State Senator Tom Umberg has introduced legislation, SB 249, that will make it more difficult for the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) to continue its assault on public schools in Orange County.  Umberg’s proposal is one part of a solution to the loopholes in existing law that allow the OCBE to impose charter schools in local school districts that adamantly do not want them.  While Umberg’s legislation will not address the immediate crisis imposed by the OCBE on school districts in Orange County, it will provide a statewide framework that will make county school boards more representative institutions.  Write your state representatives and the governor in support of this!

The Charter School Loophole

In 2000, California voters passed Proposition 39 in a campaign founded on the premise that charter schools would provide an alternative to allegedly failing public schools.  These charter schools would hypothetically be venues of pedagogical innovation and create models that could be adopted in the traditional public schools.  They would give parents a choice of where to send their children if they perceived that the local public schools were not suitable for their families.  These charters, moreover, would place the local public schools in a “competitive” market of education that would force the presumably staid bureaucracies of the traditional schools to manifest the presumed dynamism of the charter schools.

No Child Left Behind

The assumption of failing public schools was one of the major platforms in the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush.  This purported failure of public schools elicited the program of massive federal intervention in public education that Bush sponsored known as No Child Left Behind. NCLB measured all schools by a common standard in relation to something akin to a federal curriculum.  The Bush administration imposed this program with little regard for factors related to the social and economic character of the schools being measured.  Failure to measure up to those standards resulted in federal intervention by alleged education specialists who usually knew little about the communities and schools they were contracted to remedy.

No Child Left Behind was a disaster.  Bush’s own Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, became its greatest critic.  She has spent years documenting the fundamental truth of education:  schools are nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the communities in which they reside.  Academic success directly correlates to levels of wealth.  Schools in poor communities can succeed, but they can only do so in coordination with dedicated educators and community members willing to make extraordinary investment with children who must face the various challenges of poverty.

Dana Perino epitomized the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s attempt to rally around public schools as a political prop under NCLB.  In one of her press conferences, it became clear that the pretty young press secretary had no idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.  Under NCLB, ignorance of such key moments in 20^th century history might have spurred federal intervention in a school district.  It was a crisis in education if such ignorance occurred in a Title I school district with a predominant student population of English language learners.  In Bush world, though, such ignorance could get you appointed as Press Secretary – as long as you were nice to look at.

Under Trump, at least Republicans have stopped pretending to care about the performance of public schools.  They are simply seeking to abolish them and replace them with propaganda academies aligned with Christian nationalism.  Bad science and dishonest history are the foundations of education in the new Republican Party.  Under Trump, the Republican Party is now free to embrace the stupid, celebrate the stupid, and worship the stupid.

Why California’s Schools are so Bad . . . and Good

The issue of wealth partly explains why California schools rank so low on a national scale.  California’s academic performance is low particularly since so many of our schools operate either in the context of desperate rural or urban poverty.  Moreover, our schools are ethnically and linguistically diverse in ways with few parallels in the nation. 

Public schools in wealthy counties like Orange perform spectacularly well, as well as any in the nation.  Public schools in poor rural or urban counties like Alameda or Kern or Tulare, do not fare as well on average.  Academic performance is especially low in the migrant farmworker communities of the San Joaquin Valley.  Such poor communities are also where the highest rates of illiteracy, child and infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, and crime occur. 

The performance of California public schools is thus not significantly different from those in the states of Texas and Florida, where adoption of charter schools has been much more extensive and the comparative results have not been noteworthy.  Charters, clearly, are not the answer to allegedly failing public schools.  The assumption that charter schools are a major solution to a complex problem, however, became the basis for passing Proposition 39.

Schools as Scapegoats

Proposition 39 passed because it became too easy for politicians and voters to blame poverty and its affiliated social ills on poor schools rather than attributing poor schools to the social ills associated with impoverished communities.  Never has the misattribution of cause and effect been so persistently appropriated.  Never has the misattribution of cause and effect been so readily exploited. 

Charter schools thus became a bipartisan panacea and political platform for well-intentioned idealists, wealthy philanthropists, and career grifters looking for a way to divert the 700 billion of taxpayer dollars into their own pockets and those of their cronies.  Obviously, any school that can preselect its students and circumvent the requirement of public schools to meet the needs of ALL students in a community can outperform the local public schools that are prohibited from filtering out students with learning challenges, behavioral problems, and difficult home lives.

