Submitted by: J Cryots
Online [charter] schools are rife with
fraud and a lack of accountability…”
The California legislature takes steps to increase oversight on online charter schools. Bill passed in committee Wednesday seeks to close loopholes where nonclassroom-based schools are shortchanging students academically and using vendors who aren’t
required to be credentialed or pass background checks.
Proposed reforms in AB1316 follows a report by In the Public Interest earlier
this year that revealed that Californians are wasting at least $600 million
per year on nonclassroom-based charter schools.
SACRAMENTO– The California Assembly Education Committee yesterday approved sweeping new legislation meant to fix weaknesses in state laws regulating the publicly funded but privately operated online charter schools, saying that the online charter schools are “rife with fraud and a lack of accountability.”
AB1316 which will require a vote by both the full Assembly and Senate, includes a number of measures designed to increase fiscal and attendance accountability in California’s nonclassroom-based schools* and other reforms such as background checks and credentialing requirements for vendors responsible for the direct supervision of pupils. Currently a vendor delivering instruction in a California online charter school is not required to even have a high school degree. The pending legislation also takes away the ability for online charter schools to cherry pick school districts as authorizers and then deliver an education product to students far removed and without adequate oversight.
AB 1316 was crafted with recommendations from state auditors and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the high-profile case of the A3 charter school network involving the theft of more than $50 million in public dollars.
Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, described during the hearing how a small San Diego County rural school district with 140 students became the authorizer for A3, an online for-profit charter school run by an Australian businessman that enrolled 20,000 students. This tiny district was then responsible for oversight and accountability for the thousands of charter students. Earlier this week, O’Donnell, the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, told The San Diego Union Tribune, “The days of handing out buckets of public money without accountability are ending.”
This week’s hearing also follows the February release of a study by the national nonprofit research and policy center In the Public Interest that exposed that hundreds of millions of California’s tax dollars are being wasted every year on the state’s online charter schools. The report, titled Costly Failure: California Is Overpaying for Online Charter Schools That Are Failing Students, examined California’s 313 nonclassroom-based charter schools,* which enroll nearly 175,000 students, or an astounding 27 percent of the state’s charter school students. Of these schools, nearly half deliver educational programs primarily online. The research was conducted by University of Oregon Professor, Dr. Gordon Lafer.
The findings in the report and yesterday’s hearing are significant because California has just entered the second year of a two-year moratorium on authorizing new nonclassroom-based charter schools. The intent of the moratorium was to give the legislature time to study and develop reforms to this segment of the charter school industry. In this session of the legislature lawmakers must decide what conditions to place on existing or new nonclassroom-based charter schools. A vote in the full assembly on AB1316 is expected by June.
California’s nonclassroom-based charter school sector has generated increasing controversy in recent years. Networks like the Inspire charter school chain have given state education dollars to parents to spend on activities like horseback riding, Disneyland, and Legoland trips for their students’ education. Meanwhile, services for students, especially special education students, have fallen short.
Among the In the Public Interest report’s findings:
● Californians are overpaying for nonclassroom-based charter schools to the tune of more than $600 million per year.
● Californians pay approximately $10,300 for every student who attends one of Pearson’s Connections Academy online charter schools. Yet the tuition for enrolling in the private Pearson Online Academy is just $4,800 for elementary school students, $5,880 for middle school, and $6,880 for high school if the student is enrolling outside California.
● The educational outcomes of online charter schools are significantly below the state average, by every measure.
● Online charter schools have expanded to the point that in most counties, parents have at least six different online charter schools from which to choose.
Many online charter schools in California and elsewhere have been mired in scandal related to enrollment figures and academic quality in recent years. In 2019, A3 was ordered to close 19 charter schools as a result of an enrollment scam where hundreds of children who had signed up for Little League of other extracurricular activities were fraudulently enrolled without their knowledge at A3. That same year, a complaint by six county superintendents across California led to an ongoing state investigation into fraud at the Inspire charter homeschool network. In Ohio, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), a statewide online charter school, was forced to close when the Ohio Department of Education found that it had grossly inflated the number of students enrolled. ECOT also was noted for having had the highest dropout rate of any school in the United States. In 2020, the Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy also were cited for fraudulent enrollment figures.
AB1316 is opposed by the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). Opponents who testified at the April 28 hearing say that tighter auditing is all that’s required. Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, described those arguments as “hollow.”
In the Public Interest is a nonprofit research and policy center that studies public goods and advocates for building popular support for public institutions that work for all of us.
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