Los Altos has a problem. Wealthy residents opened a charter school for their children, drawing money from the public schools to support their charter. The Bullis School is a private school that calls itself a “public” school and is funded by public dollars.
Vladimir Ivanovic wrote the following update on the community’s efforts to compel the Bullis School to act like a public school, not a private academy. Vladimir is a member of the elected Los Altos school board. He is also earning his doctorate in education policy at San Jose State University and has been a member of the Network for Public Education since 2013.
He writes:
This week, the Los Altos School District (LASD) in Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley formally asked its County Board and Office of Education to take action against the discriminatory enrollment practices at Bullis Charter School (BCS). The charter school began its enrollment marketing for the 2020-21 school year by announcing the reinstatement of a geographic enrollment preference for children who live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the nation, the exact opposite of the stated purpose of charter school law. This is an example of how charter law can be used to exacerbate inequities in education. (BCS was in the news before for its exclusive enrollment practices: “Taxpayers Get Billed for Kids of Millionaires at Charter School.”)
BCS was authorized by the county 15 years ago over the objections of LASD, and so the District must appeal to the charter’s authorizer for changes that will ensure equal access to education for all students at all public schools. The District’s letter to the Santa Clara County Board of Education and its Superintendent cites data from the State of California regarding the charter’s demographics that clearly show it is underserving students with special needs, English Language Learners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged children and asks for the same kind of remedy that California’s Attorney General obtained from the Sausalito Marin School District: a timely and effective desegregation plan.
Here is LASD’s press release: https://www.lasdschools.org/District/News/10840-Press-Release-September-10-2019.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
See! Charters are about JIM CROW and the Colonial Model of masters and slaves.
“the exact opposite of the stated purpose of charter school law.”
That’s a really important point, because ed reformers keep moving the goal posts.
They said they would provide a BETTER system if it was privatized. They didn’t say they would replace public schools with the schools they prefer, with no regard at all for effect on the rest of the system. The “rest of the system” is public school students.
If you opened an elite charter in my district that CHANGES the composition of the public school. They cannot continue to ignore this obvious fact, because by doing so they are ignoring public school STUDENTS. People who say “students first!” when they’re selling charters and vouchers shouldn’t be permitted to ignore the students in public schools. That’s a preference.
If public schools are to be designated the “safety net” for ed reform privatization experiments, with no value other than their usefulness to “the movement” then public school families should be TOLD that.
In just the last ten years the echo chamber has gone from promising better school SYSTEMS to promising “choice”. That’s not the same thing. That wasn’t what they sold to the public. For one thing, better school SYSTEMS is much more difficult than handing out vouchers. They WILDLY over-promised and now that we’re 20 years into this and creating privatized systems that are better than the public schools they disdain turns out to be REALLY DIFFICULT they blithely change the goal to “choice”? Call foul. That shouldn’t be permitted. It’s a bait and switch.
The ugly side of so-called choice is discrimination, racism, segregation and elitism. Why should public money be spent to pay for “islands of opportunity” for those that already have an abundance of opportunities? If the wealthy want an exclusionary school for their children, they should have to pay for it out of their own pockets.
The public school parents in Los Altos have complained about the privileged Bullis charter for years. No one cares.
One kind of amusing thing the voucher cheerleaders in Ohio do (because apparently they are innumerate) is use the entire structure of the existing public system for private schools (transportation, sports, music, extracurriculars) but they don’t count the COST in THEIR cost.
This is a fantasy. Your school doesn’t “cost” 5000. It costs 5000 + 1000. Public schools don’t operate for free. Maybe it would be better if we just moved to the ed reform dream of universal vouchers. At least then there wouldn’t be all this ridiculous accounting fantasy. After 20 years we’ll finally get simple addition and subtraction.
This happens in NYC, too.
The public school system is required to provide all sorts of “freebies” to charters. And it isn’t just that it costs more, it is that the money comes out of the public school budget.