Oversimplification of the challenges of public schools makes it difficult to break the bi-partisan obsession with them.  Public schools are easily derided.  Horror stories about instances of bad teachers doing bad things occur and they appeal to the salacious demands of various media.  Those media rarely mention that constraints on teacher behaviors are much greater at public schools than at private and parochial schools.  Anyone who speaks on behalf of the importance or success of public schools suffers attacks for justifying a wasteful bureaucracy or being a stooge of teachers’ unions.  Politicians blame public schools for juvenile delinquency, crime rates, and the persistence of poverty.  Schools are an easy political target.  The extremist right, however, goes beyond that.

Project 2025

The Republican Party is now fully invested in the destruction of the public school system that has evolved in the US since the founding of the republic.  They attack its secularism as well as its refusal to embrace their core and false belief that the United States is a Christian nation whose doctrine of church-state separation should not preclude taxpayer money from going to explicitly Christian schools.  They claim that secular public schools are hotbeds of “woke” ideology that not merely accept but actively promote homosexuality, transgender identities, racial theories targeting white males, and Marxism.  They expect taxpayers who might not be Christian or who might be members of the LGBTQ+ community to contribute to schools that deplore their very existence.  The destruction of public schools is central to the Project 2025 blueprint for America.

Republicans have rallied around a program of charter schools that have emerged in relation to Hillsdale College, a small Christian college in Michigan with close ties to the family of former Trump Secretary of Education, Betsy De Vos.  The Hillsdale curriculum hides its religiosity behind a façade of classicism.  It uses Nicomachean Ethics to justify authoritarianism and frame the history of the United States in Platonic idealistic terms.  Its legal positivism suggests that racism in the US ended with the signing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s. 

The inference is that if we do not teach this idealized version of American history, we undermine both the constitutional and the religious foundation that has made the United States great.  This curriculum has been widely adopted in red states and counties and has become an obsession with the extremists who control the OCBE.

All five members of the OCBE as well as its appointed superintendent are invested in the Hillsdale curriculum as represented by the two regional private charter schools that embrace that curriculum: the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) and the California Republic Leadership Academy (CRLA).  The Charter Public Schools PAC and the California Policy Center contributed over half of the $425,000 of Mari Barke’s most recent campaign for her seat on the OCBE.  Mari’s ex-husband, Jeff, sits on the board for the OCCA.  Republican extremists hold all five seats on the board, and the recent passing of the elected superintendent Al Mijares enabled the board to appoint their fellow extremist Stefan Bean (left) to that post.  The monthly meetings of the OCBE are little other than sessions devoted to figuring out ways to use the Proposition 39 loophole to impose charter schools on local districts that do not want them. 

Why Have Democrats failed at Municipal Politics in the OC?

Two core questions arise from the charter school issue in Orange County.  The first is how an increasingly purple county like Orange is still so red at the OCBE.  The second is why the Democrats have not done more to thwart extremist efforts to undermine public schools.  Senator Umberg’s legislation will only address the first question.  The second question is the most challenging one because it will require Democrats to abandon politically appealing but largely illusory support for charter schools in the public mind.

Republicans in Orange County have been very effective at municipal politics because they understand the partisan significance of ostensibly non-partisan offices.  For example, Republicans disproportionally control water boards because they know that in California water is a political issue as much as a pragmatic one.   Over the course of the last decade Republicans have turned local school boards and the county board into venues to fight their culture wars against “wokeness.” 

Extremists on the OCBE have specifically targeted three school boards as venues to promote their war on Critical Race Theory (CRT), transgender rights, and secular education.  Those three are the Orange, Capistrano, and Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Districts.  By using these culture wars to generate massive turmoil and waste, they are achieving their goal of destroying public schools and diverting taxpayer money into unaccountable charters.  These fiscally and emotionally exhausting battles will continue as long as the OCBE remains under the control of extremists.  This problem will not change any time soon.

The Benefits of November Elections

Even though Senator Umberg’s legislation will only take effect in 2026 and only address part of the problem, it will have beneficial long-term consequences for public schools.  By moving the OCBE election to the November general election in even-numbered years and away from the spring direct primary election, voter participation in OCBE elections will significantly increase. 

Moving the OCBE election to November will have the further benefit of aligning it with local school board elections.  This will make more transparent the associations between the extremists on the county board and those running for local boards.  For example, there are many people who have come to know and dislike Leandra Blades in the PYLUSD who are completely unaware of her association with Mari Barke and all the other members of the OCBE.  The public needs to have a much better understanding of how charter school and homeschool PACs collude with major Republican organizations to undermine Orange County’s outstanding public schools. 

