Earlier this year, LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson revealed that 82% of the charter schools in Los Angeles have empty seats (no waiting lists).
Yet because of California’s charter-friendly environment, the privately managed schools continue to open.
A report in 2017 found that charters in Los Angeles are proliferating where they are not needed.
The report points out that traditional school districts can’t build new schools when real or potential enrollment fails to justify expansion. But those rules don’t apply to charter schools, which can open anywhere and qualify for state funding or subsidies to build or lease facilities. The report says public funds helped open and sustain at least 450 charters in areas with plenty of existing classroom space.
“Paying for more schools than are needed wastes taxpayer dollars,” the report says. “Furthermore, an oversupply of schools serves to undermine the viability of any individual school.”
The latter argument has been made repeatedly by L.A. Unified officials, who say that rapid and widespread charter growth is one of several factors threatening the solvency of the nation’s second-largest school system.
The report’s lead researcher, Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, attributes the problem to a lack of clarity and vision in state policy.
“A new report finds that charters in Los Angeles are proliferating where they are not needed.”
This “phenomenon” is not surprising IF we understand the difference between the remote motivations behind the charter movement, and the motivations behind the development of PUBLIC schools.
To be more specific, new charter schools ARE needed IF the motivation is to make money in the short term “on the backs of students;” or, as is the case for some oligarchs (re: religious and/or political intent) and in the longer term, to screw around with the curricula (by commission and/or omission) in a way that also screws around with the whole idea of “public” and its mandate for developing citizens to know their REAL choices that concern living in a vibrant democracy–or not. CBK
Isn’t it amazing that people can just force the city and state to pay for a charter school where it’s not only not needed, but will harm the existing schools that the city and state are already paying for. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! I tried to think of an analogy, an instance of government paying private companies to harm government, but I am at a loss. This instance of waste and self-harm seems unprecedented. And Reed Hastings and Eli Broad are guilty of getting the public to commit this crime against the public. Makes me proud to have never made a Netflix account or bought any insurance from AIG.
Charters absolutely are absolutely needed in order to fully undermine public schools. If we understand that is the goal of their billionaire supporters, then we understand how desperately charters are needed by the only people that matter to the billionaires and their co-opted media enablers like NY Times education reporter Eliza Shapiro.
The needs of the .001% are always far more important than the needs of anyone else, especially the poorest and most vulnerable children and their parents, who reporters will continue to ignore except to promote the false narrative that they are all desperate for seats in those empty charters and in the new ones that must be established for them.
No need to care about empty seats or fake wait list numbers when the rich and powerful simply tell you that low-income parents are desperate for privatized public schools that suspend high numbers of African-American Kindergarten children because of their violent natures and you believe your job as a white reporter is not to question it but to report it as fact. The “needs” of the white billionaires are far more important than the needs of poor children.
The charter-voucher deformers of public education are not going to go away easily. They are the same as dangerous cancer or viral disease.
As long as it is easy to take free, easy public money without rules or oversight, con-men that think just like Donald Trump will keep coming. Greed is a mental disease and that greed when allowed to run rampant will destroy everything it touches.
If we want to get rid of these rotten scum, voters must drown them in bleach at the polls.
Los Angeles independent charter schools generally come in six types:
1) Small K-5, K-8 and 6-8 Latino charters controlled and operated by church-affiliated professionals that seek to exclude “problematic” kids [you figure out what they deem problematic.] Students are then funneled into neighborhood high schools that are traditionally the pride and nucleus of the community. They are all under-enrolled, but are happy to stay that way as long as they keep out undesirables.
2) Micro-sized K-5 and K-8 Latino charters that fit the same characterization but merge/bus their few high school students together out of financial necessity. They are under-enrolled, but are happy to stay that way as long as they keep out undesirables.
3) Micro-sized K-5, K-8 and K-12 African-American charters controlled and operated by church-affiliated professioanls that seek to exclude “problematic” kids [same deal as #1 and #2, above.] They are all under-enrolled, but are happy to stay that way.
4) A number of ultra-exclusive, White/Korean/Pilipino K-5 charters nestled in exclusive neighborhoods, and which allow limited numbers of SPED and underrepresented minority kids to sneak through the lottery system…enough to give the impression that they are trying to maintain equity [which they are not.] They fill all of their seats without any problem and have waiting lists. Their graduates go to private schools (half of them), or to a few very high functioning public middle schools (that are also nestled in exclusive neighborhoods.)
5) A few very large, White/Korean/Pilipino charter high schools that rely upon the students matriculating from #4, and from professional parents that are scattered around the city but work nearby. They have been flagrantly violating equity laws for years…even decades.
6) A few dozen racially mixed charters that are generally floundering and occasionally collapsing. They have little direction, no real [should actually say “sinister”] motivation, and are the ones you hear about in news reports. They are under-enrolled and always in a state of flux. Other than being fairly racially mixed, they have no reason to exist.
