Sacramento Bee Editorial: Progress on charter schools is threatened

I realize that I am behind in my posting - as a local operator of six public charter schools I have been engrossed in the mad dash to the end of another school calendar year -  and now the 2010 -11 school year is celebrated and complete for us.  During my 'hiatus' I have been thinking and talking about the charter school movement and what I wanted to talk about here, to you. Then I opened up my SacBee Online and there it was succinctly voiced in the editorial attached below. I appreciate their voice (and their much larger readership) and hope it has some impact on those who make decisions.

Sacramento Bee Editorial/ Published: Tuesday, Jun. 14, 2011 - 12:00 am
(Page 10A) 
From the spate of anti-charter school legislation coming out of the state Assembly, you wouldn't know that California once was on the leading edge of the public charter school movement. In 1992, the state became the second in the country to enact charter school legislation. Today, with 910 charter schools, California has the most of any state. In the not-so-distant past, the state was praised by the Center for Education Reform for its "consistent improvements" to charter school law and its "highly equitable funding measures" for the schools.

My, how things have changed.

There's a notable increase in the volume – and nastiness – of anti-charter legislation. The aim seems to be to slow charter school growth by making life difficult for existing and potential charter school operators.

For example, Assembly Bill 401, by Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco, would limit the maximum number of charter schools to 1,450, with a sunset date of January 2017.

At the current average pace of 86 new charter schools a year, that cap would be reached before the sunset date. And since the growth in the number of charter schools has been accelerating, the cap would likely be reached much earlier than 2017. At a time when the Obama administration is urging states to get rid of arbitrary caps on charter schools, this would be a big step backward.

When the Senate Education Committee hears this bill on Wednesday, it should reject it, as it did a similar bill last year.

Across the nation, one of the aims of charter school law has been to offer flexibility from certain state and local rules to give schools the room to experiment. Assembly Bill 925, by Democratic Assemblyman Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens, would upend that by imposing on charter schools a host of labor laws regarding custodians and other school support staff – such as job classifications with defined duties, seniority rights, layoff rights, bumping rights. So much for flexibility.

Then there's Assembly Bill 440, resurrected from last year's session by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica. It would impose a gnarly mix of new renewal criteria on charter schools.

Districts could deny renewal if a charter school's demographics weren't comparable to the district overall – say, a school that primarily enrolls underserved African American students. And where current law requires that charter renewals be granted for five years, offering a measure of stability, this would allow charter renewals between one and five years.

Add to this uncertainty a painfully slow state bureaucracy, which has been trickling out funds at a snail's pace. State funds to reimburse charter schools for lease costs in low-income areas have gone to only 40 of 300 schools. And while the state last summer celebrated getting $300 million in federal charter school startup grant funds, the state has doled out money to only 20 schools, down from the usual 55 to 65 a year. Charter schools have complained bitterly, to no avail.

Gov. Jerry Brown, a charter school supporter who founded two charter schools in Oakland, should not have to expend political capital on this nonsense. California needs some legislative champions to reclaim the state's mantle as a charter school leader.
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