Other features of Senator Umberg’s legislation will further place public education at the center of our political discussion, where it belongs.  The OCBE election would hereafter align with the election of the Superintendent of Schools every four years.  It will also reduce the role of money in campaigns.  It is ridiculous that it costs nearly $500,000 to run for a seat on the OCBE and around $1 million to run for county superintendent.  The massively increasing costs of running for school board gives a preposterous advantage to the charter and private school PACs, who are funded by plutocrats who see the potential for grift in charter schools.  Excellent educators who would be wonderful representatives on both the county and local boards are too often driven away from running for the local and county boards by the enormous financial cost and personal attacks directed against anyone who challenges the extremist agenda.

Lessons from the PYLUSD

The PYLUSD provides an example of how the charade of charter schools plays out to the detriment of the excellent public schools that operate in the district.  The Magnolia and CRLA charter schools currently have demanded access to PYLUSD properties using the Proposition 39 loopholes.  The Magnolia Charter School is a national network of elementary and secondary schools founded by a billionaire Turkish cleric.  Its schools employ staff often contracted from Turkey.  These employees do not enjoy many of the rights, benefits, and protections offered to teachers in public schools.  Moreover, these teachers are not credentialed in the same way as those working in California’s public schools.  (Can you imagine if we outsourced police and fire services in this manner?)   

Its curriculum of these charters is neither new or unique, adding nothing to what is already offered in the district.  It will nevertheless be used as an illusory alternative to those parents and students in the district who have been told to distrust the sinister public schools that operate in collusion with the malicious teachers’ union. 

The billionaire Turkish cleric and the charter school PAC will fund advertising campaigns promoting the false notion that Magnolia and CRLA are great places to learn.  The students who choose to attend that school will divert Average Daily Attendance (ADA) money away from the public schools that operate under the authority of locally elected school boards.  ADA is the money that the state of California pays to each school based on student enrollment and attendance.  Such independent charters do not have the same degree of state oversight and local scrutiny as do the public schools overseen by local boards.

This farce plays out even worse with the CRLA.  The CRLA has failed to gain the approval of both the educational experts at the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) and the District Office of the PYLUSD.  CRLA’s public presentations at the OCBE and the PYLUSD board meeting were abysmal.  Its pseudo-classicist pedagogy offered nothing that every certificated educator in the county did not already know.  Its curriculum is transparently shallow and does not hold a candle to any number of programs already operating in the PYLUSD.  Its Christian Nationalist bias is poorly concealed behind the façade of its classicism, as illustrated in the content of its curriculum.  It was not surprising when both the educators at the OCDE and the PYLUSD rejected authorizing it. 

The opposition of both local school districts and the experts in the OCDE did not dissuade the extremists on the OCBE.  It has decided to impose the CRLA in the PYLUSD regardless.  Using CRLA and its affiliated OCCA are ways for the OCBE to set up institutions that will drain public money from institutions that are not accountable to the public through elected school boards.  Once the extremists on the county board managed to force Becky Gomez off the board and replace the elected Al Mijares with the appointed Stefan Bean, OCBE monthly meetings have been little other than promotional events for the OCCA and CRLA.  Their goal is to destroy universal, free, and secular public education as it has developed since the beginning of the republic.

The fraudulent L. Ken Williams provided one of the most tellingly absurd moments at an OCBE meeting last year.  The utterly unqualified Williams has sat on the board since 1996.  Last March, he defeated the supremely qualified Dr. Nancy Watkins due to the organizational power of the charter school racket working in collusion with megachurches and big Republican money.  I was sitting next to Nancy at another dreadful meeting of the OCBE, where Williams was droning on about the many “virtues” of the OCCA, a sibling parasite of the CRLA.  (Please note the emphasis on the word “virtue” in the messaging of these Hillsdale acolyte institutions.  Its connotations are both misogynist and homophobic.) At one point Williams made the insultingly ridiculous statement that none of the public schools teaches using the Socratic method.  I whispered to Nancy that I remembered about twenty years earlier when she led the entire staff at Valencia High School in how to adapt Socratic methods in large classrooms of 36 students with various learning abilities and challenges in various subjects.  (Socrates got to pick his students.  That would make a difference!) We just shook our heads and smiled.  It is hard to argue with the willfully ignorant.  Indeed, it is a fool’s errand.

Resist the hemlock though!