So, no surprises there…
Here is another example of how the rich gain control of WHATEVER they want regardless of the harm they do. It’s a book review from the New York Review of Books written by R. B. Gratz whose friendship with Jane Jacobs was long-term. Guess what: Our Man Trump plays a part in her story, as does De Blasio. The below is a “newslet” from the Review: CBK (all copied below)
“On Monday we published Roberta Brandes Gratz’s essay ‘How New York Is Zoning Out the Human-Scale City,’ a trenchant survey of how real estate interests exert so much control over the city. She begins with the case of 270 Park Avenue, the old Union Carbide building.
“A classic mid-century Modernist tower in Midtown Manhattan, recently renovated (using tax breaks) to the latest environmental standards, the building is now scheduled for demolition—so that its owner, Chase Bank, can build an even taller tower on the same lot. The incentive was provided by the district’s ‘upzoning’ under Mayor Bill de Blasio, which loosened local regulations and awarded owners of landmarked buildings the right to sell their unused ‘air rights’ to the owner of a lot that might be several city blocks away. But that story is merely a symptom, in Gratz’s view, of the systematic capture of urban planning decision-making by the developer lobby—with baleful results for the whole fabric of the city, or, as she writes, ‘what Jane Jacobs called an .’
“Gratz is uniquely qualified to bear the standard of Jacobs, for a host of reasons—not least their friendship of nearly thirty years. ‘I was introduced to Jane by Jason Epstein of Random House, her longtime editor and friend, and my first editor, in 1978,’ Roberta told me via email this week. ‘We hit it off immediately.’
“Roberta had recently left The New York Post, where she’d gone straight from graduation at NYU, working her way up from copy girl to reporter. She quit when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and was embarking on a new career, of writing a book about urban regeneration, when happily she met Jacobs.
“’Few people appreciated my observations about cities in trouble or beginning to be reborn,’ she recalled. ‘The experts were all negative and saw no value in the neighborhood-based rebirth I was seeing. But she [Jacobs] celebrated my observations, encouraged me, gave me confidence that I was onto something out of the mainstream.’
“It wasn’t their only connection. Roberta was ‘born and raised in Greenwich Village,’ next door to Jacobs’s beloved West Village, and the Brandes family’s last place in the city (they moved when she was a teenager and her father opened a business in Connecticut) was on Washington Square—the site of Jacobs’s famous first victory against the titan of New York planning, Robert Moses, who in the 1950s had proposed putting a highway through the square’s park. That struggle—between the mighty master-builder and the great advocate of neighborhood ‘liveliness’—was one memorialized in one of Gratz’s later books, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (2010).
“Roberta’s move out of journalism also led her into activism. She is a former president of the Center for the Living City (which she co-founded with Jacobs in 2004), and a longtime board member for the Preservation League of New York State; she was also a founder of the Fire Island Historical Society, and a member of the governor of New York’s task force on Manhattan’s West Side waterfront; and she served on New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission during the Bloomberg administrations. Of the many causes she’s taken up, I wondered which meant most to her.
“’Probably my most important project was the Eldridge Street Synagogue,’ Roberta said. This Lower East Side temple, which dates from 1887, was in a state of disrepair when she encountered it nearly a century later; over more than twenty years, she worked to achieve its restoration and preservation. ‘Its significance for city history is very deep and one can’t tell the story of the American Jewish experience without it,’ she explained. ‘When I first walked into it, it was on the verge of loss. Today, 40,000 visitors a year come from around the world to see it’
“But there have been setbacks and sorrows along the way: notably, the failure of a campaign in the 1980s to save the Helen Hayes and Morosco theaters on 45th Street—’demolished to build the exceedingly ugly, inward-directed Marriott Marquis Hotel, when the city could have saved the theaters and built a new hotel over them.’ I wondered whether, in her wars, she’d ever rubbed up against a real estate developer named Donald Trump.
“’Ah, yes! The effort to fight Donald Trump’s massive, city-smothering project on the West Side from 59th to 72nd Streets started at my dining-room table,’ she said. ‘We organized a citywide campaign and defeated his outlandish plan for a six-story, thirteen-block shopping mall with 2,000 parking spaces, with the tallest building in world (150 stories) on top, flanked by six more ultra-tall towers. It would have walled off the city and killed retail citywide. The City Planning Commission would have compromised badly; instead, we defeated him in the courts.’
“’He turned around, conceded defeat, and included us in designing the first of the new towers; and we designed the now-celebrated waterfront park.’
“Defeat Trump? Just as Jacobs bested Moses, Gratz showed it can be done.”
For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the NYR Daily. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton/Editor, NYR Daily