Just after the new school drop out figures were released on Wednesday, the Daily News ran an Op Ed by LAUSD School Board Member, Julie Korenstein who, in addition to her always conspicuously manicured fingernails is, I’m fairly sure, the only person holding public office in Los Angeles County who is still ratting their hair. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing; I’m just saying.)
Anyway, about the Op Ed: In it, Korenstein asks a number of questions and makes a bunch of fairly quarrelsome statements about charter schools–which, for the most part, seem to have much higher test scores and much lower dropout rates than their LAUSD-run equivalents, all of which Korenstein appears to see as some kind of unjust plot to make the district look bad.
So, just for the heck of it, I decided yank apart her Op Ed and address her points one at a time:
(WARNING: This is a teensy bit long, so those not similarly obsessed with the ongoing LAUSD/charter battle might want to simply skim the high points. Julie’s Op Ed is the stuff encased in the boxes.)
Why does the Los Angeles Unified School District have charter schools?
Maybe, because LAUSD has a dropout rate of between 33 and 50 percent, depending upon who’s doing the counting. And because, save for a few Westside and valley schools, its scores on the state’s standardized tests are consistently in the toilet. And so parents are freaking fed up?
In 1992, legislation created a pilot project for an innovative program of schools that were not restricted by all of the California Education Codes and would therefore allow more flexibility at the school site. In the first few years, there was a cap of 100 charter schools for the entire state. Shortly after that, there was new legislation to lift the cap and allow 100 new charter schools each and every year. By comparison, the state of New York allows only 100 charter schools for the entire state.
At the beginning, there was a sincere belief that this was a valuable experiment. But no one in their wildest dreams thought that within a few years there would be 147 charters in the LAUSD alone, with new ones added every year. Currently there are about 54,000 charter school students in the LAUSD geographical area.
Now why should this make any difference?
Because now 54,000 LA kids now have a shot at a better education?
Let’s begin with the loss of state ADA (average daily attendance) funds per child leaving LAUSD’s traditional schools to go to charter schools. The loss of funds to the district is approximately $300 million per year.
So? You also lost $300 million worth of students. The money follows the kid.
This is a loss to all of the children.
No, actually, it’s not. It’s a gain for the 54,000 who fled your sinking ships. But whatever.
This money could help the 680,000 students attending traditional schools. While the LAUSD may have fewer students to teach, only a few students leave each school, and the district still has to pay for staff and for the cost of maintaining the school facility.
Hmmm. Interesting point. Have you considered cutting back on the $157 million cost overrun your former superintendant signed off on for the architectural boondoggle you’re building downtown across from the cathedral? That’s more than half of your $300 mil right there. And for more places to find money, try looking at Admiral Brewer’s half-million buck PR Gate.
OR…. what about that nice $9.6 million you gave the idiots who sold you the preposterously broken $132 million payroll system because, after they broke the thing, they convinced you they needed another nearly $10 mil to fix it.
OR, here’s a really good idea, cut back on your insane number of administrators, consultants and multi-million dollar pre-packaged programs (that the district loves to purchase, institute with lots of costly teacher training, and then toss every two years) and spend more of the district’s budget (which is, to remind you, higher than that of the entire city of Los Angeles) on the…you know….schools.
Each charter has its own board of directors that makes all the decisions for the school.
That’s bad????
The LAUSD Board of Education has no decision-making power over charters.
News flash Julie, I think that’s kinda the point.
The LAUSD charters the school and can take the charter away or renew it, but the LAUSD does not run the charter school.
Thank you, Jesus.
Charters are now a money-making endeavor.
Oh, really. Got anything to back up that statement? As we like to say in English composition class: Be specific, cite examples, develop your theme. Most charters I know are doing more with less, and ain’t nobody getting rich, that’s for damn sure.
There are some companies that run multiple charter schools, as many as 18 charter schools in LAUSD alone.
