Education’s
Charter
School Program
(CSP) wasted more
than a billion dollars on charter schools that never opened or opened
for a very brief period before closing, according to two
reports
published by the Network
for Public Education
(NPE) in 2019. CSP has provided close
to $4 billion
in seed funding to charter schools since
1995,
but lax oversight of funds has resulted in a 37
percent national failure rate.
The three
states
that wasted the most funds on charter schools are Louisiana (48
percent failure rate, $27 million lost), Florida (37 percent failure
rate, $34 million lost), and, with the “most astounding loss,”
California (37 percent failure rate, nearly $102 million lost).
As a former
charter school teacher in Los Angeles, I saw federal dollars being
wasted on dysfunctional schools that never should have been started
in the first place. Westchester Secondary Charter School, the school
where I taught in the 2016-2017 academic year, was launched with a
$375,000
CSP grant.
It opened in September 2013 and closed
in June 2017. The
Los Angeles County Office of Education
(LACOE) cited several concerns in its detailed rejection
of the school’s charter renewal petition including an “unsound
educational program,” a failure to “meet its enrollment
projections,” “the lack of appropriate school
facilities,” “issues related to special education,”
and a discipline program that may cause “physical, educational,
or psychological harm to the affected pupils.”
While I was
teaching at Westchester Secondary Charter School, City High School -
a charter that received a $575,000
CSP grant
and was also struggling with facility and enrollment issues - closed
“a month into its second year,” according
to the Los
Angeles Times.
Soon after, in September 2016, Westchester Secondary Charter School
took in a few of its 116 students, and my colleagues and I embarked
on the challenging task of catching them up when they’d already
missed a month of instruction and yearned to be with their friends
and teachers.
In
hindsight, it seems that the public dollars wasted on these schools
and the personal angst they caused to teachers, students, and parents
should have been avoided with a more rigorous authorization process
for the disbursement of CSP funds.
Enrollment
issues were not exclusive to Westchester and City High - most
charters in Los Angeles were under-enrolled
because there were just too many of them. California has more
charter schools than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified
School District (LAUSD) has more
charter schools than any other district in the country, leading to
what the Washington
Post’s
Valerie Strauss described in 2016 as “the
Wild West“
of the charter sector.
When
Westchester was shut down, it was “under-enrolled by more than
26 percent from the projection in its current [2016-2017] charter,
and more than 58 percent below the enrollment target in the original
charter,” according to LACOE’s
rejection document.
The under-enrollment was partially caused by facility challenges: the
school had bounced around from one private building to another,
finally co-locating
with a public school in South Los Angeles, miles from its desired
location on the Westside. Westchester’s original petition had
predicted an enrollment
of 525 students by the 2016-17 school year, but only 220 students
were actually registered. In October 2016, the principal laid
off
a sixth-grade teacher because the grade was under-enrolled, according
to an email she sent to families. Because funding
was tied to enrollment,
our school was fiscally unstable, leading to students, faculty and
staff worrying that we could close at any minute.
The NPE has
raised questions not only about the reckless
disbursement
of federal funds by the CSP, but also about the careless charter
school authorization
process
in states like California. In a 2019 report, “Examining
California’s Charter School Appeals Process,”
the policy and research center In
the Public Interest
pointed out that the Los Angeles County Board of Education approved
Westchester’s petition in 2012, in the same month that LAUSD
unanimously denied it - despite the board’s own concerns about
its “proposed special education program, student outcome
measures, and plan to reflect the student demographics of the Los
Angeles Unified School District.”
The Los
Angeles County Board of Education’s subsequent denial
of Westchester’s renewal petition in 2017 proved that their
initial concerns were justified.
Westchester
was not only a failed business venture; it was also an unsound
investment academically.
Referring to a
review of Westchester’s California
Assessment of Student Performance and Progress
(CAASPP) results in certain subjects for 2015 and 2016, LACOE noted
that the CAASPP “data does not show progress for all groups of
pupils served by the school.” Specifically, decreases in math
achievement were seen “in each numerically significant
subgroup: Economically disadvantaged students dropped in Math from 22
percent met or exceeded to 12 percent; Hispanic or Latino students
decreased in Math proficiency from 20 percent Met or Exceeded
Standards to 10 percent; and Black or African American students
decreased in proficiency from 19 percent met or exceeded to 17
percent.”
In English
Language Arts (ELA), while economically disadvantaged and Hispanic or
Latino students showed increased proficiency, for Black or African
American Students, who made up 48 percent of the student population
at Westchester, the proficiency decreased “from 29 percent Met
or Exceeded Standards to 25 percent,” according
to
LACOE.
Beyond test
scores, the academic program at Westchester was probably harmful to
its most vulnerable students, LACOE’s rejection document
suggested.
“In
2014, Westchester received a complaint from the Office
of Administrative Hearings
(OAH) and in 2015, from the Office
for Civil Rights
(OCR) for issues related to special education,” LACOE noted.
In the 2015-2016 academic year, LACOE’s rejection went
on to say,
the special education teacher, who was non-credentialed, had a
caseload of 31 students, which exceeded the 28-student legal
limit.
While LACOE did not point out that the school hired a new special
education teacher in the 2016-17 school year and saddled
him with 43 students, exceeding the legal limit even more flagrantly,
it did note
that the school was overdue
on nine Individual
Education Plans (IEPs),
making it non-compliant on special education requirements.
LACOE also
took to task Westchester suspension policy, noting
that one student had been suspended 18 times in six months.
Furthermore, “A student at Westchester is more than 25 times
more likely to get suspended than a student within Westchester’s
sponsoring district of LAUSD.”
Additionally,
LACOE criticized
Westchester’s high student and teacher attrition rates, the
school’s not meeting the academic needs of English
learners,
and its noncompliance with the transparency and open meetings
required by the Brown
Act.
Westchester
Secondary Charter School and City High School are just two of many
CSP recipients in California that closed
shortly after opening or pocketed the seed money and never opened at
all, wasting a statewide total of nearly $102 million - part of the
over $1 billion squandered
overall.
Stories like
these are why the federal government might think long and hard before
considering funding new charter schools. As NPE’s two
reports
on the CSP and my own experience demonstrate, the CSP program has
financed schools that are dysfunctional, wasteful, and don’t
properly serve disadvantaged students.
Until
Congress issues a moratorium on the CSP, a big chunk of federal
funding will continue to be directed to charter schools that educate
just 6
percent
of students - while the
public schools that serve the vast majority of American children
and desperately need more support and resources continue to have
their funding and enrollment undercut.
This
article was produced by Our
Schools.
a
project of The Independent Media Institute.
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