BILL ANALYSIS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Gloria Romero, Chair
2009-2010 Regular Session
BILL NO: AB 1741
AUTHOR: Coto
AMENDED: April 26, 2010
FISCAL COMM: Yes HEARING DATE: June 23, 2010
URGENCY: No CONSULTANT:Beth Graybill
SUBJECT : Charter Schools: English learners.
SUMMARY
This bill requires a petition to establish a charter school
in which at least 15% of the pupils to be served are English
learners to include specified information related to the
instructional programs for these pupils and requires
chartering authorities, in renewing a charter school to
consider the degree to which a school implemented those
programs.
BACKGROUND
Current law requires charter developers to collect certain
signatures in support of the petition and requires petitions
to include a prominent statement that a signature means that
the person signing has a meaningful interest in teaching in
or having his or her children attend the school. Existing
law authorizes a school district, county office of education,
or the State Board of Education (SBE) to approve or deny a
petition for a charter school. (Education Code 47605)
Existing law authorizes a charter to be granted for not more
than five years and requires charter schools to meet
specified criteria prior to receiving a charter renewal.
Current law requires the renewal and any material revision of
the provisions of the charter to be made only with the
approval of the authority that granted the charter and be
based on the same standards as the original charter. (EC
47607)
Existing federal law, The American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5) (ARRA), provides $4.3 billion
for the Race to the Top (RTTT) program, for the purpose of
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encouraging and rewarding states that are implementing
specified educational objectives. For purposes of
implementing the federal RTTT program, existing state law
requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) and
the SBE to establish a list of low-achieving schools and
persistently lowest-achieving schools (PLAS), as defined,
according to specific criteria. A low-achieving school is
defined as a school in Program Improvement (PI) under Title I
of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). The
methodology for determining a PLAS includes:
The lowest 5% of the low-achieving schools;
The lowest 5% of secondary schools, as measured by the
Academic Performance Index (API), that are eligible for
but do not receive Title I funds;
Any high school with a graduation rate less than 60% in
each of the last three years; and
Excludes, to the extent allowable under federal law,
specified special needs or alternative schools and those
schools that have experienced academic growth of at
least 50 points on the API, unless the SPI and the SBE
jointly overrule that exclusion.
Existing law requires the Superintendent of Public
Instruction and the State Board of Education to establish a
list of Persistently Lowest Achieving schools and requires
the governing board to implement for any school so identified
one of four school intervention models beginning in the
2010-11 school year. (EC 53202)
The four models are:
Turnaround model in which the Local Education Agency
(LEA) undertakes a series of major school improvement
actions including replacing the principal and rehiring
no more than half of the staff.
Restart model in which the LEA converts a school or
closes and reopens a school as a charter school.
School closure model in which the LEA closes a school
and enrolls students in another school.
Transformation model in which the LEA implements a
series of required school improvement strategies,
including replacing the principal and increasing
instructional time.
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Current law specifies that if 15 percent or more of the
pupils enrolled in a public school that provides instruction
in kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 12, inclusive, speak a
single primary language other than English, as determined
from the annual language census in the preceding year, all
notices, reports, statements, or records sent to the parent
or guardian of any such pupil by the school or school
district shall, in addition to being written in English, be
written in the primary language, and may be responded to
either in English or the primary language. (EC 48985)
ANALYSIS
This bill :
1) Requires a petition to establish a charter school in
which at least 15% of the pupils to be served are
English learners (ELs), to include a description of all
of the following information:
a) The program design that will provide programs
and core courses to meet the academic, language,
and cultural needs of English learners at the
school.
b) The means by which administrators and staff
qualified to teach English learners will be hired
by the school.
c) The manner in which a relevant outreach
program will be implemented that reaches parents,
assists them in being involved in the school and in
understanding how the charter school process works.
d) The programs and staffing that will be
implemented and designed to enable non-English
speaking parents to participate fully as partners
in their children's education at the school.
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e) If the petitioner currently operates other
charter schools, the programs designed for English
learners that the petitioner has implemented at
other schools it currently operates.
2) Requires authorizing entities to consider the degree to
which the charter school has implemented programs for
ELs, as specified in their initial charter petition.
3) Requires petitions to convert a Persistently Low
Achieving School to a charter school, to meet the same
petition requirements as is required for other charter
schools, including those related to ELs as specified in
this measure.
4) Makes findings and declarations regarding interventions
to schools identified as Persistently Lowest Achieving
Schools (PLAS) for purposes of implementing the federal
RTTT program and the absence of data about the success
of English learners in charter schools and the
underrepresentation of ELs in many charter schools.