Oh, no. The horror. And by SOME companies, you wouldn’t mean Green Dot, would you?
Green Dot presently has 12 charter schools and will have 20 after the Locke High School conversion this September. Julie, you opposed the Green Dot/Locke conversion although the majority of tenured teachers at Locke signed a petition in favor of it.
It is, of course, the grand experiment. But thus far the signs are positive. There is a new mood on campus. And on the first day of summer school, 680 kids showed up, all in their new school uniforms and ready to go. In September that 680 students will expand to over 2000. It’ll be challenging. But, according to the state’s own figures, under LAUD’s management, Locke has a 41% graduation rate, a 50.9% dropout rates and test scores that are downright scary. So, I think we can safely say there’s nowhere to go but up.
In addition, an entire cottage industry of charter school supply companies and management organizations now feeds off California taxpayers.
HA-HA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ah-ahahahahahahahhaha!!!!!!!!! Let’s review: charter schools buy from a “cottage industry” of suppliers. While LAUSD buys from a multi-billion dollar industry of program and administrative suppliers—like those fun folks who did your payroll. Seriously, Julie, I got to give it to you for your really charming sense of humor.
Charter schools most often do not have as many special-education students as traditional schools. This is significant because when test scores are compared between charter and traditional schools, charters may look like they are doing better, but the reality is they have far fewer learning-disabled students.
Look. Here you’ve got a marginal point. But it’s very marginal. Mainstreamed learning disabled kids are factored into test scores. Some charters have a significant percentage of learning disabled kids, others do not. But the special ed factor does not account for the large gaps in scores between the successful charters and the district high schools serving the same student population. Moreover, how do you account for the difference in dropout rates? Do you blame the catastrophic dropout figures on special ed kids too? And, while we’re on the subject, I’ve seen multiple instances in which learning disabled students were crashing and burning at LAUSD middle schools, and then turned around and thrived at LA charter high schools.
Also, when charters are compared to traditional public schools, charters have fewer students – often no more than 500 – and are compared to traditional schools with 3,000 or 4,000 students. Again, skewing the scores.
Uh, yeah. Small schools seem to be better for kids. So, your point would be exactly….?
Anyone could choose 300 or 400 students from any large school in the LAUSD and come up with similar scores, especially if selecting the best students.
Oh, please. Granted, as with magnets, there is a self selecting aspect to the charter school population. The fact that the kid applied at all means that somebody in the family had to have it somewhat together. Charters rarely get homeless kids, or kids from foster families. But to say that the big, successful charter groups cherry pick kids, just isn’t true.
Green Dot does their selection through a random lottery. I’ve seen it. Have you? If not, I suggest you show up at the next one. It’s an experience. You will watch as hundreds and hundreds of parents and kids sit for hours in a big meeting room, their expressions desperate and painfully hopeful, as they wait while the numbers are picked from a spinning basket and called.
Furthermore, few charters reveal how well their students did when in traditional schools. We don’t really know if they improved as a result of their charter-school education.
Actually we do. We have plenty of evidence, both quantitative and qualitative. And the parents of those kids whose academic lives have been changed inevitably show up at your school board meetings whenever there’s a new fight to get another charter school approved. Haven’t you been listening to those parents? Evidently not.
It is time to put politics aside and look at what is good for all of the children, not just a few. At present, the charter experiment does not address the needs of all of the children.
Okay, it is true, the charters can only address the needs of the students who go to their schools. The rest are stuck with y’all. It sucks. But, yeah, that’s how it works.
Should taxpayers’ money be used in this way?
Well, the successful charters have been shown to get a bigger bang for the ADA buck, so I’m guessing if you asked the average taxpayer about the issue, they’d feel just dandy about that use of money. Also, big education doners like Bill and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad seem to think their money is better spent on charters. So what does that tell you?
And, hey, while we’re on the subject, how do you think the voters will feel when they learn that $157 million of their bond money was spent on a….friggin’ toboggan run, or whatever it is you call that ludicrous thing that looms over the 101 Freeway?