Leandra’s Political Charade

The real charade occurred when Leandra Blades and her two extremist cohorts on the PYLUSD board voted to reject the application of the CRLA to operate as an independent charter school in that district.  She even attended a meeting of the OCBE to indicate to all her friends and campaign endorsers on that board that she was not their puppet (wink, wink).  Blades wanted the gullible to “know” that she opposed using the Proposition 39 loophole to impose the CRLA on the PYLUSD.  Leandra was therefore publicly on record twice in opposition to the CRLA being placed in the PYLUSD.  What a farce.

Of course, she knew all along that her publicly stated opinion did not matter; nor did she want it to.  She knew all along that the OCBE would impose the charter regardless.  It was all just a political cover to distance herself from what she knew would be a policy that would further drain the district of money and programs.  What she has NOT done is to criticize her friends on the board for what she knows is a policy that will hurt the existing schools in the PYLUSD.  The destruction of public schools is their goal.  They just cannot say it in so many words.  Whenever possible, Leandra will have her cake and eat it too.

Williams as Emblematic of the OCGOP

One incident from Ken Williams’ recent past illustrates how the lawlessness and corruption of the MAGA Republican Party has infested the OCGOP and the OCBE.  On March 11, 2023, the then 65-year-old Williams had a physical confrontation on a 55-mph roadway in Mission Viejo with a 20-year-old named Caden O’Malley.  While the district attorney’s office was unable to determine the aggressor beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore did not file charges, there was enough evidence for the young Mr. O’Malley to file a civil suit against Mr. Williams.  We know from reports that Mr. Williams beat and choked the young man and abandoned him on the road.  Mr. O’Malley crawled to the side of the road and phoned paramedics.

According to Williams, the entire incident provided a convenient ploy to be exploited by his “woke” adversaries.  Williams’ response to this incident is the Trumpian litany of grievance and descent into irrelevancy.  He declared: “My political opponents are using this.”  Without a hint of irony, he claimed that people were attacking him for “protecting the innocence of children, charter schools and staying away from the woke curriculum such as critical race theory that would harm the parent-child relationship.”  He continued: “The woke left attacks me because I oppose defunding the police, my pro-law enforcement and law-and-order public positions and oppose weakening criminal laws.”  In sum, a well-documented incident of evident road rage that clearly reflects poor judgment on the part of Mr. Williams becomes his launching point for an attack on those who suggest it might be a cause to consider when deciding whether he was the best qualified to serve on the OCBE.

The story bears repeating for clarity’s sake.  Mr. Williams, an elected official, beat the crap out of a 20-year-old and abandoned him in the road.  He failed to assist the beaten young man, to phone for assistance, or to immediately inform the police of the incident.  He is, keep in mind, a reserve officer for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.  It is doubtful that anyone who was not so well-connected with the very top of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department or the Orange County District Attorney’s Office would have emerged from this without criminal consequences. 

Mr. O’Malley and his attorney are so confident of their case that they are willing to take the risk of presenting it in civil court.  Why this is not in criminal court is a question that should be directed toward Don Barnes and Todd Spitzer.

Even though this despicable incident was fully known at the time of Mr. Williams’ reelection to the OCBE, it did not constrain the typical litany of Republican extremists from endorsing him.  This included every other member of the OCBE, Representatives Young Kim and Michelle Steel, Supervisor Don Wagner, and retired State Senator John Moorlach.  The Orange County Register looked past the road rage incident and the infinitely greater qualifications of Nancy Watkins to endorse Williams. 

It gets worse.  Sheriff Don Barnes endorsed him after he had left the scene of this crime and failed to report it.  This raises the basic question of why a sheriff would deem it fit to endorse someone for a non-partisan school board position in the first place?  Finally, despite the road rage incident and the fact that he embraced the deadly anti-vaccine and anti-mask of his friend Jeff Barke’s America’s Frontline Doctors, he continued to serve on the staff of St. Joseph Hospital, Hoag Hospital, and the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.  It is hard to imagine a more fitting example of how the broader structures of our corrupted political culture produce fraud in our municipal elections.

How Extremists Came to Dominate the OCBE

The corruption of municipal politics converges with factors unique to Orange County to produce a situation particularly auspicious for exploitation by the charter school racket. Having the OCBE elections in March rather than November disproportionately favors the role of money and megachurches.  The fact that there are only five areas for all of Orange County means that there is a massive number of registered voters in each of the trustee areas.  Each trustee area has a population of around 625,000 residents, population counts that exceed those of the states of Wyoming and Vermont and is comparable to the entire populations of Alaska and both Dakotas.

