Louis Freedberg of EdSource explains here why California charter schools are largely unsupervised, leading to a drumbeat of scandals like the recent indictment of 11 people charged with a theft of $80 million.
He writes:
As charter school conflicts intensify in California, increasing attention is being focused not only on the schools themselves but on the school boards and other entities that grant them permission to operate in the first place.
They’re called charter authorizers, and unlike many states, California has hundreds of them: 294 local school districts, 41 county offices of education, along with the State Board of Education.
In fact, California, with over 1300 charters schools, has more authorizers than any other state. That’s not only because of California’s size but also because it has an extremely decentralized approach to charter school authorization.
Someone wishing to start a charter school, or to renew a charter, must apply to a local school district to get the green light to do so. If a petition is turned down by the district, applicants can appeal to county boards of education, and if they are denied there, they can go to the State Board of Education as a last resort.
An emerging question is whether California’s authorizers have the skills, capacity and guidance to adequately oversee the charter schools under their jurisdiction.
Under the state’s extremely lax law, a tiny rural district may authorize a charter to open for business in an urban district hundreds of miles away. The rural district collects a commission, the charter has no supervision.
A win-win for the charter and the authorizer, a lose-lose for taxpayers and students.
The California problem is not that authorizers need training, but that any district can authorize charters in other districts.
The law should be changed so that districts control whether charters open inside their boundaries. The current law encourages scavengers to prey on other districts. This must stop. Give districts control and responsibility for the schools inside their geographic area. Stop the charter vandals whose only goal is profiteering without oversight.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The complete lack of regulation and oversight in California surprises me, because California isn’t a state that is ideologically committed to deregulation.
I knew what would happen in Florida because ed reform in Florida is guided by ideological themes and beliefs. I wouldn’t have guessed California would also have a “wild west” charter sector.
I do have a question for ed reformers though- if authorizers benefit when charter schools expand, aren’t authorizers “self interested”?
Why is the “self interest” analysis only applied to public schools? If the cynical belief if “adults” deliberately sabotage children because the adults are “self interested” then why does this belief only apply to people who work for and advocate on behalf of public schools? Are ed reformers just inherently better human beings than people who support public schools?
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The US Department of Education (in the person of DeVos) spends nearly every work day proclaiming that anyone who disagrees even slightly with the ed reform agenda is “self interested” in the “status quo”.
Why wouldn’t this also apply to all the adults who promote, work for, and lobby on behalf of charter and private school vouchers?
It seems to me ed reformers need to choose- they can promote this idea that anyone who in any way materially benefits from a public school is a greedy self interested adult and ALSO apply that to the schools they prefer, or they can drop it completely. Exempting themselves from this analysis is incoherent. Despite what they tell themselves they are not actually superior beings to those who work for public schools.
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When ed reform started in Ohio we were told ed reformers would cleanse our statehouse of all that nasty “politics” and we would have a group of unelected experts setting public policy based purely upon “science” and “data”.
What we got was a bunch of charter and voucher lobbyists. Which was foreseeable, and which ed reformers were literally the last people to figure out.
No one could have predicted that rubber stamping hundreds of millions of public funds to thousands of contractors would end this way. No, sir. That was unimaginable.
This isn’t that complicated. It’s BAD GOVERNMENT. They did a lousy job creating a new government. They pitched the old system in the trash with no thought at all and replaced it with junk. It was reckless.
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yeah, they were gonna drain the swamp, right? Then they became the swamp, the swampiest swamp ever seen.
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from day one of so many legislators on both sides of the political isle happily signing on to the blatantly ridiculous theory that NCLB could force everyone — all children, all schools, all teachers — toward a magically standardized academic success: BAD GOVERNMENT
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Who is overseeing the overseers(AKA authorizers)????? I guess we know the answer. NO ONE. So, if Acton-Agua Dulce, New Jerusalem, Mountain Empire, Dehesa and many more districts take the money and run, nothing happens to them. There is no grading of authorizers. It would be great to find out the rate of failure by district.
