Written by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, the report will be released in three sections. The first one, Decline, documents the startling halt in charter school growth. Once heralded as the salvation of American education, charter schools are no longer growing. Despite the lack of demand for new charters, the Trump administration recently increased the annual appropriation to the federal Charter Schools Program from $440 million every year to $500 million a year.
The report will be released in three parts: Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs. This is the first part.
Burris begins:
In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Created and led by experienced teachers, it was designed as an alternative school for students struggling in traditional settings. With just 53 students, City Academy embodied the original vision for charter schools: small, teacher-run schools within public districts that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids.
When successful, those strategies would inform and strengthen public education as a whole.
That was the idea supported by American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker in 1988.
But by the early 1990s, Shanker had become disillusioned. As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent.
He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”
His warning proved prophetic. In the decades since, real estate investors, for-profit management companies, and corporate charter chains have taken over what began as teacher-led experiments. Today, more than fifty charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $13 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.
During the Obama years, federal initiatives like Race to the Top fueled charter expansion with strong bipartisan support. But that coalition has since un-raveled. While Republican enthusiasm for any alternative to public education— charters, vouchers, homeschools — has surged, Democratic support has eroded, particularly as concerns grow over transparency, equity, and privatization.
Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed.
For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized homeschools.
This report, released in three parts — Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs —examines the trajectory of the charter school movement. It contrasts the promise of its early days with its complex, often troubling reality today.
As the charter experiment enters its fourth decade, the question is no longer what charter schools were meant to be — but whether they can still be reformed in order to serve the public good….
Burris questions why the federal government–which claims to be cutting costs and cutting unnecessary programs–continues to send $500 million every year to a sector that is not growing and does not need the money. DOGE eliminated most employees of the U.S. Department of Wducation but left the federal Charter Schools Program untouched.
The charter school sector stands at a critical juncture. Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity, it is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures — often sudden and disruptive— are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.
As the data show, under-enrollment is the primary driver of failure. There is no crisis of unmet demand. Hundreds of charter schools, according to NCES data, can’t fill even a single classroom. The frequently cited “million-student waitlist” has been thoroughly debunked, yet continues to be invoked to justify ever-increasing taxpayer support.
Meanwhile, mega-charters and online schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy siphon vast sums of public dollars while delivering dismal academic outcomes. Others, like Highlands Community Charter School, have defrauded taxpayers and exploited students under the guise of second chances.
With enrollment stagnating and oversight failing, taxpayers should ask: Why are we continuing to fund with federal dollars an expansion that isn’t happening? It is time for Congress and the Department of Education to reassess the Charter Schools Program. Federal dollars should no longer subsidize a shrinking and troubled sector. Instead, they must be redirected toward accountable, transparent, and student-centered public education.
Part II of this report, Disillusionment, to be published this fall, will further explain the reasons behind the sector’s decline.
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Colorado Skies Academy, a Centennial-based charter school with a focus on aviation and aerospace education, abruptly announced its closure on Friday, just 16 days before the start of the school year.
The announcement, which came in an email on Friday at 8:17 p.m., leaves parents scrambling to find alternative schools for their children.
The school cited financial challenges as the reason for the immediate closure. A spokeswoman for the Colorado Charter School Institute, which serves as the school’s authorizer, said there were “unanticipated financial developments” over the summer which, caused the school’s viability to “rapidly deteriorate.”
CSI acknowledged the sudden closure was not ideal, but said it supported the board’s decision to close now, rather risk closing mid-school year which would have been more challenging.
Still, the timing of the announcement has particularly frustrated parents, who received the closure notice hours after the school posted on Facebook about an upcoming back-to-school night event.
“They posted in the morning, come join us for back-to-school night. Then they send an email in the evening saying sorry, there’s gonna be no school at all,” parent Erin Hess said. Her son Connor was set to attend sixth grade at the 6-8 school.
The Charter Trap: How Texas’s Approval System Fuels Inequity in Public Education
This feature investigates how Texas’s charter school approval system — combined with growing voucher programs — is reshaping public education funding, access, and accountability. Drawing on insights from State Board of Education Member Dr. Tiffany Clark, the piece explores how state policies are accelerating the growth of charter schools while defunding traditional public districts, particularly those serving Black and Latino students. It highlights the unequal standards between public and charter schools, the impact of school closures, and the erosion of community voice in education policy. As public schools work to innovate under pressure, the state continues to shift resources toward less regulated alternatives — raising urgent questions about equity, transparency, and the future of public education in Texas.
In Texas, the promise of school choice has become a defining feature of the state’s education strategy. Charter schools are marketed as innovative alternatives to traditional public schools, especially in districts that serve predominantly Black and Latino students. But the way these charters are approved, and who ultimately benefits, reveals a system riddled with disparities.
Every year, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) reviews applications from prospective charter school operators. Those that make it through the cumbersome process are recommended to the State Board of Education (SBOE), which votes to approve or deny the applications. While this process is meant to support innovation and improve outcomes, the evidence suggests that it is doing the opposite in many communities.
We are approving the same systems that have failed our students over and over again. DR. TIFFANY CLARK, SBOE MEMBER DISTRICT 13
One of the clearest voices highlighting these disparities is State Board of Education member Dr. Tiffany Clark, representing District 13, which includes parts of Dallas and Tarrant counties. Earlier this month, Dr. Clark released a public letter explaining her decision to vote against two new charter proposals in her district. In her letter, she pointed to the approval of charter schools with ties to historically underperforming models, often led by alumni of the same charter incubator programs, such as Building Excellent Schools (BES).
In an interview with Dallas Weekly, Dr. Clark described how charter applicants are not required to have experience as superintendents or demonstrate a successful track record with similar student populations. “You don’t need to be a certified superintendent to apply,” she said. “You just need a compelling idea. There’s no pilot requirement. The model hasn’t had to prove itself in Texas or in similar communities.”
Her concerns are not isolated. They point to broader issues in the state’s charter school authorization process, particularly regarding performance, equity, and accountability. According to the Texas AFT, charter schools in Texas have a 30-34% closure rate. Worse, most of these closures occur within five years of opening. Some have even closed during the school year, leaving parents and students scrambling to find new options.
A Troubling Track Record
Of the 21 charter schools approved between 2016 and 2021, 17 received D or F accountability ratings by 2023. Many of these schools were launched by leaders trained through the same national pipelines, like the Building Excellent Schools (BES) program, that continue to produce new charter applicants in Texas, often with limited changes to their model.
Despite this underperformance, state approval rates remain high. In many cases, new charter proposals are approved without substantial evidence that the academic model works or that the leadership team has the experience to run a successful school.