Most voters, moreover, have no clue what the OCBE even does.  While many people know well what is happening in their local school districts, they have no idea about how the OCBE might be affecting what happens in them.  Up until about ten years ago, that was not a major problem.  In prior times, the board and superintendent positions tended to attract real educators with real educations and an authentic interest in making our schools better.  However, the same destructive forces that have brought us Trump’s SCOTUS are also funding the national attack on public schools.  The power of billionaire money devoted to the destruction of public education has created an array of pseudo-intellectual “think tanks” and institutes promoting variations of nihilism, objectivism, and Christian Nationalism cloaked in the guise of classicism.  This message is fed variously through social media and the network of megachurches that defines Orange County political culture. This interface of money, facile ideology, and false Christianity has recently been well documented in Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Orange County is uniquely equipped to fight such culture wars in the state of California.    

The odd thing is that while the influence of the Republican Party in Orange County politics has waned over recent decades, it remains extraordinarily strong in such municipal bodies as water boards and school boards.  The power in such institutions is not readily apparent to anyone not deeply immersed in the relevant issues of water and education.  In a political situation where there is no perceived turmoil, ignorance invariably favors the incumbent. 

This last point, as much as any, explains the persistence of such a notable fool like Ken Williams on this board for nearly thirty years.  The good news is that his position on the OCBE has not opened an opportunity for him to run for higher office, something that he has clearly aspired to but that his Republican Party overlords have not permitted.  Marrying a woman younger than some of his children and putting in hair plugs has not made him any younger or more viable as a candidate for higher office.  He is just getting older and angrier, possibly due to the use of gender-affirming hormones.  Along with the other four extremist members of the board, he will continue working to undermine public schools in those districts most vulnerable to the pathetic charter schools the OCBE is peddling. 

The Broader Republican Attack on

Science, Education, and Knowledge

Even though an angry buffoon like Williams has sat on the board for decades, more recent trends in the county have made his presence more pernicious.  This interface of money, institutions and mega-churches has made Orange County particularly susceptible to corruption on the Board of Education.  The OC has long been known as the cash cow for every Republican aspiring to higher national office.  When the 2010 Citizens United decision turned federal, state, and local elections into plutocratic playgrounds, it tilted the playing field in favor of the Lincoln Club and the myriad OC billionaires to funnel money into politics through various means.  There are over 40 billionaires who either reside or own a home in Orange County.  Orange County thus represents about 5% of all the billionaires in the United States.  Most of them are major donors to the Republican Party, including Palmer Luckey (Matt Gaetz’s brother-in-law) whose company, Anduril Indutries, recently scored billions in defense contracts thanks to the work of Representative Young Kim.  Young Kim has in turn endorsed such educational absurdities as Ken Williams and Leandra Blades.

Republicans like Young Kim, Steven Choi, and Phillip Chen need to be constantly asked whether they think it is permissible for county boards of education to impose charter schools on districts that distinctly to not want them.  They also need to be constantly asked whether they support Republican cuts to funding for university research in science and technology.  UC Irvine has rapidly become one of the outstanding research universities in the world.  One of its many strengths is in the fields of medical research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and heart disease.  Such medical research creates agglomeration effects that place UCI at the center of technological advancement not just in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, but also electronics, software development, and robotics.  As much as any other factor, California’s universities contribute to making our state the fifth largest economy in the world.  The return on educational investment has been spectacular.  Kim, Choi, and Chen should be persistently compelled to address cuts to this research coming from their party’s leadership.

When a fool like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is put in charge of Health and Human Services and an ignorant monstrosity like Linda McMahon is put in charge of the Department of Education, all Republicans need to be held accountable for that.  Our education system, from primary through university, is rotting from the top.  Universities in other parts of the globe are quickly attracting the best and brightest from around the world.  This is Project 2025 in action.  Thanks to the failure of leadership in the Republican Party, we are becoming the world’s laughingstock.

Today’s Republican Party represents an assault on all science and scholarship, yet Democrats need to be much bolder in defending both scholarship and the system of public schools.  Our public schools and universities are the truest foundation of American greatness.  While the charter schools being promoted by the five Republicans on the OCBE represent this assault on science and scholarship in our elementary and secondary schools, too many Democrats have succumbed to the money and the simplistic logic of the charter remedy.

