California’s war over charter schools rages on in court

Farmers vs. environmentalists clash over water allocations, employers vs. unions over wages and benefits, insurers vs. personal injury lawyers over liability, and hospitals vs. nurses over staffing requirements. They’re just a few of many perpetual skirmishes, often with multibillion-dollar stakes.

One of the more interesting — and most important, from the standpoint of its effect on children — is the never-ending war between the public education establishment and the charter school movement.

Simply put, charter school advocates contend that by doing away with many of the legal and regulatory mandates on conventional public schools, they can provide more effective instruction. But school boards, administrators and teachers’ unions see charters as parasitic competitors for students and attendance-based school money.

While charters have a legal right to exist and claim shares of school financing and sometimes occupy classrooms in public school sites, their rivals — particularly politically powerful unions — do what they can to limit charter expansion or even put existing charters out of business.

Last year, for instance, the California School Boards Association mounted a campaign to make it easier for local boards to reject applications for new charters. The legislation, Senate Bill 1380, made it to the Senate floor but garnered just 13 votes, way short of the 21 required.

Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest public school system with more than a half-million students, has been one of the most volatile arenas for the charter school battle. Control of its board — whose members are full-time officeholders — periodically shifts back and forth between those allied with United Teachers Los Angeles and other unions, and those who aren’t.

LAUSD, like California’s other urban districts, has been experiencing declining enrollment, which translates into declining amounts of state school aid that’s based primarily on attendance, thereby increasing the intensity of hostilities over money that the charters claim.

Last year, after union-backed candidates achieved a majority on the LAUSD board, it issued a new policy declaring that the district should “avoid” housing charters in 346 of the district’s school sites, thereby potentially evicting them.

The Charter School Association sued, contending that the policy violated state law that allows such co-housing arrangements, including a 2000 ballot measure, Proposition 39. That measure, which was mostly aimed at lowering the vote requirement for local school bond issues, also, as one analysis puts it, “requires each local K-12 school district to provide charter school facilities sufficient to accommodate the charter school’s students.”

The suit is now before Superior Court Judge Stephen Goorvitch, and the outcome seems to hinge on the disputed policy’s use of the word “avoid.” In his tentative ruling, Goorvitch wrote that “avoid” could be considered the same as “prohibit,” which then could render the policy illegal. The district’s attorney argued that “avoid” was not prohibitive but merely guidance.

The judge suggested the two sides discuss a compromise. But in the absence of a deal, Goorvitch told the lawyers that if he sides with the charters, the school board could counter by changing the disputed word to something less prescriptive. “I think this can be fixed,” Goorvitch said. “This may end up being a narrow and temporary victory for the petitioner.”

In other words, regardless of the suit’s outcome, it will be just another skirmish in a perpetual war.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.