It’s a shame for the families and teachers involved, but examples like these keep piling up.
Ken Larson was pacing the floor of his office in a tiny elementary school in Oro Grande, Calif., surrounded by the chaos of fax lines beeping, three beleaguered secretaries peppering him with questions and phone lines ringing for the umpteenth time.
It had been a month since one of the nation’s largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left Mr. Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.
“Hysterical parents are calling us, swearing and shouting,” Mr. Larson said in an interview in Oro Grande last week. “People are walking off with assets all over the state. We’re absolutely sinking.”
The disintegration of the California Charter Academy, the largest chain of publicly financed but privately run charter schools to slide into insolvency, offers a sobering picture of what can follow. Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students’ academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.
Investigators are sifting through records seeking causes of the disaster, which has raised new questions about how charter schools are regulated.
I think it’s safe to say that they’re not regulated nearly enough. Unfortunately, that’s the inescapable point and fundamental flaw in the charter school system.
Because charter schools operate independently from state educational guidelines and regulations, there’s no accountability. No one knows how the schools are managed, whether their teachers are qualified, or how taxpayer dollars — which finance the schools’ costs — are spent.
The idea is predicated on the notion that innovative educators could get better results free of teachers’ unions, red tape, and burdensome bureaucracy. The reality is what happened to the California Charter Academy.