While Senator Umberg’s legislation will make it possible for county board elections to be more democratic and representative, it is only a partial solution that will have to play out over a long period of time.  The simple and immediate solution to the practice of the OCBE imposing unwanted and destructive charter schools in local districts that do not want them would be to eliminate or revise the provision of Proposition 39 that allows county boards to impose charter schools.  This solution, however, has several hurdles to cross.

Public Schools are the Heart of Local Communities.

Even in a blue state like California, there remains a consensus that charter schools can provide a worthy alternative to existing public schools and are often venues for educational innovation.  There are many flaws in this consensus opinion.

Thanks to the work of Diane Ravitch and others, we know why successful districts are successful and we know why unsuccessful districts are not successful.  It can be explained in one word:  money.  While many wealthy parents send their children to elite private or parochial schools at personal expense, others live in districts that pass bonds to build the best public school educational facilities available.  Still others can afford private tutors to assist the children of privilege who might be enrolled in public school or the expanding array of homeschool programs offered by various districts. 

The expansion of homeschool options thus becomes another venue in which the public sphere has been altered in favor of the wealthy.  Homeschooling either assumes a stay-at-home parent or parents able to afford tutors.  This class discrimination played out recently in the PYLUSD when the then extremist school board majority and its superintendent deliberately closed the Buena Vista Virtual Academy (BVVA), an innovative alternative program that would have allowed for less privileged students to take courses from home in an on-line format with teacher supervision.  These are often students who must stay at home during the day to take care of the elderly or the very young while their parents go off to work.  In some instances, these are students who are unhoused.  This was an innovative program envisioned by a district educator who herself had raised a child while living in a car for a time. 

Such an innovative program would not be tolerated by the destructive extremists on the PYLUSD board or its Superintendent.  Superintendent Cherniss forced the Buena Vista Virtual Academy out of its home because he wanted to locate the elitist Universal Sports Institute (USI) at that site.  At great cost to the district and as part of the destruction of the BVVA program, the district rushed through a construction project only to abandon it in favor of locating most of the resources of the USI at a site projected to become an independent charter school. 

This is just another example of how charter schools have become a front in the class warfare that has been declared by the adherents of Project 2025. Tricia Quintero, a recently elected member of the board who had prevailed over her extremist opponent, pointed out at a recent PYLUSD board meeting that not a single athlete from Valencia High School (VHS) had enrolled in USI.  VHS has by far the highest number of Title I students and Latinos.  Parents and students at VHS do not generally have the wherewithal to regularly drive to a remote site away from their high school gyms for more refined training.  Quintero further pointed out that there were also only a few athletes from El Dorado High School, a school with comparable demographics to VHS.

Tricia’s son was one of the best athletes in the district last year.  He wondered why any student should not have the best possible coaches and equipment available at each of the school sites.  He was not really interested in training apart from his teammates.  His attitude endorses the value of teamwork, leadership, and community.  Schools are community institutions.  Anything that physically removes students from their local elementary or secondary school can serve to undermine the sense of community that public schools uniquely provide.

Why Some Democrats Support Charter Schools

It is so often this sense of community that gets lost in prescribing charter schools as a cure.  Local schools are the foundation of community.  Local school boards are the foundation of democracy.  Any effort to circumvent the authority of the local school board is thus an attack on the most basic institution of democracy.  Why, then, has the overwhelmingly Democratic California State Legislature not closed the Proposition 39 loophole that allows for county boards to impose charter schools in districts that do not want them?  Again, the answer is probably money.

Even though charter schools almost invariably subvert the ability of local communities to operate their schools within the framework of state law and the federal constitution, it remains difficult to sway Democratic politicians to oppose charters.  Legislation attempting to restrict charter school enrollment in 2016 failed in the California State Legislature after the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) poured around $18 million into the pockets of legislators and lobbyists that year.  Major contributors to the CCSA at that time included Democratic Party donors Doris Fisher of Gap clothing company ($4.2 million) and Reed Hastings of Netflix ($2 million).  Three very Republican members of the Walmart family found it in their interests to add $2 million to California charter schools from their privileged perches outside the state.  Add to that money flow the many millions that come from the megachurch affiliated Homeschool Legal Defense Association, an organization that opposes any regulation on homeschooling and has provided cover for many instances of child abuse.  These have combined to tilt the bipartisan money scales heavily in favor of charters.

