When the LA School District abruptly turns their middle school into a charter-school, people protest.
“Let’s take over the takeover,” vowed a South Los Angeles resident about the Los Angeles Board of Education’s recent move to close Henry Clay Middle School and then reopen it with Green Dot, a charter-school corporation, as operator.
In effect since 2009, Public School Choice is a program of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) that puts public schools up for bid to outside groups such as charter-school corporations and nonprofits. It has made the LAUSD the most charter-friendly school district in the country.
The LAUSD uses scores from standardized tests to label schools “failing” or “low-performing” — even though the tests have been proven unreliable in assessing school performance.
By using the scores to give schools away to charter operators, the district blames the whole school community — parents, teachers, students, and staff — for problems that have actually been caused by decades of budget cuts and underfunded public education.
And the LAUSD is also using the program to give away newly constructed schools that don’t have any any track record at all!
Still, the giveaway of the Clay Middle School came as a surprise, because the LAUSD violated its own policies to do so. Instead of holding community hearings to consult with parents, the district simply announced Green Dot’s takeover.
“The school board placed Clay on a silver platter and handed it to Green Dot without any solicitation or proposal,” exclaims Marguerite La Motte, the lone school-board member who opposes Public School Choice.
“Green Dot’s scores are no better than Clay’s,” La Motte points out. “Of the 13 schools they operate within LAUSD, eight have scores of less than 650.” A low Academic Performance Index (API) is cause to put a school up for bid, unless you are already a Charter like Green Dot.
Awarding Clay to an organization whose scores are essentially no better than Clay’s raises suspicions about why LAUSD is so aggressively giving away public schools.
Studies on charter schools show that their initial success depended on massive outside funding from billionaire “venture philanthropists” like financier Eli Broad and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
This initial investment allows them to siphon millions more from struggling school districts.
Charters have also been criticized for filtering out students who require more help — for instance, special-needs students and English-language learners
And there are other drawbacks. Unlike public schools, when community needs are too high the charter schools simply close down. Green Dot abruptly closed its Animo Justice Charter High School in the middle of the 2009/2010 school year,
leaving its largely Latino students abandoned and angry.
Now longtime residents of South LA — many of whom experienced de facto segregated schools, as they grew up — are vowing, “We Will Not Be Moved!” and “This Is Our school, Our Land!”
Joining in the struggle are newer Los Angeles residents who recently came to this country in search of a better future for their children. They are spreading the word on the backroom deal to give away Clay Middle School but are also moving toward a critique about the move to take the “public” out of public education.
“They didn’t do it right the first time, so they are fixing the procedures to take away our schools,” explains Emily Saenz the recently displaced parent representative from Henry Clay about the first rounds of Public School Choice in which many communities successfully held on to their schools.
She believes the Clay giveaway without parent input is a test for how Public School Choice will be implemented in the future. “This struggle is bigger than one school — the future of all schools depend on whether we save Clay.”
“There are millions of dollars in public education, and these charter organizations want our schools and our money,’ she says. “Clay’s annual budget is $4 million.”
The Clay takeover also represents a shift in strategy by charter operators, who typically bid on elementary schools. Many believe the takeover is the first step in taking over the feeder elementary schools as well.
As we go to press, Clay’s future is uncertain. But the struggle to keep public education [begin italics] public [end italics] has reached a community with deep roots in civil-rights battles for quality public education — and they are not likely to let the struggle die.
