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California: Charter School Borrows Nearly $30 Million for New Building, Then Was Closed Down

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2018 //
6

A charter school in Palmdale, California, raised nearly $30 million in bonds for its new building. But as matters stand, the school will never open. Charters are risky. They open, they close. Sometimes states close more charter schools than they open. That’s business. Where is Enron, Braniff Airlines, all sorts of brands that disappeared? Gone without a trace.


For the last year, construction on the corner of Avenue R and 40th Street East in Palmdale hummed along as a massive school campus took shape.

On its Facebook page, Guidance Charter School posted photos of students holding shovels adorned with yellow ribbons and contractors pouring the foundation for what would be an 87,000-square-foot campus with a swimming pool, library and playing fields — paid for with nearly $30 million in bonds.

Less visible was what was happening behind the scenes, as the local school system raised alarms that threatened Guidance’s existence.

The Palmdale School District’s board of trustees, which first authorized Guidance 17 years ago, voted in January to close the school, citing concerns about poor academic performance and questionable financial operations. As the new campus rose, charter officials launched a series of appeals, the latest of which came before the Los Angeles County Board of Education this week.

On Tuesday, the board rejected Guidance’s last-ditch effort to open for the 2018-19 school year. Unless a court overturns Palmdale’s decision, Guidance Charter School will not be able to enroll students — or receive the state funding that comes with them. But it still will be responsible for repaying the loan.

Supporters say the school is a victim of a process that puts decision-making power in the hands of the very districts that compete with charters for students and funding. Opponents see it as proof that charter schools, regardless of the quality of the education they offer or the extent of oversight they receive, are able to access bond money too easily.

The school’s executive director, Kamal Al-Khatib, blames its closure on the Palmdale School District, which he said purposely set the charter school up for failure in order to win students back. In the spring of 2017, less than a year before voting not to renew the school, the district had declared that Guidance was on solid ground, he said…

Guidance was founded in 2001 by Muslim leaders who promised to offer students a secular education and Arabic instruction.

The school leased space from a mosque owned by the American Islamic Institute of Antelope Valley, a religious organization run by the charter’s founder and its executive director, which would later prompt a host of conflict-of-interest concerns. Guidance’s ties to the mosque — and the thin partitions erected to separate its students from a prayer room — drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League that there was not enough of a wall between church and state.

Regardless, the school grew. It had opened with 65 students but by last year had about 900 in grades K-12. And every five years, when its right to operate came up for renewal, the Palmdale school board voted to keep it open. Guidance also rented classroom space from the district…

When district officials voted not to renew the charter, they cited Guidance’s lagging academic performance as their primary concern.

Although its students’ scores on the state English exam in 2017 were roughly comparable to their peers in the district, according to Palmdale, math was a different story. In that subject, scores at Guidance were worse than those at most other schools in the area; none of the charter school’s 11th graders tested at grade level.

Many of Guidance’s students didn’t graduate, according to county officials, who said its drop-out rate was about 23% for the class of 2016. Palmdale officials found that even when students did graduate, many were not prepared to go to four-year colleges. According to the district, of 32 students who graduated from Guidance in 2014 and 2015, 24 had not completed the courses required for admission to the University of California or California State University systems.

The district also flagged Guidance’s fiscal operations and governance structure. It accused Al-Khatib of having financial interests in several of the school’s transactions, including its lease with the American Islamic Institute and a roughly $2-million loan from a related company called Guidance Charter School Services LLC.

Guidance’s lawyers disputed the claims and said Al-Khatib’s role at the mosque was voluntary and unpaid.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

California: The Rightwing Money Funding Marshall Tuck’s Campaign for State Superintendent of Instruction

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2018 //
9

For those of us concerned about the future of public education in America, one of the most important elections this fall is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction between Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond. They are both Democrats, on paper. Thurmond won the overwhelming endorsement of the Democrats, like 89% to 5% at the party’s state convention. The grassroots know who the real Democrat is and who is the puppet of the charter billionaires.

I support Tony Thurmond, a former social worker and current legislator. His first commitment is to children. I will write more about him as the election nears. California needs a State Superintendent whose first priority is meeting the needs of students, not the whims of Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, the Walton family, and Michael Bloomberg.

Marshall Tuck is a former investment banker who went into education via management of charter schools. He has won the hearts and minds of the Uber-rich.

The Republican Party has sent out fliers endorsing Tuck. No surprise. He has received campaign contributions from the Walmart family and the usual array of charter-loving billionaires who want to disrupt public schools.

He is, whether he likes it or not, the candidate of the right.

