Good luck to the families- this guy just made it impossible from a authority standpoint, to keep open. They cannot ignore the facts.

Families and communities should be angry as hell at him.

Considering under-enrollment of many campuses, couldn’t these students find adequate space in existing district and charter schools?

That will not be easy, but it appears to be necessary.

They will do well anywhere.

The bill was motivated by Feds telling State DOE they put at risk loss of Federal charter school funding if the state didn’t change and do more to close low performing charter schools.

The was an analysis of the bill:

1) Requires a charter petition, in specifying measurable pupil outcomes, to include outcomes that address increases in pupil academic achievement both school-wide and for all groups of pupils served by the charter school, as specified.

2) Requires a chartering authority to consider increases in pupil academic achievement for all groups of pupils served by a charter school as the most important factor in determining whether to grant a charter renewal or revoke a charter.

It was fear of loss of Federal charter school funding rather than power of the charter school lobby that brought about this amendment to charter law.

Jim Mordecai

The staff’s recommendation is posted on the OUSD website. Each Board member will have the opportunity to support, reject, amend or postpone the charter school staff, and Superintendent Smith’s, recommendation to close AIMS.

It take at least four Board Member votes to pass the staff’s and Superintendent Smith’s recommendation to revoke AIMS charter and close the school.

But, the process is not ended if there is an appeal of the decision to close AIMS to the County Board of Education.

And, such an appeal might be strengthened by SB 1290 that when into effect January 1, 2013, amended Education Code 47607 to add the following provision:

“The authority that granted the charter shall consider increases in pupil academic achievement for all groups served by the charter school as the most important factor in determing whether to revoke the charter.”

Irony is that AIMS’s scores are so high that increases are not meaningful. But, the language is protective of charter schools as an authority considering revoking a charter must make increases in pupil academic achievement for “all groups served by the charter school as the most important factor in determing whether to revoke the charter.”

The power of the charter lobby to advance its special interest in the State Legislature is impressive. Although SB 1290 may help AIMS by making test scores the “most import factor” in revoking a charter, SB 1290 makes revoking charters of charter schools that may doing poorly in raising test scores but improve test scores of one subgroup difficult to close. The bar for revoking charters has been raised which is a contradicktion to the charter school rationale of test score metric closing the poor performing schools.

Jim Mordecai

It looks like you won’t need to wait until tomorrow. The decision is posted on OUSD’s website. It looks like AIMS is being shown the door. Chavis is an angry dog and now he has been cornered. No doubt this will get interesting.