State Board Lifts Cap on Charter Schools

The State Board of Education on Friday waived the 100-school ceiling on charter schools, allowing four more campuses to join the experimental program, and made it clear that it would probably approve any future applications brought forward by local districts.

The unanimous vote was heralded as historic by school reform advocates, who said it was further evidence that the charter movement is gaining credibility in California, a pioneer among the 20 states that have passed similar laws.

“I think if there was any question about the viability of charter schools you would not have the state board lifting that cap,” said Jeanne Allen, director of the Center for Education Reform in Washington.

At least a dozen California charter bids that had been slowed by the uncertainty surrounding the limit--including up to three in Los Angeles--are expected to percolate up to the state board during the coming year. People organizing those efforts described the state board decision as a great relief.

“It’s very good news for us because we feel that going charter is the next natural step here,” said Diane Pritchard, principal at Montague School in Pacoima, which expects to submit a charter application to the Los Angeles Board of Education in the next two months.

For Montague, the freedom a charter offers from most state and local regulations could mean creating a gifted school within the school, Pritchard said, or even keeping the school open for instruction or educational programs during vacations.

The four charters that forced the issue Friday included a Native American charter school in Oakland, a charter high school in Escondido and others in Butte County and Berkeley.

Only California Teachers Union representatives opposed the waivers at the state board meeting, saying board members overstepped their authority by lifting a cap set by the Legislature in 1992.

Locally, however, United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein was more circumspect, saying that the key question in allowing more charters should be whether students are learning more at the existing ones--a proof required under charter law but yet to be provided.

But Bernstein said the state board rightfully placed the responsibility for reviewing the five-year charter contracts at the local school board level, as the original legislation intended.

“I personally think if somebody submits a good charter, they should be granted a charter,” Bernstein said.

In addition to Montague, the other two local bids anticipated by Los Angeles Unified’s charter administrator are for Byrd Middle School in Sun Valley and for a cluster of schools in south Los Angeles that feed into Crenshaw and Dorsey highs.

The 100-school cap was set in the original legislation as a compromise between teachers’ unions, which wanted to restrict it to the lowest possible number, and business groups that wanted no limits to be set.

But the predicted rush to sign up never materialized and, two years after the law took effect, California has only about 80 active charter schools, six of them in Los Angeles. There is no mystery about why for Elise Darwish, who is in charge of instruction at the very first charter school approved by the state.

“It’s really hard to start a school,” said Darwish, speaking from the front office of San Carlos Charter Learning Center. “You really have to give yourself a lot of planning time and realize it’s so much work.”

Although the state board set no bounds on the number of waivers it would issue, charter advocates said there is still need for formal legislation.

Currently, several bills pending in the Legislature would raise the allotted charters by anywhere from 60 to 300 schools a year. One bill would lift the cap altogether.

“We want it limitless,” said Sue Burr, who drafted the charter law for former state Sen. Gary Hart, with whom she now works at the Cal State University Institute for Education Reform.

But even staunch charter supporters such as Burr are calling for an overhaul of the law to reflect lessons learned in the past two years.

The failure of a downtown Los Angeles charter school for dropouts last year pointed up some legislative shortcomings. A state auditor who randomly visited Edutrain Charter School stumbled on widespread record keeping problems, but Los Angeles Unified believed that it had to perform its own audit before closing the school.

Edutrain left a trail of debts that the district says are the state’s responsibility and the state has turned back to the district.

“That’s precisely the type of legal and liability issue that we would like to see clarified,” said Eric Premack, a charter school consultant.