A judge in San Diego ordered two charter schools in the district to close in response to the school district’s complaint that they were operating without local authorization and could not be supervised. About 40,000 students attend Learn4Life centers statewide.
The Learn4Life charters are appealing the decision.
Judge David Danielsen on Monday granted a motion by San Diego Unified School District to close the two Learn4Life locations operating in the district’s boundaries: Diego Hills Central, a charter school authorized by Dehesa School District, and a resource center for San Diego Workforce Innovation High, a school authorized by Borrego Springs Unified School District. Neither of those schools have active locations in the districts that authorized them.
As Carol Burris reported in Charters and Consequences, the Learn4Life charters are storefronts where students meet a teacher once every 20 days. Their graduation rates are abysmal. Typically, they are authorized by small rural districts to operate in urban districts hundreds of miles away, where they operate without oversight. The authorizing district gets a commission for every student who enrolls.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I guess Moscow Mitch is not working fast enough to stack the courts against truth. There is a good reason for life-long judge-ships? CBK
There is a good reason for life-long judge-ships? You asked a REALLY important question there, Catherine!!!
What could possibly go wrong with Calf.’s contractor school plan? Let’s ask Bill Gates or current/former faculty at the Walton’s University of Arkansas Dept. of Ed. or faculty at the Arnold-funded university ed centers.
It is so insane that this was allowed to happen.
It is also ridiculous that Kamala Harris has not had to go on record about her position on these things. Is she willing to acknowledge that the lack of oversight that the promoters of charters who also give her money is a bad thing and is she willing to straight up say that they are wrong to be fighting oversight? Or will she give some mealy mouthed answer about supporting “good public charters”?
If Corey Booker has really abandoned his “I will support any charters my billionaire public school-hating donors want me to support”, then he can prove it by speaking out loudly about this.
The candidates need to be asked much more frequently to take a stand on very specific issues because that makes it much harder for them to get away with mealy mouthed generalities about “good public charters”.
Why do news organizations always have to give a definition of charters as “independently run public schools”? They are privately owned and operated businesses. Calling them public schools is false reporting. Free press isn’t supposed to mean dishonest press.
We don’t have a free press in the US.
It is an owned press.
So instead of “freedom of the press”, we have “owndom of the press.”(or maybe it’s spelled “owndumb”)
The Twenty-First Century 1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any other than Betsy DeVos’ religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of Betsy DeVos thereof; or abridging the owndumb of Bill Gates to surveil speech, or of the corporate press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble as long as the unwashed do not Occupy space in front of Starbucks or McDonalds, and to petition the Government —in vain unless you’re a moneyed corporate lobbyist —for a redress of grievances.
and always so frustratingly, much of the current charter school mess which the nation faces would dissolve if the media simply stopped telling the lies
Charter school reform legislation before the Legislature AB 1507 is designed to prevent authorization by school districts of charter schools in other school districts. Hopefully folks will contact members of the California legislature lobbying them to vote passage of AB 1507.
I’m confused by this: “State law requires charter schools to be located in the boundaries of the school district that authorized them. Charter schools can open a location outside of its authorizing district’s boundaries in certain cases.”. How were they authorized in the first place?
That contradiction confused me too because efforts to reform charter law in CA are focused on limiting charters only to the district that authorized them.
Unfortunately, individual county boards of education are responsible for the school districts that reside within them. If a proposed charter school is shot down by the local district the county board that oversees the district may overrule it.
In the past, if the county was also wise enough to shoot the proposed charter down rest assured that Jerry Brown’s toadies would approve it at the state level.
Dehesa is a rural town 28 mis away – has1 K-8 school. Borrego Springs is a desert town 90 mis away w/1 each elem, midsch & hisch. What a joke to think a tiny schdistr has the staff to “oversee” a non-local sch. Obviously this [now-repealed] charter law was set up to ensure zero monitoring by paying off a strapped distr somewhere else to say they’re doing it.
Correction:
“The authorizing district gets a KICKBACK for every student who enrolls.”