Financial Fallout for Public Schools
The impact on traditional school districts is severe. Fort Worth ISD, for example, has lost more than $635 million in state funding and over 20% of its student population in the past five years. Dallas ISD has experienced an even greater loss of revenue (approximately $1.7 billion) over the same period. This decline is directly linked to students transferring to charter schools. The result: public school closures, staffing reductions, and diminished services for the students who remain.
When a neighborhood school closes, it often creates more barriers for families rather than expanding their choices. Many charter schools do not provide transportation, leaving parents, especially those working multiple jobs, with limited options. The vision of equitable access is undermined when choice is only accessible to families with time, resources, or flexibility.
The situation is further complicated by the state’s growing push for private school vouchers. These programs allow families to use public funds for private tuition, even though private schools are not required to accept all students, provide transportation, or meet the same accountability standards as public schools. For districts already losing enrollment to charters, the addition of vouchers creates yet another drain on funding, with even fewer protections for equity or transparency. It adds another layer to a system in which public schools, especially those in historically under-resourced communities, are expected to serve every child, but are continually shortchanged by state policy.
Two Systems, Two Standards
As Texas accelerates its charter school approvals, public schools, especially in urban districts like Dallas ISD and Fort Worth ISD, are being forced to do more with less. While many of these districts have launched dual-language academies, early college programs, STEM pathways, and arts-focused schools to meet family demand, they continue to face declining enrollment and shrinking budgets as students are siphoned off by charters. This drain leads to real-world consequences: campus closures, longer commutes for families, and a loss of critical resources, particularly for students with disabilities, English learners, and low-income communities.
Charters, by contrast, are not held to the same accountability standards. In fact, more charter schools have their operating licenses revoked than the number approved each year. But until then, they can cap enrollment, lack transportation, and often underserve or under-identify special education students, yet they receive public funding with fewer regulatory obligations. Public schools must serve every student who walks through their doors. Charters do not. And as the state continues to invest in new charters while underfunding existing public systems, it is creating two separate and unequal school systems, one with oversight, obligation, and community accountability, and one without.
Approval Without Accountability
Charter schools in Texas operate with significantly fewer accountability measures than their public counterparts. Their boards are not elected. Their meetings are not required to be public. They can expand without reapplying or justifying need. If a campus underperforms, it can take up to three years before the state considers intervention, and even then, it’s typically the individual campus that’s closed, not the entire charter network.
Moreover, schools labeled as “high-performing entities” in other states are often allowed to skip critical parts of the approval process, such as interviews or community review. But success in Florida or Arizona doesn’t guarantee results in Fort Worth or Dallas. Without a clear performance baseline or pilot requirement, the state risks importing models that are unfit for the local context.
A Call for Systemic Change
Dr. Clark advocates for more rigorous standards in charter school approvals, including requiring pilot programs, stronger oversight of operator qualifications, and elevating community input through impact statements.
She also emphasized the importance of transparency around which charter entities are being approved and why. “We can’t keep approving ideas. We need to approve proven solutions, especially when our most vulnerable students are involved,” she said.
Her perspective underscores the need for the SBOE and TEA to be more deliberate in assessing not only whether a proposed school is innovative, but whether it is likely to succeed where others have failed.
We can’t keep approving ideas. We need to approve proven solutions, especially when our most vulnerable students are involved.
According to Dr. Clark, Texas’s current charter approval system claims to promote equity and access, but its structure too often reinforces the opposite. Without stronger performance standards, leadership requirements, and accountability mechanisms, the state risks continuing to approve underperforming schools at the expense of public education.
Community voices, particularly in Black and Latino neighborhoods, deserve to be at the center of education policy decisions, not on the sidelines. If school choice is to be more than a slogan, it must come with real transparency, proven outcomes, and respect for the public systems already serving our children.
Meanwhile, public schools across Texas are already evolving, expanding STEM tracks, dual-language programs, and career pathways to meet diverse student needs. Yet instead of supporting these systems, the state continues to siphon funding away and invest in charter operators with unproven records. The result is a two-tiered system where innovation is rewarded only when it comes from outside the public sector.
Until that changes, students of color will continue to bear the weight of a policy agenda that undercuts the very schools built to serve them.
A teacher and students at Aspire Inskeep Academy in Los Angeles.
Courtesy: Aspire Public Schools
In times of crisis, we should be looking for ways to help, not hinder. But in California, the inequities in public school education funding are only deepening the crisis for too many students.
On top of the devastating social-emotional and academic effects of the pandemic, our communities have been dealing with widespread staffing challenges, culture wars and frequent unfair attacks on educators. And in cities across California, projections suggest that public school enrollment will continue to drop — creating a crisis for practically all schools across the state.
Public charter schools face all of these challenges and more. At Aspire Public Schools, a charter school network serving more than 15,000 students in 36 schools across the state, our student population is more than 85% Black and Latino, and the vast majority of our students are experiencing poverty. Yet since the day we were founded, we’ve been forced to get creative with limited resources: Aspire students — like all public charter school students in California — receive less funding than their peers in traditional public schools.
According to new research from the University of Arkansas, the problem remains severe. In the 2019-20 school year, Los Angeles public charter school students received $5,226 less per-pupil funding than their counterparts in traditional public schools. In Oakland, the gap is even larger, at $7,103. This is driven by a lack of public funding. In both cities, public charter schools receive less local, state and federal funding than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
Why? While both public charters and traditional public schools receive the same amount of base funding under California’s Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, that doesn’t mean the total funding is equal. One reason for this is that schools receive additional funding for higher-need student categories and for higher concentrations of students in those categories, known as “concentration grants.” However, charter school concentration grant amounts are capped based on the average student demographics for the district in which they reside. This means that public charters are, in effect, penalized for serving a greater share of high-need students than their district. There are also a number of local, state and federal funding streams that are only accessible to traditional public schools —for instance, voter-approved local funding for operations or capital projects.
I’m not writing this to complain. We are honored to serve our school communities and our wonderful, talented scholars. It’s hard work, but unequal funding makes it harder. The more time we have to spend fighting tooth and nail for basic resources, the less we can spend educating California’s next generation. Our scholars are the same students whom politicians claim to want to support, especially in the wake of the pandemic, but they are consistently left out because they and their families made the choice to attend a public charter school. Elected officials frequently speak about the importance of equity, and we at Aspire couldn’t agree more. But equity means all students getting what they need — and Aspire schools (as well as many other public charter schools) serve large numbers of historically marginalized students.
This challenge is nothing new. If you talk to charter leaders across California, they’ll all tell you a similar story. Due to this systemic funding deficit, we have had no choice but to try to raise philanthropic dollars to fill critical funding gaps. But that is often turned into an attack against us, with critics saying that public charter schools are bankrolled by private investors. That is simply untrue. Trust me — I would love nothing more than to be able to operate our schools without fundraising. But it’s just not an option.
