Dive Brief:
- A fairly successful charter high school in Los Angeles, El Camino Real, is under the microscope because of alleged financial mismanagement since it became a charter in 2011.
- The Los Angeles Times reports the Los Angeles Unified School District enumerated the findings of a recent investigation to school leaders last week, including potentially inappropriate spending, inadequate accounting and oversight and public meeting law violations.
- The school has defended its actions and responses to issues that have been brought to light in the past year, calling the steps by LAUSD to bring the school back under district control an example of its increasing hostility toward charter schools as its own revenues decline.
Dive Insight:
Los Angeles, like other big cities, has witnessed an explosion in charter schools in the last two decades that has represented near-unprecedented competition. As a growing portion of state dollars get funneled to the alternative public schools, some districts are getting increasingly desperate. LAUSD opened 16 new magnet schools this year in hopes of attracting some students back to district-controlled schools. It also opened an all-girls school this year, with an all-boys school planned for next year.
In Detroit, competition between charter schools and traditional neighborhood schools has created a crisis across the board as parents struggle to make sense of all their choices and schools compete for families. In the meantime, large charter management organizations begin to look like their traditional district counterparts, bureaucracy and all.