During his February announcement that he’s running for California’s superintendent of public instruction, Assembly member Al Muratsuchi, D- Los Angeles, vowed to “fight to defend our schools and our students” against attacks on public education from the Trump administration.
Yet Muratsuchi’s signature legislation this year—and one being heard this week in the education committee he chairs—is the biggest attack we’ve seen on the ability of California parents to secure the best-possible education for their kids. Assembly Bill 84 would give the department he hopes to lead new powers to quash charters schools and force them to become like struggling traditional public schools.
Charters are publicly funded, but their success has angered the educational establishment for years. While everyone wants to ensure that charter schools operate at the highest level of fiscal probity, AB 84 would trigger expanded audits and vest new powers in state auditors to harass these schools. Charters have succeeded because they are freed from bureaucratic constraints, but this bill would destroy what makes them special. It’s a cynical effort that will hurt rather than help them.
In addition to imposing massive new requirements on all charter schools, the legislation would quash non-classroom-based alternatives: “The bill would limit the size of the totality of non-classroom-based charter schools that a school district may authorize the charter for based on the average daily attendance of the school district.” This bald-faced attack seems driven by Muratsuchi’s own agenda rather than, say, any obvious effort (at this point) from the teachers’ unions.
“Instead of preserving the flexibility and innovation that make charter schools successful, this bill imposes excessive regulation, restricts growth and prioritizes bureaucratic compliance over student learning,” the Charter Schools Development Center correctly noted. Charter foes have been chipping away at the independence of such schools for years, driven largely by their goal of protecting the ill-performing public schools from competition. This bill takes that effort in astounding new directions.
Why such hostility to largely successful charter schools? Public-school enrollment has been on a steady decline. “Over the past five years, enrollment has declined at nearly three-quarters of California school districts, bringing added fiscal pressures and difficult downsizing decisions,” the Public Policy Institute of California explained in 2023. Think of AB 84 as an effort to bolster public-school attendance by clamping down on the competition.
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Don’t gut 2013 PEPRA pension reform, reject AB 569 DMV keeping killer drivers on the road Stop intrusions into Americans’ rights to use cash as well as credit DOGE isn’t enough to tame big government The city of Los Angeles brought this fiscal crisis on itself Furthermore, public-school test scores have been abysmal, especially since the COVID-19 disruptions. Despite a slight recent uptick, California public-school test scores are nothing short of shocking: Only 47% of students met the state English standards, while only 35.5% met the state’s math standards. Meanwhile, charter-school students significantly outperformed similar students in test results.Lawmakers who are serious about boosting school performance should seek out ways for the traditional schools to mimic charters rather than quash charters to bolster traditional schools. The goal should be better schools for everyone, but we suspect that public-school advocates mainly are concerned about protecting the existing union-dominated, competition-averse system.
California’s public-school spending continues to soar, yet the results remain poor. Yet AB 84 is more interested in taking funds away from more cost-efficient charters to prop up a costly system that isn’t producing tangible results. That Muratsuchi is a leading candidate to oversee the state’s educational system makes the bill even more troubling.
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