And new challenges often emerge. Just two years ago we made the choice to go to Sacramento to advocate for all public charter students to fight against legislation that would have penalized charter schools — and not traditional public schools — for following the state’s guidelines for quarantining students who were exposed to Covid-19. While we were able to win that fight, it is illustrative of the larger issue: Charter students are treated as less than others.
But here’s the thing: Despite these challenges, charter schools have been able to accomplish so much. According to new research from the CREDO Institute at Stanford University, California charter students have gained the equivalent of 11 days of reading and four days of math compared with similar students in traditional public schools. Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty had even larger gains. At Aspire specifically, we were proud to have met CREDO’s “gap-busting” criteria in both reading and math, recognizing our ability to reduce opportunity gaps at scale.
So many of our students are carrying so much. They are talented and resilient, and they work hard to achieve their goals. We believe in them, and we tell them that every day.
But this funding gap tells them something different — that because they happen to attend a charter school, they matter less. It’s time that education leaders put childish politics aside and focus on giving all of our kids what they need. They’re all California students. They deserve to be treated as such.
•••
Mala Batra is the chief executive officer at Aspire Public Schools, a charter management organization serving 15,000 TK-12 students across 36 schools in historically underserved communities throughout California.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
The Los Angeles Unified School District school board is considering a resolution that would exclude 346 schools serving its most vulnerable student populations from co-location arrangements with charter schools. Doing so could potentially undermine the integrity of Proposition 39, a statewide initiative that mandates public schools to share spaces with charter schools.
The resolution, authored by President Jackie Goldberg and member Rocio Rivas and discussed at a meeting Tuesday, would require the district to avoid co-location offers on LAUSD’s 100 Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan campuses and community schools.
According to the proposal, LAUSD would also avoid charter co-location offers that “compromise district schools’ capacity to serve neighborhood children” or “grade span arrangements that negatively impact student safety and build charter school pipelines that actively deter students from attending district schools, so that the district can focus on supporting its most fragile students and schools, key programs, and student safety.”
The proposed criteria would guide the placement of new charter schools as well as those opting to change location and increase oversight of charter school co-locations, including site visits before location offers are made, frequent assessments of the average daily attendance of charter schools as well as regular reporting of their facilities payments.
Goldberg said that her goal was not to “undo” anything but rather to prioritize the needs of vulnerable students by making the co-location process more rational.
“We should have just some accountability practices, a common sense policy,” said Gloria Martinez, treasurer of United Teachers Los Angeles, the teacher’s union. “I don’t necessarily see this as an erosion of charter schools to exist. This is not an attack on charter schools or communities or parents or students. This is simply saying ‘Our district schools are drowning, and what’s our life vest?”
Eric Premack, the president and founder of the Charter Schools Development Center, disagrees, saying, “That display at the board meeting today was really stunning, that they were essentially offering an extended middle finger to the voters of California, to the taxpayers and to students and parents and families who have opted to go to charter schools.”
Board members will vote on the resolution at Tuesday’s meeting. It would give Superintendent Alberto Carvalho 45 days to report back to the board with an updated co-location policy reflecting the resolution.
Charter school co-locations have long polarized the Los Angeles community with proponents of the proposed policy maintaining that sharing campus spaces has led to hostile environments for the children and greater challenges with securing necessary resources.
Charter proponents, on the other hand, say the resolution would cause even more of their campuses to be split up and prolong commutes for students who are already disadvantaged.
Still, the resolution comes amid years of declining enrollment across LAUSD, which some say might be the real reason behind the efforts to curtail co-location.
Charters in LAUSD: The Basics
For the 2023-24 academic year, Los Angeles Unified authorized 272 charters — 51 affiliated with the district and 221 independent, according to a presentation by José Cole-Gutiérrez, the director of LAUSD’s charter schools division, which coordinates the district’s Proposition 39 program.
By the first day of November each year, charter schools must file a facilities request to LAUSD as part of a process outlined by the proposition. Those requests must include the charters’ must include their average daily attendance, which is used to determine how much space they would be allocated.
For its part, LAUSD must extend a final location offer to the charters by April 1, and the charters have a month to respond.
For years, the district has had charters share campuses with its regular public schools. This academic year, there are 52 co-locations at 50 campuses, representing 6.7% of district sites.
Los Angeles Unified has seen fewer facilities requests from charter schools in the past few years. In the 2015-2016 academic year, for example, the district received 101 facilities requests. That number shrank to 51 this year.
‘More to do with less’: Fighting for increased enrollment
The resolution comes as Los Angeles Unified — and schools throughout the state — have been reckoning with decreased enrollment despite the expansion of transitional kindergarten. Districts are working harder to retain and increase their current student populations.
“Parents have some choices, and they’re not shy about exercising them,” said Premack, the president and founder of the Charter Schools Development Center. “A lot of them have voted with their feet and gone to the charter sector for instruction to enroll their kids, and … the district sees that is costing them a lot of money.”
Decreased enrollment has led to fewer charters making facility requests, leading to more physical space open for student learning, said Myrna Castrejón, president of the California Charter Schools Association, which opposes the proposed resolution and staged a rally outside LAUSD’s headquarters during the recent meeting.
With enrollment at 538,295 in 2022-23, LAUSD suffered the second-largest percentage enrollment decline in the state — a nearly 16% drop from 639,337 in 2015-16.
“The cream of the crop left the district and went to charter schools, so did the money, and so did the funds, now we have to do with less,” Rivas, who co-authored the resolution, said during Wednesday’s board meeting.
She also said that charter management organizations have continually profited while eroding the money the district needs to support more vulnerable student populations.
“We’re pitted against each other to fight for the very few crumbs we’re given,” Rivas said.
Challenges with co-location
Parents and community organizations have long pointed to challenges with co-locating charters on regular LAUSD campuses, citing competition over spaces and contentious relationships between school communities.
“Co-locating charters are a burden placed on the shoulders of school communities. Campuses become divided spaces with drastically diminished resources, often at the expense of our most vulnerable students and families. As a result of co-locations, we have witnessed appalling and unacceptable uses of space,” reads a news release issued by the Facebook group Parents Supporting Teachers.
The group says some schools have had to hold speech therapy sessions in closets and auditoriums have been converted into administrative offices.
During Tuesday’s public comment segment, speakers and board members in favor of the proposed changes also cited challenges with district schools being able to access music and dance spaces — along with PE areas and rooms needed for individual education plan meetings.
Supporters of Los Angeles charter schools, however, emphasized that sharing spaces is not always associated with problems.
“Nobody likes to share,” said Castrejón, the president of the California Charter Schools Association. “But there are actually really good examples of … really good synergistic co-locations that actually amplify and serve both schools.”