STAFF COMMENTS
1) Need for the bill . According to the author's office,
the purpose of AB 1741, is to ensure that charter
schools have the resources and capacity to provide
appropriate and quality education to English learners.
As local education agencies move to implement
interventions for turning around low achieving schools,
the author contends that this measure will help ensure
that a PLAS converting to a charter school is positioned
to address the needs of English learners who will be
enrolled in the school.
2) English learners . According to the California
Department of Education (CDE), English learners comprise
approximately 25% of all students enrolled in California
public schools. Yet according to the author, only 17%
of charter school enrollments are English learners. A
2009 EdSource report found that charter high schools
enroll 13% fewer students who are either ELs or
redesignated as fluent English proficient (RFEP)
students compared to noncharter schools. A variety of
reasons could account for these differences, including
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the fact that approximately 22% of charter schools are
nonclassroom based and a greater proportion of charter
schools are high schools, which tend to have fewer EL
and RFEP students. Although this bill does not
specifically address EL enrollment in charter schools,
these
enrollment data could change if a significant number of
schools identified as PLAS convert to charter schools.
3) Charter schools . Charter schools are public schools
that provide instruction in any of grades K-12.
Currently, charter schools serve approximately four
percent of the state's 6.3 million public school
students. A charter school is usually created or
organized by a group of teachers, parents and community
leaders, or a community-based organization. Under the
provisions of
SBX5 1 (2010), a governing board can convert a school or
close and reopen a school under a charter school
operator, a charter management organization (CMO), or an
education management organization (EMO) that has been
selected through a locally determined rigorous review
process. According to the CDE, a restart model school
must enroll, within the grades it serves, any former
student who wishes to attend the school.
Under current law, charter schools design their
educational programs around the needs of the students
they will serve. Specific goals and operating
procedures for the charter school are detailed in the
charter, which serves as an agreement between the
authorizing entity and the charter organizer. Under
current law, the petition must include among other
things, a comprehensive description of the educational
program of the school and identify the pupils the school
will serve, specify the "measurable pupil outcomes" for
the school and the method by which pupil progress in
meeting those outcomes is to be measured. Although
current law does not require the petition to include
information for specific pupil populations, governing
boards must be satisfied that the charter is consistent
with sound educational practice prior to authorizing the
charter. Given that it may be difficult for a
petitioner who is seeking to establish a new charter to
know exactly how many English learners the school will
serve, would it make more sense to specify that the
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requirement applies if the developer can reasonably
expect that at least 15 percent of the pupils will be
English learners?
Staff recommends amendments to amend Section 2 of the
bill to specify that if there is a reasonable
expectation that 15 percent of the pupils to be served
by the charter school are English learners.
Except where specifically noted, charter schools are
generally exempt from most laws governing school
districts and schools in order to allow the charter
school the flexibility to innovate and be responsive to
the educational needs of the student population served.
Charter schools are required however, to have
credentialed teachers in core and college preparatory
courses, meet statewide standards, and participate in
state testing programs required for the Academic
Performance Index (API).
The 2009 EdSource report indicated that enrollment in
charter schools has increased from 98,355 in 1999-2000
to 252,645 in 2007-08. According to EdSource, charter
schools as a whole, serve a somewhat different
population of students than noncharter schools.
Charters serve greater proportions of African American
and white students and smaller percentages of Asian and
Hispanic students. The report also noted that 40.5% of
charter schools are high schools compared with 23.3% in
noncharter public schools. The sponsors of this
measure, Californians Together and the California
Association of Bilingual Educators (CABE), contend that
although charter school enrollment has more than doubled
since 2001, there is relatively little data on the
success of English learners in charter schools.
Although the findings and declarations contained in this
measure will not be codified, it is not clear that the
assertion that little data is maintained about the
success of English learners in charter schools is
accurate.
Staff recommends amending the bill to delete subsection
(b) of Section 1 of the bill.
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4) Addressing specific needs . This measure requires
charter schools to identify how the needs of a specific
population will be met. Opponents argue that this bill
is not necessary because current law gives governing
boards' the responsibility and authority to deny
petitions that do not contain a comprehensive
description of the students the school will educate and
the educational programs to be provided to those
students. Opponents also point out that governing
boards have the authority to restructure or not to renew
a school's charter if specific groups within the charter
school's student enrollment are not performing, or there
is evidence their needs are not being addressed.
A variety of studies have shown a strong correlation between
teaching and student achievement. Students who have
more than one ineffective teacher lose ground against
their peers who have highly effective teachers. Since
many of the PLAS schools that convert to a charter
school have been in Program Improvement status for a
number of years, it seems clear that students in these
schools, especially those who are still learning
English, will need highly effective teachers and
educational programs in order to make up ground in their
achievement levels and become successful learners.