He pledged not to take money from PACs, but when the Walton heirs bundled money for him, he took it. When a notorious homophobe funded his campaign, he was sufficiently embarrassed to return the money. The rightwingers see him as the Betsy DeVos of California, but his billionaire funders will portray him as a fresh face with innovative ideas, like more charter schools.

As Jim Miller of San Diego wrote,

“The hope of Tuck’s supporters is that perhaps no one will notice. Maybe, they think, the big money will push him over the finish line this time despite the sleazy rightwing connections that would seem an anathema to voters here on the Left Coast. We can only trust that the vast majority California’s Democratic voters will join those Democrats at the state convention last week who rejected Tuck’s second bid to open California schools to the kinds of right-wing privatization schemes that have wreaked havoc elsewhere in the country.”

Categories Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform

California: Torlakson Creates a Task Force to Review State Charter Laws

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
12

Tom Torlakson, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction in California, has created a task force to review the charter school laws in the state.

California has more charter schools than any other state. The California Charter School Association is the richest, most powerful lobby in the state and has been able to stymie any overhaul of the law. The CCSA has staunchly opposed any revision of the law that might require accountability or transparency from charter schools and that would, for example, bar conflicts of interest or for-profit charters.

Governor Jerry Brown, who has been a progressive leader on so many major issues, has been a faithful defender of charter schools, vetoing any legislative efforts to update the law.

But, it now appears that the new governor will be Gavin Newsom, and he has no debts to the CCSSA, which directed millions of dollars to Antonio Villairaigosa in the primaries, who ran a distant third.

Given the reshuffling at the top, it is time to fix the conditions that allow frauds and scandals to go undetected in the charter sector.

Responsible members of the charter industry should work diligently to remove the fraudsters and grifters from their sector, as should everyone.

Charters should not have the ability to appeal from the district board to the county board to the state board, where they are certain to win approval, no matter how ill-qualified their staff.

At present, given the lack of any accountability for the expenditure of public money by charters, the state has experienced many scandals. To learn more about the woeful state of California’s charter industry, read Carol Burris’s carefully researched “Charters and Consequences.”

The Torlakson commission has the chance to get the law right, which would benefit both public schools and charter schools.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Scandal

“School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice”

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2018 //
56

The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.

But now comes a new and welcome voice.

Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.

Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.

She writes:

“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.

“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.

“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.

“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.

“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.

“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.

“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”

“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.

“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.

“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.

“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Justice, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Gulen-Bay Tech Charter School in Trouble Again

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
21

Recently we learned that the principal of the Bay Tech Charter School in Oakland gave himself a generous severance package of $450,000, then left for Australia.

Bay Tech is a Gulen School, connected to the reclusive Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania while overseeing one of the largest charter chains in the U.S. You can tell a Gulen school by the disproportionate number of Tirkish people on its board and teaching staff. The repressive autocrat Erdogan in Turkey wants to extradite Gulen, claiming j
He fomented a failed rebellion against the government. Critics of Gulen believe he uses the money he extracts from his charter chain to subsidize his movement. I don’t know much about Turkish politics, but I wonder why Turkish citizens are taking control of American public schools, whose first obligation is to teach the duties of American citizenship.

California taxpayers are very generous indeed to those who work in the charter sector.

Now it turns out that the school has been forcing students to pay for their graduation gowns, which is illlegal, and requiring parents to buy tickets for the graduation ceremonies, which is also illegal.

You see, it’s simple. In California, laws are written to regulate public schools, not charter schools. The most powerful lobby in the state is the California Charter Schools Association, and it fights any regulation or accountability or even prohibition of conflicts of interest. And to top it off, Governor Jerry Brown vetoes any legislation that might hold charters accountable or block conflicts of interest. So charters are free not to hold open meetings, free to keep their records secret, free to give contracts to relatives, because Governor Brown protects them from transparency.

What a sad stain on an otherwise great legacy.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Gulen Charter Schools, Oakland, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Rightwing Shill Smears Teachers and Their Union

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2018 //
24

Tom Ultican formerly of Silicon Valley, now retired as a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has had it with the rightwingers who sit in air-conditioned offices and complain about teachers. And whine about their unions, who dare to defend them.

In this post, he eviscerates a jerk from a rightwing think-not tank and questions why this highly political organization has a tax-exempt status. We should all wonder why ALEC, the political arm of rightwingers and corporations, is also tax-exempt as if it were a charity, when it is a mean-spirited cabal intent on grinding down the lives and hopes of the 99%.

Ultican writes:

“The article by Edward Ring was a slanted hit piece intended to undermine support for public sector unions and teachers’ unions in particular. This is clearly a political document that has nothing to do with charitable giving, but anyone giving money to further this political agenda can claim a charitable deduction. That means as a citizen I am supporting the propagation of a political ideology I find abhorrent.