Supporting campuses with higher needs
The new resolution would prevent Priority, Black Student Achievement Plan and community schools from sharing their campuses with a charter school. Board President Goldberg said during the meeting that the changes would offset “some of the worst impacts” of Proposition 39 on more vulnerable LAUSD schools and communities.
This academic year, LAUSD approved 13 co-locations on the district’s 100 Priority Schools, 19 co-locations on Black Student Achievement Plan campuses and seven on community schools campuses.
“We’re saying: Those schools where we are doubling our investment — and I don’t mean as far as dollars — but where we are doubling our efforts really to help those schools – we cannot subject them to being co-located and then having themselves … in a fight to be able to carry out that vision to be able to … hold on to rooms where we can actually carry out the needs of the community,” said Martinez, the treasurer of United Teachers Los Angeles.
The resolution’s opponents, however, have noted that many charters located on LAUSD campuses are community schools.
More than 70 of LAUSD’s independent charters have received State Community Schools Grants, according to Ana Tintocalis, California Charter Schools Association spokesperson.
“Based on CCSA’s analysis of the district data, there are more independent charter schools in LAUSD that have received State Community Schools Grants than district schools,” Tintocalis said in an email to EdSource.
Potential effects for charters
This academic year, 19 charter schools have been split over either two or three LAUSD campuses, and the proposed resolution is projected to increase that number.
“In attempting to avoid sites with special designations, it is likely that there will be more multi-site offers, leading to a larger overall number of co-locations Districtwide,” reads the interoffice correspondence from the office of the chief strategy officer on “Operational, Policy & Student Impact Statements” for the resolution.
“This may also lead to increased costs associated with renovation work to make sites ready for co-location, and would likely make it more challenging for the district when making ‘reasonable efforts’ to locate the charter school ‘near’ where it wishes to locate.”
Splitting a charter school across multiple sites can negatively impact students’ morale and can lead to unsustainable commutes for parents, said David Garner, the principal of Magnolia Science Academy-2.
“They were going to also offer us another school, which is Sepulveda Middle School, which is 6.9 miles away,” Garner said. “And 6.9 miles away is not a big deal if you have people that have cars. However, 88% of our students’ parents come from free-and-reduced lunch backgrounds.”
Eighty percent of the 4,000 students enrolled in his schools come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Garner calculated that the commute from Sepulveda Middle School to Magnolia Science Academy-2 is 55 minutes each way by bus — which can add up, particularly in cases where parents have children at various locations, spread out across grade levels, with different bell schedules.
“Let’s just say one of the kids is in, you know, one of our sites on (Birmingham Community High School’s) complex, and then she has another two kids at the Sepulveda Middle School site,” said Garner.
“That parent would have to take the bus to Sepulveda from our school (at Birmingham) for one hour just to drop her other kids, and then take a bus back one hour to pick up the kid from our school, and then the bus back one more hour to pick up her second kid, and then the bus home.”
Ultimately, he said, schools — public, charter or private — should all be held to the same standards in supporting their students.
“We all take to this industry because we care about the kids,” Garner added. “We care about their futures. We believe that education can be used as a means to social mobility, as a means to get out of some challenging circumstances and (give) them all the tools to be successful.”
A student at Rocketship Public Schools in San Jose works on a math problem.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Top Takeaways
Charter schools’ enrollment has grown slowly since the pandemic; they now serve one out of eight TK-12 children in California.
Most charter schools will seek renewal within the next three years under new rules.
High-profile cases of fraud have led to calls for tighter controls, with bills now before the Legislature.
California charter schools are having a strong year — at least by one metric: enrollment. As the state’s traditional public school population continues to decline, charter school enrollment has risen to nearly 728,000 students, accounting for 12.5% of all public school students across 1,280 campuses and independent study programs.
Most charter schools are also performing well academically. In the 2023-24 California School Dashboard, 16.5% of charter schools earned the highest performance rating, qualifying them for renewals of five to seven years. An additional 76.8% are eligible for five-year renewals, while just 6.7% face closure.
However, this growth comes amid increasing scrutiny. State lawmakers are pushing for stricter financial oversight following high-profile fraud cases, while local districts now have more authority to reject charter petitions. Teachers unions are gaining influence within charter schools.
Looming is the potential for another religious charter school case making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, adding more complexity to the already politically charged environment. If the court rules in favor of taxpayer funding of religious charter schools, it could have significant implications for public education funding and policy at the state level. Combined with the uncertainty over the future of the U.S. Department of Education and the Trump administration’s support for private school vouchers, the charter school sector faces political challenges not unlike those of 1992, when California enacted its charter school legislation.
The tension is annoyingly familiar to Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). Despite charter schools’ successes in academic achievement, dual high school and community college enrollment, and competitive admission rates to the University of California and California State University for Black, Latino, and low-income students, Castrejón described the current political climate as a “bare-knuckle” fight.
“Every year we have to rally our troops and tell our stories and speak to legislators about who we are and who we serve and why our mission is so important,” said Castrejón. “I can’t sit here and say charter schools are doing great and the politics are better — they are not. Make no mistake, we still have opponents who are not going to stop until they strip out our autonomy entirely and/or cripple us.”
Fraud and oversight
A key focus of that anger is Assembly Bill 84, introduced by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee. The bill aims to enact sweeping anti-fraud reforms proposed in a trio of reports released last year, following the largest charter school fraud in California history.
Muratsuchi, who is running for state superintendent of public instruction in 2026, told EdSource that he has no intention of “going after the charter schools that are acting responsibly and providing good educational services for their kids.” AB 84, he added, “is about going after the bad actors that are committing fraud and engaging in corruption through the current lack of transparency and accountability that we have with our statewide charter oversight system.”
The most notorious case involved A3 Education, a network of 19 virtual schools whose operators stole over $400 million in public school money by falsifying student enrollments. A3 exploited “a completely failed system not designed and operated to protect itself from theft,” said Kevin Fannan, a former San Diego County deputy district attorney who worked on the case. While this was an extreme case, charter advocates acknowledge the sector’s vulnerabilities and are among those calling for stronger safeguards.
“We are not in denial that we have a problem,” said Eric Premack, founder of the Charter Schools Development Center (CSDC). “It’s extraordinarily painful for us to have even a slow drip of these.” But Premack, Castrejón and other charter advocates believe that Senate Bill 414, which they sponsored, offers a more targeted solution than AB 84, which they view as imposing onerous administrative provisions that have nothing to do with fraud. Both bills have passed their respective houses and will ultimately be amended before a final version is approved and sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Nonclassroom-based schools’ rapid growth
The rapid expansion of “nonclassroom-based” charter schools presents challenges in regulation, but the term itself is a “misnomer,” according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) in their anti-fraud report commissioned by the state Legislature. Under state law, a charter school is classified as nonclassroom-based if less than 80% of instruction occurs in a traditional classroom. As a result, hybrid programs, like those that require students to attend classes three days a week, fall into the same category as entirely virtual schools.