On the other hand, the LAUSD has had a phenomenal magnet education program for years. We should be expanding existing magnets as well as adding more. Magnet schools are the original choice program, benefiting thousands of children.
Lovely idea. And, for years, we really, really, really hoped the district would take it upon itself to do exactly that. But it didn’t— as was noted in last spring’s 115-page diagnostic report that the Admiral ordered up for $350,000. When the district actually did something right, as with the magnets, which are LAUSD’s jewels, the report said that, over and over, the district failed to examine and replicate those successes.
I saw it up close with the Film and Theater Academy that started at Jefferson High School. A smart, dedicated LAUSD teacher started an innovative program within a large, failing high school. Although FTA got problem kids dumped on them, test scores skyrocketed during the first year….and kids who had previously hated school, were suddenly happy and succeeding, and the already studious kids were now shooting for the moon (and believing the moon could be theirs). And so what did LAUSD do in response to this resounding and heartening success? Offer FTA additional support? Try to expand or replicate it? Nope. They tried to kill the program. As a consequence, Jefferson’s Film and Theater Academy is now a Green Dot school.
It is imperative that we as educators learn from one another, but also understand that, although some of the charter school students may have a good educational experience, there will be many who will not.
Well, sure. As in life. But, thus far a higher percentage of charter students seem to be having a good experience than their LAUSD counterparts. Certainly, you have some very fine schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But too many of your schools are failing kids at a tragic and unforgiveable rate. Yet despite years of promises, little has changed. So kids and their parents are jumping ship and attending (or in some cases, opening) charter schools. And when they do, those kids—on average—do better. It’s that simple.
What will be the long-range impact on their lives?
Um…..Their lives will be better?
Good post, Celeste. I read most of and agreed with everything that I read.
Someone needs to discuss something else with Julie K. There was this woman that a friend told me about who was related to an uncle of a friend of that friend, and this is what happened to her. She had a beehive hairdo that she kept up by teasing and ratting it every day. One day she became very sick and died. They determined the cause of death was from a Black Widow spider bite, and found that there was a spider nest in her hair! True story.
Unfortunately Celeste the evidence doesn’t support your thesis. See recent studies that show achievement levels in chater schools are roughly the same as in regular public schools.
And, again, may i point out that suburban schools (non-charter) doe significantly better which is why you will never see vouchers passed on any ballot (just rejected in Utah!) since parents worry about diverting funds from their schools – which work just fine for them.
Urban schools have unique problems and charters or vouchers are not the “magic bullets” some think they are. Again, see Bob Sommerby’s pieces on Wendy Kopp and “Teach for America” in his archives at http://www.dailyhowler.com
You touch on Korenstein’s argument that the success of charters is primarily thanks to creaming – taking the self-selecting group who tends to be better motivated (especially in terms of parental involvement) than the average kid. Well, that may only be a temporary feature of charter schools. While some charter schools are focusing just on the basic tasks of offering a better education to LA kids who are otherwise stucking in lousy public schools, there are new schools that are focusing on specialized groups.
For example, New Village Charter School, which is still very much a work in progress, offers a semi-specialized education, integrating pregnant and parenting teens (many from St. Anne’s – which means they are foster kids as well) with other girls from the community. It’s a different model from the standard charter and it’s too soon to say whether or not it will be a success but the efforts at targeting a specific population that often gets lost in the public school system is laudable. I’m suspect as charters continue to grow and face less pressure to prove themselves as a viable enterprise we’ll see more charter schools that are focusing on serving kids with the most to overcome.