The charter school option offers too many temptations for politicians of all stripes to forego.  In addition to wealthy idealists like Reed Hastings, Doris Fisher, Andre Agassi, and others, politicians supporting charter schools include such prominent figures as Barack Obama and even Bernie Sanders.  It would be one thing if these wealthy donors funded private institutions targeting at-risk youth in troubled urban or rural school districts.  While the loss of these students would deprive the public schools of their ADA money, the ADA money would NOT flow to the private school and further undermine the funding for students attending the public school. That is, while the affected district would lose its portion of ADA to the state, it would not lose it to the private institution that would be competing with it for those funds.  The diversion of taxpayer money to independent charters can be devastating to a school district forced to compete in a market where the rules favor the private interests.

This is how all private and parochial schools have operated in this country from the beginning.    No one is questioning the right of parents to send their kids to private schools or parochial schools at their own expense.  Nor is anyone questioning the right of private interests to operate schools designed to assist students in communities where the public schools might benefit from a new vision for education.  The Montessori schools provide an excellent example of an alternative educational concept that addresses the educational needs of various socioeconomic communities in the country in a way that does not significantly harm the ability of the public schools to function effectively. 

The problem occurs when charter schools operating under an authority outside the jurisdiction of the local school district begins to draw ADA money out of that district.  At that point, the will of the voters in that district has been undermined.  At that point, the voters in that district have lost control over what happens to their taxpayer dollars.

On the Resnicks’ “Wonderful Schools”

A good example of a well-intentioned charter school sponsored by Democratic donors would be the Wonderful College Prep Academy sponsored by Stewart and Lynda Resnick in Delano and Lost Hills in Kern County.  The Resnicks live in a Beaux-Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.  They also happen to be the wealthiest farmers in the United States.  Their wealth derives in part from being the owners of The Wonderful Company, formerly Paramount Farms.  If you have eaten a Wonderful pomegranate, mandarin, almond or pistachio; drunk a bottle of FIJI water or Justin wine; or purchased flowers from Teleflora; you have contributed to the wealth empire of the Resnicks. 

Their landholdings and claims to water are the foundation of their wealth.  If you drive on Highway 46 west of the I5 and then turns north on the 33, you will drive past a seemingly endless stretch of orchards belonging to the Resnicks.  You will journey across miles and miles of orchards without seeing any sign of residency.  Doing so reminded me of a hiking trip I made many years ago with some friends in the Bieszczady Mountains (eastern Beskids), where we looked down on a collective farm across the border in Ukraine.  In the eastern San Joaquin Valley you can see seemingly endless acres of orchard without signs of human settlement just as in the former Soviet Union you could see endless acres of grains, also without sign of human habitation.  There are striking parallels between late-stage capitalism and the former Soviet system, but that is the subject for another time. 

By the standards of today’s plutocrats, the Resnicks’ wealth is relatively modest at “only” $9 billion.  This pales compared to the $320 billion of Elon Musk, the $218 billion of Jeff Bezos, and the $214 billion of Mark Zuckerberg.  The Resnicks’ wealth, however, is tied into the relatively stable commodities of agricultural land and water rights that are not prone to the market volatility currently being experienced by those whose wealth resides in other sectors of the economy.

The ultimate source of the Resnicks’ power and influence, though, comes from the controlling interest they hold in the Kern Water Bank.  Water politics in California are not for the fainthearted, and the Resnicks have played these politics as effectively as anyone.  Their negotiation of the Monterey Amendments with the California Department of Water Resources and State Water Project contractors has been the subject of investigative journalism, documentary films, and season 3 of the Goliath TV series, ever so ironically presented on Amazon Prime Video.  In simple terms, one might consider the story of the Resnicks as The Beverly Hillbillies turned on its head:  elite urban tycoons go to some of the poorest rural communities to consolidate their wealth.

The Resnicks are also good Democrats.  According to the magnificent phone app Goods Unite Us, 83% of The Wonderful Company donations goes to Democrats.  They are also supporters of reducing the influence of money in politics through campaign finance reform.  Despite their strong support for campaign finance reform, they contribute a lot to state and national politicians.  Recently they made major donations to Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden.  They are also in regular contact with and support of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Whether the Resnick investment in charter schools in Delano and Lost Hills is sincerely philanthropic or further evidence of exploitation is arguable.  Much of what they do in these communities is laudable and has certainly opened doors of opportunity for young people who might otherwise have had none.  Their investment in the schools, however, poses the same problems as their investments in agriculture.  Do the ventures of the Resnicks provide an overall benefit to the communities in which their corporate interests operate or has their wealth been obtained at the expense of those without such clout?  Are they feeding a fundamentally corrupted system or are they altering it as only a wealthy person could given the plutocratic reality of our current polity?