For example, Northern Summit Academy (NSA) in rural Shasta County converted a former grocery store in Anderson into a dynamic learning hub for its 200 independent study students in transitional kindergarten through high school. The school offers optional in-person instruction in core subjects like math, social studies and science, as well as an enviable maker space with career technical education in fields such as digital embroidery, video production and robotics.
The academy also provides career pathways in nursing, cosmetology, energy and power, and has a veterinary assistant program with state-of-the-art equipment that has a 100% employment rate for graduates. Students meet weekly, in person or online, with their teacher of record. Despite this hands-on learning, NSA is classified as nonclassroom-based. The LAO-FCMAT report found that nearly two-thirds of nonclassroom-based schools in 2023-24 used hybrid models where much of the instruction was in person.
That still leaves more than 100,000 students in schools that are mainly virtual, and more are expected to seek authorization when a legislative moratorium on new nonclassroom-based charters ends on Jan. 1, 2026. These schools have attracted the most scrutiny due to their disproportionate problems with oversight, especially when authorized by small districts that stand to receive substantial income in oversight fees, which “raised some red flags for us about whether we can have quality authorizing in that situation,” explained Edgar Cabral, the LAO’s deputy legislative analyst for K–12 education. The LAO-FCMAT report identified 14 small districts in 2022-23 that authorized virtual charters whose enrollment far exceeded their district’s own, including most of the six districts conned by the founders of A3 schools.
AB 84 seeks to limit enrollment in nonclassroom-based schools authorized by small districts, but critics argue this could undermine well-run programs and stifle the innovation that is a hallmark of the charter school movement.
Kevin Humphrey, superintendent of Guajome Park Academy, based in Vista in Central California, notes that hybrid programs are essential for students who cannot thrive in traditional settings, offering flexibility for those facing anxiety, health issues or bullying. “These programs don’t just protect our students — they give them a future,” Humphrey said.
Local vs. county
About 84% of charter schools are authorized by local school boards. Nearly all the rest are under county offices of education. A few dozen that are authorized by the State Board of Education have until 2028 to find new authorizers under Assembly Bill 1505. Approved in 2019, AB 1505 was a sweeping charter reform aimed at giving local districts more control over charter authorizations. But there is growing concern among charter critics that more petitioners will bypass local school boards and turn to county offices, which are seen as more charter-friendly.
Adam Weinberger, president of the California School Employees Association, the union representing school staff, decried it as a “blatant end run around local school boards,” undermining the intent of AB 1505.
Adding to the pressure, more than 1,000 charter schools are due for renewal over the next three years due to a pandemic-era pause. This renewal process is a highly detailed and time-consuming task that will strain both local school districts and county offices of education. The rigorous evaluations required for renewals will assess each school’s academic performance, financial stability and legal compliance.
Shrinkingenrollment, increasing competition
Ten to 15 years ago, large urban districts saw charter schools as a solution to overcrowded classrooms and split sessions. Now, with statewide enrollment at 5.8 million and declining, districts are competing with charters for a shrinking pool of students. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which once enrolled nearly 672,000 students, now serves fewer than 517,000, with charter students making up a record 28% of that total, costing the district about $2.8 billion in state funding. In recent years, the LAUSD board has become more wary of charters and is currently in a legal battle over its efforts to restrict charter schools from sharing campus space with district schools.
Assemblymember Muratsuchi recognized that some districts with declining enrollments have “significant consternation with local charter schools taking away enrollment and enrollment-based funding.” But he also acknowledged that many families choose charter schools and “that is a reality that school districts need to deal with.”
To win back and hold onto students, some districts are expanding choice programs, such as magnet schools and independent study programs. During the 2023-24 school year, more than 277,000 students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade were receiving at least half their instruction through independent programs run by districts and county offices of education, according to the California Department of Education.
While charter enrollment is still rising, the pace has slowed, as has the number of new schools; only 12 opened in 2023 compared to 53 in 2019. Some long-running charters are closing due to enrollment declines. Downtown College Prep, which opened its first charter high school in San Jose in 2001, shut that campus and its two middle schools last month, citing a $4.5 million budget shortfall and a 35% drop in enrollment in six years.
Pondering this trend, Tom Hutton, executive director of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, wonders if there will come a point in declining enrollment environments “where, even though choice is impactful, there just are too many schools — both district and charter — creating more risks of making all of them weaker instead of strengthening public education overall.”
At this time, the organization’s most pressing concern is helping authorizers as they face political and public pressure to improve authorizing practices. Its mission is ensuring that charter students receive a high-quality education.
“Charter schools were introduced to inject some new energy into addressing persistent challenges in California’s education system, especially for students with unique needs and those in underserved communities, and in many ways they have succeeded,” Hutton said.
But, as the nation’s largest and second-oldest charter system, he added, “We’re experiencing growing pains and challenges in finding the right balance between continuing to innovate and committing to greater accountability. We see that as an opportunity to strengthen the system.”
Kathryn Baron is an education reporter based in California.
The Los Angeles Unified School District school board drew a mix of gratitude and frustration from communities throughout the region during its discussion of a policy that prevents charter schools from sharing a campus with its 100 priority schools, Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) schools and community schools. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), along with charter supporters, said the board policy was discriminatory and threatened lawsuits against the district.
Borrowing from a previous resolution, the proposed new policy encourages the district to avoid co-location offers that “compromise district schools’ capacity to serve neighborhood children” and that “result in grade span arrangements that negatively impact student safety and build charter school pipelines that actively deter students from attending District schools.”
The policy would come into play when the district evaluates new charter schools, when charters request different or new sites or when “existing conditions change for reasons including, but not limited to, insufficient space, addition of grade levels, and other material revisions.”
LAUSD’s school board directed Superintendent Alberto Carvalho to develop such a policy through a resolution passed last September, and the board is slated to vote on it in February.
The goal of the resolution, according to board President and resolution author Jackie Goldberg, is not to undo anything — but instead, to prioritize the needs of district students who are more vulnerable. She cited hostility on campuses and challenges with sharing spaces, including those used for enrichment activities and basic needs support.
“We’re on the right path to get past, shall we say, discomforts and disagreements on what it means to have a charter school on a campus,” said school board member George McKenna during Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole Meeting.
“Everyone may not be satisfied all the time, but I think the guidelines are a great opportunity.”
Charter supporters, however, have claimed that the policy discriminates against roughly 11,000 charter students by closing off roughly 346 district campuses. These restrictions, they say, could lead to more school closures and instances where schools are split between various locations — leading to longer commutes and accessibility issues for disadvantaged students.
“If the board adopts the proposed policy presented today, CCSA will be left with few remaining options but to, yet again, meet LAUSD in court and enforce the rights of charter school students,” said the organization’s CEO and president, Myrna Castrejón.
