Kristen Take of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a setback for online charter schools. A judge ruled against their class-action lawsuit that sought more funding from the state. The judge cited the online charters’ history of fraud and abuse. Earlier this year, the owners of the A3 online charter chain pled guilty to charges against them for self-dealing and agreed to repay the state $215 million dollars for falsely inflating their enrollment.
She wrote:
A California Superior Court judge ruled against hundreds of online and other non-classroom based charter schools in a class-action lawsuit last week, declaring that the state did not wrongfully deprive the schools of education funding during the pandemic.
The ruling, handed down July 27, was a blow to the schools, which are called non-classroom-based charter schools because at least 20 percent of the learning occurs off campus, often online or at home.
Three San Diego-based charter school networks — The Classical Academies, The Learning Choice Academy and Springs Charter Schools — and the parents of several enrolled and waitlisted students sued the state of California last fall, saying the state did not equitably fund their charter schools by accounting for the new students they enrolled during the last school year.
The lawsuit was deemed a class-action petition representing about 300 non-classroom based charter schools across California that enrolled about 200,000 students, said Lee Rosenberg, attorney for the plaintiffs.
Those schools took on about 25,000 new students last school year that weren’t paid for by the state, he said.
The state typically funds all public schools, including charter schools, on a per-student basis, which means the more students a school enrolls, the higher its state funding.
Last year, because of the pandemic and related school closures, the state initially froze public school funding levels to stabilize schools’ and districts’ finances.
Then state officials unfroze the funding and gave K-12 public schools funding for their existing and newly enrolled new students last year — except for non-classroom based charter schools, which provided mostly online, home school and non-traditional education services. Their funding remained frozen for existing students.
State leaders chose not to fund new students at those non-classroom based charter schools because there is a history of fraud and abuse by some of those kinds of schools, the state attorney general wrote in a recent court filing.
“The state determined that (non-classroom based charter schools) raised major concerns for fraud and abuse and inferior education and decided to limit the incentive for expanding that model of education during the pandemic while the state considered the underlying policy around (non-classroom based charter schools),” Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a June court filing signed by him and others in his office.
Why won’t the ed reform lobby refgulate charter schools? If the goal is to replace the whole system with private contractors the fraud is going to explode and that’s not even counting the wholly unregulated private school voucher funding.
This only ends one way. I know they’re ideologically opposed to regulation but as they privatize more and more we will see more and more fraud.
They won’t even bar for profits. They’re right now all lobbying for more funding for for profit charter schools. This is a direct contradiction of what they repeatedly told the public – they said the schools would be nonprofits. Even that slight effort at regulation – public schools shouldn’t be for profit entities- is ferociously opposed by the whole echo chamber. They accept no regulation or oversight of any kind and they seek to privatize the whole K-12 system. It’s going to be a disaster.
We’ve already seen massive scandals and they haven’t changed the antiregulatory ideological approach at all- Ohio lost 60 million in a scandal and now Indiana has lost 70 million. That’s with +/- 10% of privatized schools. Imagine when they reach their goal of 100%. It’ll be billions.
This is a win for families and students that fall prey to these on-line grifters that have been scamming the states and taxpayers for years. These schools are opportunistic parasites that drain public coffers to pay for a failing product. On-line programming does not offer equivalent education.
opportunistic: the entire game exposed
I am glad the pandemic taught most people a lesson about the lack of effectiveness of online learning and of online communication in general. I’m glad A3 taught California a lesson about charter waste, fraud, and abuse. Charter advocates learned nothing, as usual, but many people did. Why does it take such huge disasters to teach people that the hype surrounding charters, especially online charters, was all hype?
Looks like there was a grammatical conflict in my last sentence. It was tense.
One of Florida’s top ed reformers, traveling the country giving political speeches attacking public schools:
“Among his targets: Florida public school teachers and textbook publishers.
“You have to police them on a daily basis,” he said of the state’s 185,000 teachers, to ensure they aren’t attempting to “indoctrinate” students in ideas such as critical race theory.
He boasted of making sure a Duval County teacher was “terminated” after she refused to take down a Black Lives Matter flag in her classroom. (The teacher wasn’t terminated, she was reassigned outside the classroom. Also, the teacher advocating Black Lives Matter worked at Jacksonville’s Robert E. Lee High School, where nearly 70% of the students are Black.)”
Too bad for you if you’re a public school student or family in Florida, anti-public education ideologues run the public school systems. Not one positive plan, idea or mention of public schools, not one actual contribution to the public schools and he’s paid to run “public education”.
Florida is the ed reform model for the country? We’re all supposed to adopt the Jeb Bush privatization model?
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/editorials/os-op-richard-corcoran-florida-state-president-20210518-67jxyexiencinlzyopjqa57csu-story.html