Charter School Concerns

President Obama has said that more charter schools will be a centerpiece of his educational reform in his recent address on education. There are some concerns with charter schools however.

Charters created for purpose of giving children of a particular faith religious instruction at state expense is becoming a real concern. There are problems with public school charters using taxpayer money being created in Minnesota for Muslim students. Read:http://www.startribune.com/local/17406054.html

And both an Arabic language and a Hebrew language charter school created in New York City for Muslims and Jews repectively. Read:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/nyregion/12hebrew.html

Here inside our VUSD, we have had two charters created at two different churches. Neither was chartered by VUSD but by another much more distant school district. I believe one was chartered by the Julian School District. The charter school students in both cases were mostly the children of church members and the teachers also attended that church. The first church charter was closed several years ago due to financial irregularities. Read:

The second charter called the Classical Academy is still in operation at a local Baptist Church. It came to light when its director, Melvin Goode, was accused of criminal sexual misconduct with underage children. Read: http://www.10news.com/news/18645419/detail.html

A third may be a coincidence, North County Trade Tech High School has a forty acre site next to St. Anne's church where it intends to construct a school. Will there be a religious tie in with the church next door?

A fourth is the case of the San Marcos Unified affiliated charter school, Bayshore Prep, founded by Guffanti campaign contributer and home school advocate, Carolyn Lucia who was forced to resign last May in disgrace because of student transcript irregularities.

Read: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20080621-9999-1mi21smchart.html

Charter schools as religious instruments of instruction not only violates the Church/State separation required in our Constitution but if allowed to continue will tend to separate our country into little groups of similar believers that do not trust outsiders. This "Balkanization" of our country can only lead to disaster and eventually dis-union.

The religious co-opting of the charter movement is the first and best reason to oppose charters but there are two additional reasons as well.

First charter schools are FAR more dangerous to our children during earthquakes. Charter Schools have been specifically exempted from the Field Act. The Field Act was passed after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake which collapsed numerous schools thankfully in the early morning hours before students arrived. The Field Act requires all school buildings to be made with substantial extra reinforcement to ensure that in the event of a major earthquake the students would be protected. Because charter school proponents wanted to use office buildings and empty stores for their schools, they sought and were given Field Act exemptions. Read:

Second at most charter schools employees have no rights. There is no requirement for administration to be fair or competent in releasing employees. Whimsical decisions to fire teachers and others have been made at Guajome Park Academy here in Vista. Read: http://www.guajomeunderground.org/phpBB/ and here:http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/188834/former_employees_have_complained_of_growing_tension_at_charter_school/

Now firing for no reason has become a problem in San Diego as well. Here are the first couple of paragraphs of a story "Charter Teachers, Fearful of Firings, Push to Unionize a Shaken School" found today in the Voice of San Diego online newspaper. Read:
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/03/13/education/836kch031209.txt

Thursday, March 12, 2009 Less than a year after a Barrio Logan charter school discarded its director and cut loose nearly all of its teachers with little warning, teachers in its system of schools are taking their first steps toward forming a union.

Six out of eight teachers at King/Chavez Arts Academy were dismissed last summer, shortly after its director was replaced. The jilted teachers, many of them relatively new to teaching, said they received little explanation of why they were let go.

Here are a couple of telling sentences from the middle part of the story:

It also made many of the remaining teachers fearful of losing their jobs, especially after another teacher from the same school was fired in the middle of this year. Some were galled that the principals and administrators judging them had not been classroom teachers themselves.

And another:

It is a dramatic illustration of the tradeoffs that teachers face when choosing to forgo a union and its protections for the freedoms of a charter school.

And another:

"These teachers are much more exposed to unfair treatment than teachers in the San Diego Education Association," said Peter Zschiesche, founding director of the Employee Rights Center, a group that advocates for employees who are not unionized. "Most people think there has to be some law that says, 'You've got to treat me fairly,' and there isn't." (bold type added by blog editor)

And one more:

But some teachers questioned how they could be evaluated fairly and consistently by administrators who did not know their subjects or had never taught classes of their own. (bold type and italics added by blog editor)