Charter schools never are going to have it easy. Maybe that’s what makes them so tough, and good. This year voters elected a majority of charter supporters to the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District, a victory for progress in normalizing charters within the overall public-school environment. Yet these innovative schools continue to be attacked, writes Steven Greenhut in the American Spectator.
“The LAUSD’s Office of the Inspector General is responsible for rooting out misspending within the district,” he writes. “But charter advocates say the office launches open-ended and heavy-handed investigations into charter schools, thus using its powers to discredit them as they seek renewals.” The latest blow: LAUSD bureaucrats are attacking 14 top-ranked charters for not following the district’s ridiculous red tape – the nonsense regulations that have made its traditional schools among the worst in the country. “The dispute had nothing to do with educational quality, but regulations,” he writes. “The school board insists that charters accept a growing list of ‘district-approved language.’ Included in the language is a clause allowing the district to change any existing language any time it chooses.”
That’s why strategic communications for charter schools has become even more so important. The new rules basically force the charters to follow the innovation-destroying red tape imposed on traditional schools, itself a violation of the letter and spirit of the state laws that established charters back in 1992. Fortunately, as Greenhut notes, public pressure is forcing the LAUSD to approve 11 of those 14 charters, “but it’s not going to trim the sails of its Office of the Inspector General.” So the fight for school innovation and excellence goes on.
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