Co-locations in LAUSD
As a result of Proposition 39 — a statewide initiative — public school districts throughout California are required to share space with charter schools.
While there are several ways for districts to share space with charters — such as pursuing private sites or long-term leases — LAUSD has opted for years to co-locate its campuses, meaning that both a regular public school and a charter school share one campus.
“What we have at play here in Los Angeles is very unusual. … We know how we got here, so we have a golden opportunity here to fix it, to make it better,” said district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at Tuesday’s meeting. He added that the district should be “vigilant and honest about unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies.”
To secure a space, charters request facilities from LAUSD. The district then evaluates the request and comes back with a preliminary offer by Feb. 1 every year.
Charters are given a month to respond, after which the district has until April 1 to finalize the offer.
Currently, there are 50 co-located charters across the district spanning 52 sites. About 21 charters are located on sites that would be protected under the new policy.
While the proposed co-location policy has not yet been approved, several district officials said during Tuesday’s meeting that the proposed guidelines were considered when making this year’s offers.
And of the 13 new requests from charters this year, only two offers will likely be made on the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan, community and priority schools. Meanwhile, the district did not have an estimate on the number of charters that failed to receive an offer on their requested campus.
“Co-location is one of many ways to deal with the legal obligation to share space and our moral obligation to make sure kids are treated equally; and, we have a myopic focus on these co-locations, which are really difficult even in the best-case scenarios,” said school board member Nick Melvoin on Tuesday.
“This district, LA Unified, traditional schools, has lost a couple hundred thousand kids in 20 years. We definitely have enough space for everyone. We just don’t allocate it properly.”
In fact, as the district experiences declining enrollment because of larger demographic shifts — in both non-charters and charters — the number of facilities requests and co-location offers has also declined.
Specifically, over the past five years, Castrejón said charter schools’ need for space has gone down by more than 50%.
Instead of focusing on solutions, Melvoin claimed both charter supporters and opponents have attempted to “articulate the pain for political gain on one side or the other.”
“I remain disappointed in the unwillingness to actually try and solve this,” he said.
Support for the policy
The policy’s supporters have repeatedly emphasized that avoiding co-locations on Black Student Achievement Plan, community and priority schools is critical to promoting equity and protecting the district’s more vulnerable students.
“That’s not a political issue, that’s an issue of equity,” Goldberg said.
“An issue of equity says that the schools that are struggling the most to educate our students should not be given continuously more things to do, like figure out a bell schedule and how to share the cafeteria and how to share the playground and how to share the bathrooms. … That’s an additional burden on everybody on that school, really on both sides.”
Goldberg added that in order to avoid co-locations on vulnerable campuses, the district will need to reevaluate their definition of a “reasonable distance.”
Members of United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing district teachers, have historically sided with the district on matters concerning charters and have voiced support for September’s resolution.
“It’s been months since the School Board passed the resolution on co-locations, but we have schools that are in the process of losing valuable classroom and learning space. Without action, there are schools that will soon have to hold counseling sessions on the playground, or will lose their computer lab,” reads a Facebook post from the union.
“Enough is enough. LAUSD needs to stand by its own resolution and protect our amazing programs.”
Yolanda Tamayo, a teachers union leader from the East Area, said during public comment that Lorena Street Elementary, where she teaches, used to be co-located with a charter.
During that time, 10 years ago, the school allegedly “endured the dismantling of our computer lab, lost a full-time use of our library, auditorium, eating area, yard, plus the gutting of our important resources that our school desperately needed back then and now.”
Another speaker, who teaches at an LAUSD community school, said he fears his campus could be co-located with a charter, which he believes would cost them space used to house clothes for students in need and preclude them from opening a health center and food pantry.
Concerns from charters
Supporters of charter schools have claimed, however, that the policy discriminates against charter students and could lead to “charter deserts,” harming students from marginalized communities, who make up the bulk of charter students, according to Castrejón, the CCSA president.
“Charter schools do pay a fee for the use of district facilities,” Castrejón said, noting that several at-risk charters are also community schools. “The cost of going to an open market in a place that is as overbuilt and as expensive as Los Angeles could actually … result in some school closures if Prop. 39 co-location is not made available.”
Another potential impact of the policy is an increase in multi-site offers, where charters are split across multiple LAUSD campuses, which would force families to weigh what is feasible against what they feel is right for their children, according to Keith Dell’Aquila, CCSA Greater Los Angeles local’s vice president.
Dell’Aquila added that split schools also lead to longer commutes and accessibility challenges for lower-income families.
“You may see a charter school forcibly relocated by the district that forces a family to make a choice: Are you the type of family who can travel across Los Angeles, can travel 45 minutes, has access to private transportation to get your family to that car or not?”
Split campuses also pose challenges for school communities, he emphasized.
“You start to look at a school that has to do more with less with their budget, and they’ve got to have two administrators across two different sites. They’ve got to make programs work, you’ve got to make teacher [professional development] work,” Dell’Aquila said.
“You have a divided school culture. We’ve talked to every one of our schools who has experienced this split site offer and have said, ‘yeah, life is harder across the board.’”
While they cannot fully anticipate how the policy will be implemented and its effects, CCSA sent a letter to LAUSD’s school board Monday evening addressing several of their concerns with the policy, ranging from the alleged limits placed on charter school growth to the district allegedly ignoring the intent of Proposition 39.
The letter also threatens legal action if the board adopts the policy.
“A public school policy is a promise you are making to the public,” said Shawna Draxton, who has served as an educator in both regular Los Angeles public schools and charters for more than 25 years, during public comment Tuesday.
“My students are watching. They admire you; they care about civics; they’ve been to these meetings. And whether or not they agree with your decisions, they are looking to you to be courageous leaders.”
Editors’ note: This story has been updated to add a statement from UTLA.
Don Shalvey, who created California’s first charter school in 1994 and, as an organizer, strategist and mentor, had an outsize influence on the charter movement’s growth over a quarter-century, has died.
Shalvey succumbed Saturday to glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that was diagnosed a year ago. He was 79 and living on the family ranch in Linden, a small town near Stockton, where for the last seven years he was CEO of San Joaquin A+, a nonprofit that underwrites charter and district early college pathways for career opportunities. He was also a longtime member of EdSource’s board of directors, returning to the board for a second time in 2021.
“Don was a towering figure in public education with a direct influence on the opportunity of people in under-resourced communities to get a first-class education. He did it regardless of criticism or compliments because it was the right thing,” said John Deasy, former Los Angeles Unified superintendent and close friend for four decades.
In 1999, Shalvey founded the first multischool charter organization in California, and was its CEO for a decade: Oakland-based Aspire Public Schools is now the state’s largest charter operator, with 36 schools serving 15,000 students, the equivalent of a midsize school district.
