L.A. Unified has 224 independent charters, more than any other system, enrolling about 18% of district students
There is a fierce political struggle going on between supporters of Charter Schools in the LAUSD, and the traditional old style conventional schools. PSA prefers to see this as a positive process that will, eventually, produce innovative solutions that will support dramatically positive improvements over time for students at LAUSD schools. That doesn’t mean it won’t be messy and even nasty in the short term.
Perhaps a healthy competition between various viewpoints on what schools should be and do, and how they should be organized, run, and financed, is a messy but necessary step to work out approaches that work for today and tomorrow for LAUSD, but also possibly nationwide.
At least there’s a reasonable chance that something good can come out this, whereas, the status quo doesn’t offer anything that fully addresses the changed circumstances for students and schools in today’s mobile and cloud world. Drawing a line in the sand to fight change is not likely to be an adequate response to our 21st century world’s requirements.
But how we get to where we need to be for students, their families, their communities and our US civilization as a whole, is unclear, and will involve a lot of experiments and trial and error, which will have its own costs. Presumably those costs are worth paying in order to avoid the ongoing costs to students from the status quo.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Charter-school-group-drops-two-lawsuits-against-L.A.-Unified.pdf”]