Good post, Celeste. Yes, Julie K’s retro ideas on education are in keeping with the era when her hair was in style — in Texas. Her argument and those who oppose charters as “taking away space” and per-pupil funding from schools under LAUSD’s control is always to argue that LAUSD has to take the worst students as well as the ones more likely to succeed, just by virtue of the fact that their parents care enough to organize and contribute their time and energy to charters, often from the ground up. Well, too bad — a parent’s obligation is what’s best for their kids, not to fill LAUSD with warm bodies to maximize revenue that LAUSD can spend and often waste. Julie has been the most vociferous opponent on the Board of charters.
However, many charters are as multi-cultural as they can be, the only difference being more personally committed parents: e.g., LEAP Charter in Chatsworth, forced to close this summer after a failed attempt to scare up funds to reopen and move out of a rented warehouse=type facility, had kids from a broad socio-economic strata including your illegal immigrants (I say “your” to rib you a bit), yet almost all the kids did as well as those in homogenously affluent areas and were accepted to college.
Even more striking, the way LAUSD forced the West Valley Charter Academy and others like it (you know and blogged about it) to close this year because as they admitted, they wanted those kids in regular schools to return to non-charters so that Julie and her buds could collect the bounty, er, per student fees instead of letting them go to WV — which everyone agrees, did an amazing job turning kids “at risk” and often kicked out of other schools, into good students with a solid work ethic. As you know, they were required to maintain a high GPA plus hold down a p/t job. Now they’ll be back in regular school, failing again, ending up on the streets maybe in gangs. There couldn’t possibly have been a cheaper and better “gang prevention” program, but it’s over thanks to the Julie Korensteins.
The only thing I’ll correct you on (again) is lumping “the Westside” in with the “West Valley” when it comes to having schools that score much higher than average overall. Other than Pali High you mention in the stats, there are NO other schools. Venice High, by contrast, was used by the ult-old-school Council leftie Bill Rosendahl in Council, as his argument FOR Janice Hahn’s property tax on homeowners for “her” and Tony Cardenas’ gang intervention programs: he used as an example “a kid called Adam, a white boy, who was thrust into Venice High,” and then was torn between black and brown gangs, “and didn’t know where to go in all that craziness,” until his family moved to Lancaster. (Where, ironically, a lot of those brown and black families have been moving as well, and taking the gang problems etc. with them.) This bullying of white kids from those buses in starts in middle schools (like Emerson, in the heart of Westwood, which is almost all ethnic and bused in, 3/4 on Poverty Assistance), and many elementary. But at least the neighborhood around Emerson is still pristine, so those kids are the lucky ones: people in upmarket Coldwater Canyon/ BHPO, Doheny Estates, Sunset Plaza etc., where homes go in the millions, are assigned to Fairfax High and middle and elem. schools they wouldn’t set foot visiting. (Scream at them all you want for not “caring” about LAUSD.)
Even Pali High worries lots of people because so many students are bused in — by one parent’s account, some 2 dozen buses. They say the boys bully the white kids, the girls do drugs in the bathrooms and the overall “culture” they bring has forced many into private schools. (Despite this, white kids living in the district are no longer even guaranteed admission to Revere Middle or Pali High, due to preference for diversity permits. When that policy went out a couple years ago, there was a lot of angry letter writing and blogging by parents in the local westside papers, you can check it out or confirm with LAUSD.)
The West Valley, on the other hand DOES have the best schools, and gets back the closest to what they pay into the system.
“the Daily News ran an Op Ed by LAUSD School Board Member, Julie Korenstein who, in addition to her always conspicuously manicured fingernails is, I’m fairly sure, the only person holding public office in Los Angeles County who is still ratting their hair.”
Good post, Celeste. Yes, Julie K’s retro ideas on education are in keeping with the era when her hair was in style  in Texas.
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I am going to bet that Julie Korenstein makes some radical changes and reforms after reading all these scathing comments about the LAUSD, that bee-hive Texas hair will be expelled.
WBC, you’re quite right to flag my erroneous lumping (Westside, West Valley). Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll keep an eye on that for the future.
And, yeah, even Pali has all kinds of issues. Ditto Revere. (I could add my complaint list to yours, trust me.)