“He was fearless,” said Steve Barr, a political activist who started Green Dot Public Schools, the first charter school network in Los Angeles, after Shalvey emboldened and then tutored him in starting a school.
Don ShalveyCourtesy of the Gates Foundation
Shalvey was instrumental in passing two state laws that enabled charter schools to expand. The first, in 1998, lifted the statewide cap of 100 charter schools. Two years later, Proposition 39 entitled charter schools, as tax-supported public schools, to equivalent space in district school facilities.
In a shrewd compromise that led to the support of the California Teachers Association, Proposition 39 also lowered the supermajority needed to pass a local school facilities bond from 66% to 55%.
Shalvey set high expectations and inspired a shared vision of what charter schools could become in high-poverty neighborhoods. Known for his variety of saddle shoes — a throwback to growing up in the ‘50s in his beloved Philadelphia — he had an encyclopedic memory of popular music and used karaoke and name-that-tune to build camaraderie at staff meetings or break the ice at conferences. Those who knew him say he was affable, persistently cheerful and unpretentious.
Knowing he was ill, colleagues and admirers shared remembrances over the past year through LinkedIn, chat groups and videos; others conveyed their thanks in person.
“Everybody wanted to make sure that he really understood how deeply grateful we are for his impact on our lives and the lives of students,” said Caprice Young, a former Los Angeles Unified board member whom Shalvey persuaded in 2003 to lead the newly formed California Charter Schools Association. She visited him earlier this month.
Deasy said that less celebrated was Shalvey’s mentoring of thousands of people: “It was his true legacy, and Don took it seriously.”
Lucky charter school leaders got his cell number, knowing that from 4 to 6 p.m., he was captive to the commute from Aspire offices in Oakland to Linden. “We always knew we could ask him for advice. If you had a question about something you couldn’t figure out, he’d be there,” Young said.
Heather Kirkpatrick, a former teacher whom Shalvey hired in 2001 to plan Aspire’s first high school, said, “Just as he has for so many people, he changed my life trajectory. There was a big feeling early at Aspire that you were along for the ride of your life,” she said.
When she suggested that teacher residencies might help retain teachers versed in Aspire’s teaching practices and culture, Shalvey encouraged her to start a five-year pilot program. It became a model for the state.
Mala Batra, the current CEO at Aspire, said conversations with Shalvey profoundly affected her, too. “There isn’t a day that goes by that you are not present in our work at Aspire,” she wrote on a tribute page for him. “A ritual you created, wisdom you shared, a practice you ingrained, a mark you left, a question you posed, a song you liked, a ‘Why can’t we do it like Don?’”
Carrie Douglass, an early Aspire employee, recalled that Shalvey called all Aspire employees on their birthday — sometimes four and five calls a day as Aspire added school sites. “Many employees said that annual phone call got them through another year,” she wrote on a LinkedIn post.
Shalvey was equally committed to offering guidance and support in his volunteer efforts, including as a longtime member of EdSource’s board of directors.
“Don made an indelible mark on how I go about my work and how to prioritize kindness while also being passionately determined,” said Anne Vasquez, CEO of EdSource, who credits Shalvey for highlighting the need for trustworthy journalism in the rapidly growing Central Valley. “Three years ago, EdSource had zero staff based in the Central Valley. Today, we have three, including our K-12 editor.”
‘Purposeful test kitchens’
Shalvey grew up an only child in Philadelphia and attended a 5,000, all-boy Catholic high school in Philadelphia and summers in the Poconos at Camp Wyomissing, first as a camper then as a counselor. It was there, he recalled, where he learned to lead. “Dad wanted me to be an engineer, and I chose not to go to MIT,” he said. “I wanted to be a teacher.”
After graduating from La Salle College in Philadelphia, he got a job offer as a middle school math teacher in Merced in 1967. His cousins, who lived in San Francisco, said, “Sure, come stay with us, we’re right near Merced.” They were confusing Lake Merced in San Francisco for the Central Valley city 165 miles away. But Shalvey grew enamored of the Central Valley, and it became his home base for the next six decades.
After teaching for a dozen years and serving as a principal, then an assistant superintendent in Lodi Unified, he became the superintendent of the San Carlos Elementary School District, south of San Francisco. Convinced that the state education code and inertia discouraged innovation, he established the San Carlos Charter Learning Center. He had the support of his school board and teachers, who shared his view that the charter school would serve as “purposeful test kitchens” for innovative practices in technology and multi-age instruction. It’s now the nation’s oldest operating charter school.
“Our work was about innovating and committing to learning and sharing what we learned with teachers,” Shalvey wrote in an EdSource commentary in 2017.
The Legislature capped the number of charter schools when it passed the state’s charter school law in 1992. The ceiling might have remained intact, even though the maximum number was reached, had Shalvey not met Reed Hastings and Barr on Sept. 17, 1997.
In the area to take daughter Chelsea to Stanford University, President Bill Clinton chose the San Carlos charter school to sign a bill creating a new grant program for charter schools. Barr was doing work for the event, and Hastings, in between selling a high-tech startup and starting Netflix, had extra time and was interested in charter school expansion. The two had lunch soon thereafter. They agreed on a plan for a statewide initiative to raise the charter school cap to 100 per year and gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. Rather than spend money fighting it, CTA agreed to legislation that included requiring credentialing requirements for charter school teachers. It also contained a provision that Hastings conceived permitting a nonprofit board of directors to oversee multiple charter schools.
Putting his job on the line
That authority would reshape charter schools. Aspire became California’s first charter management organization. After the first schools opened in Stockton in 1999 and then Modesto, Aspire quickly expanded to Oakland and the Bay Area, and Los Angeles; within a decade it had 21 schools.
In an interview last year, Hastings said Shalvey risked his reputation in leading the effort to expand the number of charter schools, knowing it would be very hard to get another job as a superintendent.
Other not-for-profit charter management organizations, known as CMOs, followed, among them San Francisco-based KIPP, Green Dot and Alliance for College Ready Public Schools in Los Angeles, Summit high schools and Rocketship elementary schools. All targeted underperforming children of low-income Black and Latino families in urban areas.
“Don was the right leader at the right moment when leaders in Silicon Valley were looking for an alternative, and charters became the idea that you could do something differently with public education, especially for the highest-need kids,” said James Willcox, who succeeded Shalvey as Aspire’s CEO in 2009 after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recruited Shalvey to become deputy director of K-12 education.
Wealthy donors like Hastings, Eli Broad in Los Angeles, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation fueled the expansion of Aspire and other charter organizations by funding startup and scaling-up expenses until the schools could operate independently on state funding. Charter school growth paralleled the boom in public school enrollment in California in the early 2000s before peaking at 6.3 million in 2004-05; many district schools were already overcrowded. Then, as state enrollment declined gradually over the next 15 years, charter school enrollment increased steadily.