“Large giving to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or the Center for American Progress is political giving. It not only should be taxed; the details of the donations should be made available to the public. Much of the giving at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, etc. is clearly designed to promote a political point of view. That is not charity. That is politics. It does not or at least should not qualify for non-profit status.

“If we stop this tax cheating, we might see fewer of these baseless attack articles that divide people and communities.”

Stopping this theft of public dollars won’t happen during the Trump administration. Everyone around him, including the family, is stuffing their pockets as fast as possible. Not even Obama dared to challenge the perks of the far-right, like hitting a hornet’s nest.

Maybe, someday we will have an ethical federal government who fearlessly cleans up the IRS deductions for political bill mills.

Categories Accountability, California, Fraud, Lies, Teachers, Unions

California: How a Charter School Will Harm One Small Public School

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
10

California is a state where charters have gone wild.

Rick Hennessy, the part time superintendent of the small Twain Harte School district responds to parents who want to secede to create their own charter school that their action will damage the education of those left behind.


if the charter school is approved, the district will lose $250,000 in the 2019-20 school year and would have to look at the following budget cuts:

Eliminate one full time teacher

Eliminate all art instruction

Eliminate all music instruction

Eliminate the librarian

Eliminate all class trips

Eliminate school counselor

Eliminate purchases of classroom library books

Eliminate Safe School Ambassador

Eliminate Treehouse Program (addresses social adjustment for grades K-3)

The proposed charter school would also have a segregative impact, he writes.

Furthermore, the charter’s petition does not include providing lunches or transportation for their students. Any charter school petition is supposed to recruit or attract the same socio-economic student group that is enrolled in the regular district. Over 60 percent of Twain Harte students ride the bus as well as receive a free or reduced lunch. It seems that the charter petition is targeting middle class or higher families that can provide transportation up the hill; which would seem to rule out most of our current students.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Should Republican Billionaires Pick Democratic Candidates? Attention, Politico Morning Education.

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2018 //
47

In the education world, we have become accustomed to the intrusion of billionaires into local and state school board races, bundling money for candidates committed to privatizing—not helping—our public schools. The most prominent such group calls itself Democrats for Education Reform, but we have no way of knowing whether its contributors are Republicans or Democrats. Some of its most prominent members are billionaires who donate to both parties, depending on which candidate is likeliest to protect charter schools and low taxes.

This post in the Blog “Crooks & Liars” notes a broader phenomenon of Republican billionaires inserting their money into Democratic primaries to choose rightwing candidates.

I noted on Twitter and on this blog that Politico’s Morning Education recently published a lengthy interview with DFER spokesmen about where they plan to target their millions, which school board elections they plan to invade, without noting that DFER represents Wall Street and contains not a single educator in its midst. Politico didn’t bother to question why hedge fund managers in New York and Connecticut are swaying elections in Colorado and California. Nor did they point out that DFER was censured by the Democratic parties in both states, which said they stop calling themselves Democrats because they represent corporate interests. I don’t know nor does Politico whether DFER is actually a Republican front group with one or two show Democrats.

Politico Morning Education has NEVER interviewed a critic of Corporate Reform, has NEVER discussed the distorting effect of outside money bundled by hedge funders on state and local school board elections. Why do the Waltons—a fiercely anti-union, anti-public school family of billionaires—invest in school board elections across the nation? Why is this story NEVER reported by Politico? Why do they keep hands off the billionaires intent on privatizing public schools?

Conversely, why has Politico never seen fit to interview public school supporters other than National Union leaders? Why have they never interviewed Carol Burris or Anthony Cody or Julian Vasquez Heilig or Jesse Hagopian or the BATS?

When the Network for Public Education released a carefully researched 50-State report ranking states on their support for public schools, Politico did not consider it worthy of even a mention, let alone a paragraph with a link to the report.

What gives at Politico Morning Education?

Categories Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Colorado, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Reform

California: Charter School Growth Slowing After a Quarter Century of Expansion

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
16

Is the air coming out of the charter school bubble?

Are parents tired of seeing their children attend faux schools in shopping malls or schools that open and close like day lilies?

California has been the Golden State for charter schools until now, but the fever is subsiding.

Maybe it was the impact of the scandals, the waste, fraud and abuse.

After a quarter century of steady expansion, the rate of growth for charter schools in California has slowed to a crawl over the past five years.

During the just completed school year, the number of charter schools grew by a mere 1.6 percent — from 1,254 schools in 2016-17 to 1,275 in 2017-18. That was even lower than last year’s 1.9 percent growth, which set a record for the lowest rate of growth in at least two decades.

These sluggish rates of growth, mirrored by similar slowdowns nationally, present a sharp contrast to the double-digit rates of expansion of charter schools for most years since California approved its charter law in 1992.

