LA Board Charters Failure

SACRAMENTO, CA~On March 29, the Los Angeles school board voted to oppose expansion of a diverse and improving charter-school consortium, and to extend the life of a low-performing racially centered Hispanic charter. A good day’s work — if the goal is to sabotage the charter school movement.

The first vote involved Green Dot Public Schools, which operates several charter high schools, and wants to open new schools in the low-income Watts neighborhood. Green Dot’s philosophy is that all students can learn if held to high expectations and taught by quality, empowered teachers. Students at Green Dot schools take college-prep courses and the schools stay open late to maximize learning. There are about 3,000 mostly black and Hispanic students in Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles, with waiting lists in the hundreds. While not all student performance indicators are improving at all the Green Dot schools, overall the schools are showing encouraging early results.

At Animo South Los Angeles Charter, one of the Green Dot schools, the achievement of African Americans rose from less than 10 percent performing at or above the proficient level in mathematics to about 40 percent in just one year. The Green Dot high schools that have graduated students have a graduation rate of nearly 80 percent, compared an estimated rate of just over 30 percent at Locke High, a regular public school in the Watts area. Green Dot officials say that most of their graduates go on to college.

Despite Green Dot’s promising results, the school board decided to side with the United Teachers of Los Angeles, a vociferous critic of charter schools, which claimed that Green Dot’s higher scores were due to handpicking students and overworking teachers – claims the Los Angeles Times declared “unsubstantiated.” The union had contributed a total of $1 million to two anti-Green Dot board members in their recent re-election bids, virtually the entirety of their campaign war chests.

According to the Times, “Parents and students from the impoverished, gang-ridden [Watts] community also implored the board to approve the charters, saying they were desperate for an alternative to the low-performing, often unsafe district middle and high schools in the area.” These pleas fell on deaf union-bought ears. Board member and Green Dot supporter Mike Lansing, who represents the Watts area, said, “It’s really disappointing that we keep talking about wanting to do what’s best for children first, when without a doubt that vote was about a teachers union and three board members not having the backbone to stand up and do the right thing for kids over their ties to the union.”

The school board, however, was more receptive to a nearly all-Hispanic charter school, Academia Semillas de Pueblo, when it renewed its charter. Since charters trade freedom from ordinary rules and regulations in exchange for higher student achievement, those charters that perform poorly are supposed to be put out of business. Semillas is one of the city’s worst schools but that didn’t matter to the board, especially with liberals like former Assembly education chair Jackie Goldberg and City Councilman Richard Alatorre plus a variety of extremist Mexican separatist groups backing the Hispano-centric anti-assimilationist school.

Marcos Aguilar, the founder and principal of Semillas, prefers race separation saying “We don’t want to drink from a white water fountain,” and that the “white way, the American way, the neo-liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.”

The school teaches students the Aztec language Nahuatl. Aguilar has said: “The importance of Nahuatl is also academic because Nahuatl is based on a Math system, which we are also practicing. We teach our children how to operate a base 20 mathematical system and how to understand the relationship between the founders and their bodies, what the effects of astronomical forces and natural forces on the human body and the human psyche, our way of thinking and our way of expressing ourselves.”

Such multicultural gibberish has resulted in 93 percent of fifth graders at Semillas testing below the proficient level in math. Yet the board renews their charter and rejects the successful Green Dot schools. These actions confirm that what matters in California is not the achievement of children but raw self-interested political power and blinding ideology. As Arnold Schwarzenegger used to say, this is box that needs to blown up.

Lance T. Izumi is Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. This article originally appeared as a Capital Ideas produced by PRI.