Challenging low expectations
Shalvey would tell colleagues at Aspire that their mission was to “make a dent in the universe, one scholar at a time.”
With the motto “College for Certain,” Aspire challenged the mindset of low expectations and replaced it with the belief that everyone would go to college.
“We decided that underserved kids really had to be part of a full, focused play that college was for certain for you. That’s visual, that’s cultural, that’s a series of activities,” Shalvey said. “We said everything we did had to ensure that kids were getting in, staying in and getting supported.”
Shalvey built a college-going culture — a novel idea in immigrant neighborhoods where most students would be the first to go to college. Each classroom had a different college banner, an idea he drew from cabins at Camp Wyomissing. Students would learn about the college, and current students or graduates would write to them about their experiences. All students had to be admitted to at least one college; in an onstage ritual, all students would exchange a letter of acceptance for an Aspire diploma at graduation.
In 2010, the international consulting firm McKinsey & Co. named Aspire to its list of 20 of the world’s most improved school systems. Only three U.S. systems, including Long Beach Unified, received that honor.
“We never thought we had it all figured out; we were always growing and learning,” Aspire CEO Willcox said.
Aspire has said that a larger percentage of its students goes on to graduate from college with either an associate or bachelor’s degree than students with similar demographics. But the figure from all graduating classes, through 2019, was only 30.5% within four years and 35.5% in six years, according to data from Aspire.
Last year, after surveying parents, teachers and students, Aspire changed its motto to better reflect its broader mission to prepare students to “pursue and persist in college or any post-secondary pathway” of their choice. Instead of “College for Certain,” it is now “Empowering Minds. Transforming Futures.”
Shalvey’s thinking evolved, too. With 70% of Central Valley high school graduates staying in the area, San Joaquin A+ focuses on developing an Early College High School model, which enables students to receive college credit while in high school and “earn as they learn” so that by age 26, “they are doing what they love and earning what they need,” Shalvey said.
Continuing tensions with school districts
With 1 out of 9 students in California now attending a charter school, districts often have tense relations with the charter schools that they authorize or approve over their objections. Antagonisms, especially with charter management organizations, have become more cutthroat in an era of declining student enrollments, as both districts and charter schools battle to fill classrooms.
Shalvey acknowledged in an interview last year that the conflicts date back to the revised charter school law that lifted the charter cap; it included collaboration and competition among charter schools’ purposes.
“That’s the dilemma,” he said. “In the beginning, you had to do the common thing uncommonly well. So that set it up that we were competing because my school’s scores are better than your school’s scores. And that was just wrong.”
During his 11 years at the Gates Foundation, where he was involved in initiatives to adopt the Common Core standards and incentivize reform in teacher evaluations, which met resistance in California, Shalvey also seeded collaborations between districts and charter schools. There were partnerships in Denver, Hartford, Connecticut., and a three-way collaboration between the Spring Branch district, KIPP-Houston, and YES Prep in Texas to share course offerings and post-graduate strategies.
It wasn’t easy to bridge the mistrust in California. He cited Summit Learning, which opened its learning platform to all districts nationwide, and KIPP, which trained hundreds of school counselors and its own team in a college-completion initiative.
“When you get together with other charters and other school systems, you learn from one another. And it grows,” Shalvey said last year. “We weren’t trying to be the only ones trying to figure this out. There are no secrets in public education. You want everyone to get it.”
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District, challenging the district’s policy limiting charter co-locations on nearly 350 campuses, including the district’s 100 Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan schools and community schools.
The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, argues that the policy is illegal and discriminates against charter students by not providing them with “reasonably equivalent” facilities.
“We have consistently maintained that this policy is a shameful and discriminatory attack on public charter school students, for which the district shares a responsibility to house,” said Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the CCSA at a press event Tuesday.
“Families choose to send their children to LAUSD charter public schools because they have found programs uniquely tailored to their needs. … This policy limits options for those parents among the most vulnerable across LA Unified.”
The CCSA started making threats of litigation when the board passed the resolution on Feb. 13. The following month, the CCSA claimed the vote was invalid due to alleged violations of the state’s open- meetings law, the Brown Act, tied to board member George McKenna’s virtual participation during the February vote.
LAUSD’s school board reconvened on March 19 and passed the policy a second time with a 4-3 vote that included the support of Board President Jackie Goldberg, Vice President Scott Schmerelson and members McKenna and Rocio Rivas.
The four board members, along with members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), have repeatedly emphasized negative effects of co-location, particularly on vulnerable students, including allegedly hostile school environments and challenges with accessing programmatic spaces, including computer labs, music rooms and art studios.
Family centers, according to Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of UTLA, are also negatively impacted by co-locations.
“Implementing proper oversight and limitations on co-located schools is the fairest way to ensure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds, can access a high-quality education within LAUSD,” Myart-Cruz said in a statement to EdSource.
She added that the lawsuit filed by the CCSA is “a misguided response” to a policy widely supported by teachers, parents and students.
“All students deserve a space to thrive, and overcrowding our already resource-limited public schools has had a detrimental effect on both public and charter students,” Myart-Cruz said.
Charter proponents, however, have argued that taking nearly 350 schools off the table for co-locations could lead to more multi-site offers and school closures, which they say will negatively impact vulnerable students.
The lawsuit specifically states that the 240 charter schools in LAUSD educate more than 115,000 students, who are largely low-income and students of color.
The lawsuit also claims that the district has failed to collaborate in good faith and points to a history of alleged violations of Proposition 39, which dealt with bonds to finance school facilities.
“Despite CCSA and the charter public school communities’ offer to work collaboratively with the board on a new policy that would improve the process of sharing campuses, LAUSD has disregarded the voices and needs of charter school families and adopted a new policy to harm their charter schools,” Castrejón added at Tuesday’s press event.
LAUSD declined to comment on the lawsuit as litigation is pending.
Meanwhile, the CCSA emphasized its strong legal track record and said they feel optimistic about the case.
“It is a common theme with LAUSD,” said CCSA’s vice president of legal advocacy and executive director, Julie Umansky, on Tuesday. “We’re feeling confident with the precedent on their disregard for Prop. 39 and our ability to get the court to see it the way we do.”
Thomas Ultican reviews the current state of billionaire support for charter schools in California. Most people, certainly the charter industry, has long forgotten or never knew that the original charter school idea was that they would be created by teachers and operate under the aegis of local school boards. The reason for the linkage was that charter schools were supposed to be places that tried innovative practices, especially for the neediest students, and fed their results to their host district. They were supposed to be like R&D centers for local school districts.
They were not supposed to compete with public schools but to help public schools.
They were not supposed to undermine public schools. They were not supposed to be for-profit or operated as chains or entrepreneurs.