Given that many of these turnaround schools are likely
to have large populations of English learners it may be
appropriate to require charter school petitions to
include a more comprehensive description about how the
needs of ELs will be met. Should other specific groups,
such as students with special needs also be addressed?
5) Imposing new requirements . This bill increases the
elements that must be addressed in a charter school
petition, and could be seen as a barrier to establishing
a new or conversion charter school. An argument could
be made however, that the required information will
increase transparency for parents and the public and
enhance a governing board's ability to determine the
"soundness" of the educational programs and services
that will be available to English learners, and in
renewing a charter, greater ability to judge the extent
to which the school's performance is comparable to the
performance of other schools in the district. In light
of the fact that charter schools are a state-sanctioned
intervention model for low performing schools, it could
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also be argued that the new requirements will help
ensure the conditions for improving pupil achievement
levels of English learners.
Amendments taken in Assembly Appropriations clarified that a
petition to establish a charter school pursuant to the
restart of a PLAS needs to meet the same requirements
that petitions for new or conversion charter schools
must meet. Is this provision outside the scope of this
bill?
Staff recommends amendments to delete this provision from the
bill.
6) Fiscal impact . According to the Assembly Appropriations
Committee analysis, this bill could create General
Fund/Proposition 98 state reimbursable mandated costs,
likely less than $50,000 to local education agencies to
review charter petitions with additional information
related to EL pupils. Staff notes that according to a
May 2006 decision by the Commission on State Mandates
(CSM), charter schools are not eligible to claim mandate
reimbursements because they are "voluntarily" created.
7) Related and prior legislation .
SB 1 (Steinberg, Chapter 2, Statutes of 2010, 5th
Extraordinary Session) established a framework for
California's application for the Race to the Top grant
program, including the requirement that schools
identified by the SPI as PLAS implement one of four
school intervention models.
SB 4 (Romero, Chapter 3, Statutes of 2010, 5th Extraordinary
Session) established an Open Enrollment program to allow
any pupil in a low achieving school as defined, to
transfer to another school in the district or to any
school outside of their district of residence. The bill
also established a
Parent Empowerment program authorizing parents of
specified schools to sign a petition requiring a Local
Education Agency to implement a school intervention
model.
AB 2363 (Mendoza) expands existing signature
requirements for conversion charter school petitions to
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include classified employees and requires the signature
petition to prominently display a statement that the
classified employees signing the petition have a
meaningful interest in working at the charter school.
This bill was held in this Committee on June 16, 2010.
AB 1982 (Ammiano) establishes a cap on the number of
charter schools that can be authorized in California,
and makes other changes to charter school authorization
process. This bill is scheduled to be heard in this
Committee on June 30, 2010.
AB 1950 (Brownley) requires enhanced charter school
fiscal and academic accountability standards. This bill
is scheduled to be heard in this Committee on June 30,
2010.
AB 2320 (Swanson) requires charter school petitions to
describe the different and innovative teaching methods
the school will use, how the school will provide
vigorous competition and stimulate continual
improvements within the public school system, and the
means by which the school will achieve a balance of
pupils who live in poverty, are English learners or are
individuals with exceptional needs; deletes the
authorization for the state board of education (SBE) to
approve charter school petitions on appeal; and, limits
state wide benefit charter schools to those that partner
with specific entities. This bill is scheduled to be
heard in this Committee on June 30, 2010.
AB 2543 (Lowenthal), requires the governing board of a
school district or a county board of education to
approve or deny a charter school renewal petition no
later than December 1 of the renewal year; and,
authorizes a charter school to appeal a district board's
denial of a renewal petition to the county board of
education, or a county board's denial of a renewal
petition to the state board, within 30 days of the date
of the denial. This bill is scheduled to be heard in
this Committee on June 30, 2010.
8) Policy arguments .
Proponents of this measure contend that
governing boards and charter schools need better
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direction in order to ensure that English learners
have equal access to the educational opportunities
available in a charter school.
Opponents of this bill argue that current law
requires petitioners to justify the educational
program the school intends to provide and provides
governing boards the authority to judge whether the
petitioner has met its obligation satisfactorily.
SUPPORT
California Council on Teacher Education
California Federation of Teachers
California Teachers Association
Californians Together
Los Angeles County Office of Education
Parent Institute for Quality Education
Public Advocates
San Francisco Unified School District
United Teachers Los Angeles
Letters from Individuals
OPPOSITION
California Charter Schools Association