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Great Public Schools Initiative
Arcadia Weekly Oct 07, 2015
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By Jonathan Tsou
This past June, the Los Angeles Times posted a 44-page report that outlines a campaign to strategically place more than half of Los Angeles Unified School District’s students into charter schools in the next eight years. As of right now, Los Angeles Unified already has the largest charter school system in the country with 16 percent of all total student enrollments and 287 charter schools. Getting it to more than 50 percent would require approximately 260 more charter schools that will hold up to 130,000 students and cost over 490 million dollars.
For many years, charter schools have been an important topic for Los Angeles and many other school districts around the nation. There has also been an increase in the number of charter schools throughout the nation because of grants from the Obama administration and other organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.
The report, created by the Broad Foundation, a foundation founded by billionaire Eli Broad, forms the Great Public School Now Initiative. The report indicates that the initiative is a bold, multi-year strategy to meet growing demands for high-quality charters in Los Angeles and ensure that every student can access an excellent public school. The newly-created charter schools will serve students; particularly minority and low-income students.
The report also takes jabs at the constantly debated Common Core. It says that investing millions of dollars with little progress on student achievement will continue to make minorities suffer.
In March, Stanford University released a new study that looked at the impact of charter schools in 41 urban areas. Using research designs that compared learning gains for students enrolled in charter schools to students enrolled in public schools in the same district, the findings show that students in charter schools learn significantly more than their peers attending traditional public schools. Students in charter schools have around 40 more days for math and 28 more days for reading.
Even though creating more charter schools has its perks, it does not come without challenges.
Making 50 percent of all Los Angeles students attend charter schools will hurt the teachers who work for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Early in September, hundreds of teachers protested outside the Broad Museum against this increase.
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