Far outpacing every other state, California charter schools now enroll over 630,000 students, or 1 in 10 of the state’s public school students. The slowdown in their growth could increase competition among parents and students to get into the most sought-after charter schools and in general limit the choices that they have beyond traditional public schools. It is also stirring concerns among charter school advocates that the slowdown may represent a permanent feature of the California education landscape, not just a temporary pause.

The slowdown is accelerating at precisely the time President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are trying to expand education options for parents and children, which includes more charter schools, as well as tax-payer subsidies for private school tuition.

What is happening in California is being watched closely by national charter school advocates. “California is a place where you see charter schools in a wide variety of urban communities as well as in rural areas,” said Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “We don’t see that in every state.” A slowdown in California, he said, will have “a big impact on the national numbers (of charter schools), and given its size and diversity it is the place to look for lessons for why it is happening and how to jumpstart growth in California and across the country.”

Maybe the time for “jumpstarting growth” was a quarter century ago. Maybe that time is gone. Maybe parents are sick and tired of seeing their local public schools taken over by corporate chains.

Maybe the Gold Rush has panned out.

Categories California, Charter Schools

California: Report Finds Charters Neglect Local Control Obligations

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2018 //
11

For Immediate Release

August 1, 2018

Contact:
Duc Luu, Communications Manager, Public Advocates, 857-373-9118; dluu@publicadvocates.org
Rigel Spencer Massaro, Senior Staff Attorney, Public Advocates, 707-761-5672, rmassaro@publicadvocates.org

New Report Uncovers Systemic Failure by California Charter Schools
to Meet Local Control Obligations

SAN FRANCISCO—A new report by Public Advocates Inc. uncovers a massive failure on the part of California charter schools to be transparent about how they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to benefit high need students, as required by state law. The report also reveals disturbing trends about the availability of public documents and the ability of parents to exercise their legal rights to participate in charter school spending decisions as promised by California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) law. The report, which is the first systematic analysis of charter school Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) found critical financial and engagement information missing, unavailable, or incomplete at a shocking number of charter schools.

For example, not a single school analyzed for this report properly documented how it was increasing or improving services for high need students, services for which those charter schools received $48.6 million this past year. Even more concerning, two-thirds of that amount was completely unaccounted for. Statewide, charters receive over $900 million annually to increase or improve services for high need students.

“Charter schools are part of California’s public education system. They receive $3.4 billion in public dollars every year and they need to be held accountable for how they spend those funds, just like every other school,” said Senior Staff Attorney Rigel Spencer Massaro.

Public Advocates looked for LCAPs at 70 schools and systematically examined 43 schools in Oakland, Sacramento, Richmond, Los Angeles, and San Jose which had published LCAPs for the 2017-2018 school year. The report found that:

One-third of all charter schools examined had no LCAP online. These public documents were still missing after email requests to the school, its authorizer, and the County Office of Education
More than two-thirds of the state funds generated by high need students—over $30 million—were unaccounted for; of the $48.6 million these schools received specifically for high need students in 2017-2018, there was only documentation for $15.8 million in planned spending
Only 21% clearly measured how they engaged parents in school decision-making, and only 37% described how community engagement impacted their planning process
91% of charter schools examined serving 15% or more English learners did not post their LCAPs in a language other than English
Of the 12 Charter Management Organizations examined in the report and that manage 123 charter schools in multiple cities, 100% adopt LCAPs at a single meeting in a single location, with minimal public comment

Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, commented, “Public Advocates’ newly released report, Keeping the Promise of LCFF in Charter Schools, raises concerns about transparency and accountability in charter schools. The fact that Public Advocates could not get copies of some charter schools’ LCAPs despite multiple requests is beyond troubling. Parents and local communities cannot ensure that student achievement and needs are addressed if the LCAPs are not easily available. The State Legislature should close a loophole requiring traditional public schools, but not charter schools, to post LCAPs on a school’s website.”

Community engagement and transparency are pillars of California’s groundbreaking Local Control Funding Formula law and every parent has a right to know and participate in how their school is spending money.

Abadesa Rolon, a charter school parent in Richmond commented, “We need our charter schools to complete their LCAPs so parents can understand the goals, actions, progress and funding that support student success. I understand how my school is spending S&C funds, but that’s because I’ve asked a lot of questions. Other parents don’t know, because this information isn’t in our school’s LCAP.”

The report calls for expert oversight and improved support over charter school LCAPs, especially when it comes to transparency for funds designated to improve services for high need students. The report also recommends legislation that would hold charter schools to similar standards of transparency and engagement as public schools.

Click here for a copy of the report
Click here for a list of the charter schools examined for this report

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Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Reform
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