November 13, 2012

Board of Education
Los Angeles Unified School District
333 South Beaudry Avenue, 24th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017

Dear Members of the Los Angeles Unified School Board:

I am writing you this morning to caution the Los Angeles Unified School Board on a measure that would set the city back over a decade in progress. The Resolution before you today, “Updating Charter Authorizing and Oversight,” proposed by Mr. Zimmer, lacks sound policy and would severely hurt a large population of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The 110,000 students currently being served by charters authorized by LAUSD have not declined enrollment for the district, but rather, are students who have been retained by the district through the creation of options for parents and adding 232 charter schools to the district’s portfolio of educational offerings.

Requiring all charter schools to use the District’s ISIS system by January 1, 2013 is an unreasonable mandate and timeline that goes against the operational autonomy defined by California’s charter school law. It is commonly known that ISIS is a work in progress, full of bugs and lacks the technical support schools need to integrate. Charter schools can and have generated the data LAUSD needs using current structures and internal reporting mechanisms.

There’s also no question that charter schools are meeting performance goals and in most cases, are outperforming conventional district schools. Consider The Accelerated Schools boast a 93 percent four-year graduation rate. Granada Hills Charter High School serves nearly 4,300 students with an in-seat attendance rate of 97.4 percent. GHCHS scored an 878 on the 2012 API and is the only comprehensive high school in Los Angeles with an API above 850. These are just two examples out of 232 charter schools improving outcomes for your students.

In our nearly 20-year experience at the Center, the formation of a Charter Oversight Commission is not a sound policy for the District to adopt. Too often these commissions, while well intentioned, never get the projected results but cost more time and resources and as proposed in the resolution before you, is only a stall tactic to limit options for parents and the portfolio of schools LAUSD is known for offering.

Finally, we strongly urge you to not postpone the review of new charter school applications. There are thousands of parents in Los Angeles still on charter school waiting lists and it is important for this body to continue to explore ways to meet that demand. New charter schools play an important role in the robust charter school movement LAUSD has supported. Halting growth would set the city back at least a decade in progress.

The Center for Education Reform, since 1993, is the leading voice and advocate for lasting, substantive and structural education reform in the U.S. We know the nation looks to a majority of your charter schools as national models of success and both traditional public schools and charters across the country work to emulate these programs. We encourage you to continue to explore ways to share best practices that the charter sector has to offer LAUSD in its own backyard.

Respectfully,
Kara Kerwin
Vice President of External Affairs
 

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