Charter schools need reform. This proposal could kneecap them

Examples of the syndrome abound. There’s the perpetual jousting between personal injury attorneys and insurers over rules governing lawsuits, efforts by medical care providers to expand the scope of their practices while invading the turf of other practitioners, and the running battle between tribal casinos and card rooms over gambling games.

For the last three decades, California’s public education establishment — school boards and school unions, primarily — has waged political war against charter schools.

Charters are public schools but are exempt from many of the rules governing conventional schools. They enroll about 11% of California’s nearly 6 million public school kids, ranging from prekindergarten to 12th grade, and receive shares of the more than $100 billion that the state spends on public education each year.

Charter advocates say they respond to parents dissatisfied with the educations their children receive in traditional schools. Their critics say they enroll a narrow slice of the student pool and divert money better spent on improving traditional education.

The battles over charter schools are often waged at the local level, because charters must be sanctioned by local school boards. An epic war has been underway for years in Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second largest school system. It ebbs and flows, depending on whether unions or charter advocates control the school board after each election cycle.

The public education establishment, particularly its unions, is very influential in the Capitol and has pursued a steady stream of bills that make forming charters more difficult or attempt to impose restrictions on those already operating.

This year’s version is Assembly Bill 84, which has cleared the Assembly and is now pending in the Senate.

Backed by school boards and school unions, the measure purports to deal with scandals in charters that don’t offer classroom instruction but rather operate via the internet or other means.

Those scandals are real. The most notorious involved A3 Education, which had a network of 19 online charter schools. An investigation by the San Diego County district attorney’s office revealed that the system’s founders fraudulently obtained hundreds of millions of dollars. They were prosecuted and more than $200 million in purloined funds was recovered.

In response to A3 Education and other scandals, the state declared a moratorium on new nonclassroom charters and commissioned a study to determine which reforms are needed to guard against fraud.

AB 84 embraces many of the recommendations emerging from the study by the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team. But the bill goes further, with new accounting and operational processes that could make it more difficult for all kinds of charters to be formed or to function.

One provision — ignored in the analyses of the bill presented to legislators — would create an entirely new position of inspector general with very broad powers, housed in the state Department of Education, but appointed by the governor.

The co-authors of SB 84, Democratic Assemblymen Al Muratsuchi and Robert Garcia, contend that it’s needed to prevent future scandals such as A3 and allow the moratorium on nonclassroom charters to be lifted.

That’s valid as far as it goes. But it also would provide new tools that the education establishment could use to thwart new charters and make life more difficult for existing charters by imposing rules that mirror those for traditional schools.

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.