This may not be a good example, but if a teacher is charged with assault of a student, the parent sues the district for not properly supervising that teacher, especially when the teacher’s behavior had been documented and reported. But, when it comes to charters that have been reported sometimes for years for mismanagement and cheating are allowed to continue to operating, then why isn’t someone or some entity held responsible for this egregious misuse of our precious education tax dollars?
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I mean, really. No one in ed reform considered the fact that private schools can exclude students for all kinds of reasons when they were all lobbying for vouchers?
This is a surprise to them? There are tens of thousands of them and they’re supposedly paid to design “systems”. Now that they jammed vouchers into 30 states they’re just now admitting that it isn’t, actually, always the “choice” of the parents? That private schools can and will exclude students?
Why did they tell people it was “just like public schools?” That’s a lie. They surely know this because most of them attended private schools. That’s why the schools are private. Because they’re not public.
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Like so many states California jumped on the privatization bandwagon without understanding the consequences or bigger picture. Now that the charter lobby has installed itself in Sacramento, it will be much harder to change the laissez-faire system they created. California is known for its expensive, cumbersome regulations. Yet, it opened up an entire education industry and allowed it to rob the taxpayers blind.
It amazes me that so many people accept all the claims about “reform” without insisting on evidence to back up any assertions. Because so-called reform is backed by so many wealthy individuals, too many of their lies and tests are accepted as having value. State governments need a reality check. It is their job to protect the common good and not accept market based education as inherently better. Our representatives should be protecting the students whose families they serve. Instead, many of them are more than willing to forget about their public duty. They feast on dark money and sell out to corporations and the 1%.
California’s problem is the same problem many states are facing. When you establish for profit climate without regulation, you make your state a haven for grifters and frauds. The goal should be about improving education, not making money. Entrenched charter operators will continue to push for a bigger “market share” to which they believe they are entitled. Instead of being about what is best for students, education becomes turf war about who can make more money.
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Charter love in California was supported early on by former Governor Gray Davis, who appointed Reed Hastings to the state board. Mr. Hastings was able to incorporate language into charter law, changing the words “may approve” to “shall approve”, thus opening up the floodgates to unrestricted expansion. That’s not going to end well. It continued with charter support from former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who thought the business model for charters was just swell. Finally, the charter legacy was cemented by Jerry Brown, who was loathe to pass any accountability/transparency legislation in order to protect his own charter schools (Oakland School for the Arts snd Oakland Military Institute).
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Here we gop again:
“There are certainly bright spots in Norfolk’s public schools, especially when families are permitted to choose their preference (e.g., Granby IB, The Academy of Discovery and Norview robotics). For the most part, however, Norfolk has adhered to an industrial-age model from the prior century vs. embracing a progressive 21st-century model that, as chronicled by David Osborne in “Reinventing America’s Schools” and education researchers at Stanford University, is delivering superior public education in urban settings resembling Norfolk.”
Pitch all the public schools in the trash heap and blindly follow privatization guru David Osborne- a person who is PAID to come up with privatization schemes and works full time at selling them all over the country.
No, there’s nothing at all arrogant and reckless about THAT. Of course David Osborne knows best and of course we should privatize, immediately, if not sooner.
When they meet local resistance, and they will, they have no one to blame but themselves. This is HUBRIS. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many times local people reject them, they come back every year with the same schemes. Every city and town and district- the same thing. NOTHING at all for public school students except a promise to gut their schools and replace them contractors.
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“a progressive 21st-century model that, as chronicled by David Osborne in “Reinventing America’s Schools”
Does it bother anyone in ed reform that before Osborne was a public school privatizer he was a public health system privatizer?
David Osborne helped create our wildly expensive, hugely inequitable health care “system”, which is a disaster. All that waste and duplication and inequitable access? That’s what these same individuals “created” in health care. It’s the exact same playbook.
They want to do this to public schools? Turn it into the disaster that is US health care? Why?
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So the same David Osborne who’s health care strategy resulted in heartbreaking scenarios like this, “The Clinic of Last Resort”. Just cross out the word “clinic” and replace it with “public school”. That’s what my grandchildren have to look forward to…https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-clinic-of-last-resort/2019/06/22/2833c8a0-92cc-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
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