-longest-waiting-lists-in-dc/2018/04/17/b652312c-427c-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html?utm_term=.c117d4e5ff2b
There are so many families who want to enroll their children in charter schools, that the school system has to set up a lottery.
This is insane. NO child should be subject to a lottery, in order to have a quality education.
(BTW- The Wash Post is a strong supporter of public education)
Has the “waiting list” been audited?
LA claimed there was a “waiting list.” We now know from official releases that 82% of LA charter schools have vacancies.