So the charter “costs” $5000 + $1000″ but also that $1000 that is spent to give charters their freebies is charged to public school kids so their “costs” are also said to be $5000 but $1000 of that money goes to pay for charter freebies. That leads to pro-charter claims that “we’re both getting $5000 but charters are doing so much more” when the truth is charters get $6000 and public schools get $4000.
Clearly the numbers don’t work exactly like that since there are still more public school students in most communities who share in paying the costs of all the freebies given to the smaller number of charter students. But the more kids go to charters, the fewer kids in public schools there are who bear the cost to give the growing number of charter schools all the freebies they demand.
If ed reformers had said “we’re going to set up some national chains of charter schools that are really quite selective – not with a test but with various other methods of cherry picking and those schools will “outperform” public schools and low income kids need that option and don’t have it” that is a MUCH less ambitious (and less contentious) goal than what they DID sell, which was “improve public schools”.
I don’t know why the puffery was necessary if it’s not ideological. What purpose did it serve other than harming existing public schools in order to promote charters and private schools? It wasn’t of any practical benefit to public school students. It doesn’t add at all. It subtracts.
You speak to the discussion that America SHOULD be having but are not because of the charter lies.
It would be incredibly easy for any public school system to set up as many “choice” schools as can accommodate the most motivated parents whose kids have no learning issues — and all of those choice schools could counsel out students if their parents became less willing to work with them when they struggled to learn or if the parents worked very hard but it turned out the kid needed more and the “choice” school had no interest in providing that.
But of course, that begs the question of what happens to the other students. Remember, that according to the privatization lie, a public school system is only as good as its most failing school. If 99% of the kids in the remaining schools for the kids whose the public “choice” schools send back are not ALSO high performing scholars, the entire public school system is a failure! That is the system we have now. Except the franchise to select which kids to teach is granted to charters, who then lie about how they have discovered a miracle solution!
Charter schools can cherry pick. So can public schools by setting up lottery or choice schools that mimic charters in only allowing the children with the most motivated families to enroll, and only allowing their kids to stay if they can perform up to snuff. But public schools can’t make the kids they don’t want to teach disappear. Charter advocates like the reprehensible Robert Pondiscio would clearly be good with that! If public schools want praise from Robert Pondiscio, they need to specialize in identifying which 5 year olds should be out on the streets and then Pondiscio would praise their 99% passing rates.
And that is pretty sickening.
This is a good editorial that goes back to the original promises of ed reformers and asks if they have met those promises:
“As supporters and detractors continue their debate, we should look at the bigger picture to gauge the impact of charters. After two decades of charter education, shouldn’t the state have seen a rise in college graduation rates and income levels?”
They were supposed to improve publicly funded systems, at least. The original promise was they would “improve public schools” but they completely bailed on that and instead gave us privatized and private schools. Okay, not what they sold, but maybe better? Nope.
They can’t even meet the much less ambitious goal, which is neglect or outright harm the disfavored public schools but show us a NET GAIN. Even if public schools lose under privatization, there should at the very least be a NET GAIN by the addition of all the privatized schools. Unless they set the bar even lower, which they’re now attempting, and the only goal was “choice”. They can literally meet that with a new law and a bookkeeper to distribute public funds. This isn’t anywhere NEAR what they sold:
“And too many advocates — lawmakers among them — keep insisting that charters provide choices and options for parents, and act as if removing choice is a disaster. But the real disaster is conflating “choice” with “quality.” Alternatives that aren’t better than the original are just new paths that lead to the same unimpressive place.”
The real tragedy is if they succeed and the systems they leave us with are WORSE (using ‘systems’ generously- the random collection of schools and gimmicks and fads) – we could then spend the NEXT 50 years committed to this plan and end up worse off.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/pennsylvania-charter-schools-law-governor-tom-wolf-20190913.html?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar
I met at Vladimir Ivanovic at the NPE conference in Indianapolis. We talked about school funding. I sent him some information on the new effort to get “per-pupil expenses” monitored at the level of each school rather than average for a district. I wish him well in his doctoral study and in this fight for reasonable policy.