The schools and targeted community investments the Resnicks have sponsored might be seen as something of a modern version of a Potemkin Village.  While the region of Kern and Tulare counties where the Wonderful Company operates has some of the most desperately impoverished communities in the nation, the pueblos where they have invested stand out as islands of modest well-being, economic stability, and low crime.  The same is true for the charter schools they fund and oversee.

These schools effectively operate as private schools for kids who cannot afford to go to a private school.  Admission requirements for entry are high.  Expectations are high.  Student performance in these schools is unsurprisingly higher than that in the local public schools.  There is no question that the Wonderful schools have created unique opportunities for those able to gain entry.  Is this, however, the best way to address the needs of the larger community?

The Wonderful College Preparation Academy (WCPA) does represent a substantial loss to the Delano Joint Union High School District (DJUHSD).  The approximately 600 students enrolled in the WCPA draw around $7.2 million from the operational funds from the DJUHSD and funnel that money to the Kern County Board of Education (KCBE) in Bakersfield for operational oversight.  Such taxpayer money no longer remains under the control of local taxpayers but rather under the control of a more distant and less directly accountable bureaucracy.  By diverting funding from the DJUHSD board of trustees to the KCBE, the WCPA diminishes the control of the local community over its schools.

Would the millions donated by the Resnicks to the WCPA have been better invested in a magnet program to one of the three comprehensive high schools in DJUHSD? While use of the word “donated” here may not be the best choice because Lynda Resnick is nothing if not a marketing genius, the loss of $7.2 million also needs to be weighed against the loss to the public schools of some of its best students with some of the parents most able to serve those public schools.  Anyone who has ever taught in a public school knows the absolute value of having even a small handful of student leaders and a small group of engaged parents supporting the school through the Parent, Teacher, Student Association. 

The contributions of such students and parents reverberate through all the programs in the school over years.  They provide the conduit for those parents who support the school but who may not have the time or means to be as engaged.  Too often, charter schools deprive the public schools not just of some of its best scholars but some of its best leaders.  Cities and towns like Delano, Earlimart, and Lost Hills need leaders who know their communities.  The public schools are thus primary venues where local communities develop.

While time and changes in agricultural practices have altered some of the deep divisions that characterized Delano during the grape strikes of the Cesar Chavez era, deep social divisions persist.  These communities remain exploited, and enormous divisions of wealth persist that no longer focus racial elements to the same degree as in the earlier period.  The Wonderful Company has generated wealth, but its distribution remains uneven.  The region remains a center of undocumented migration and persistent fear of the undocumented to report anything to the police.  Crime consequently remains high, especially those crimes related to the cross border illicit drug trade.  These problems have recently been examined in the brilliant book by Jessica Garrison, The Devil’s Harvest: A Ruthless Killer, a Terrorized Community, and the Search for Justice in California’s Central Valley.

Again, public schools are no more and no less than a reflection of the communities in which they operate.  Charter schools that operate outside the control of a local school board are rarely if ever a solution to the broader challenges of a troubled community.  One of the reasons that academic performance in poor rural communities remains low is that it is extraordinarily difficult to properly represent the needs and interests of most of the families in those communities. 

In impoverished communities especially, wealthier members of the community tend to dominate seats on the school boards.  It takes time and money not only to run for school board but to sit on them for a term.  The vested interests in such communities rather tend to represent the needs of real estate agents and local contractors than the educational needs of the bulk of students.  Further spoiling the quest for better schools over the last decade are the political factors related to megachurches with pastors suffering from messianic complexes and apocalyptic visions.

School board politics follows the same money as partisan politics, and the money in these poor rural communities derives primarily from corporate agricultural interests.  The Resnicks represent the exception to the dominance of local politics by the big money of Trump supporters in the rural communities of the San Joaquin Valley.  These Trump farmers of course represent the ultimate hypocrisy of today’s Republican Party.  These big ag elite can cheer while Trump goes after undocumented immigrants, knowing full well that Trump will do little to undermine their access to their own labor force, made up precisely of those whom Trump has targeted.  In fact, Trump’s policies have the additional benefit of making insecure immigrants even more insecure, thereby making them even more compliant and exploitable.

The WCPA in Delano thus represents only a modest solution to a major problem.  There are truly heroic leaders in these communities, but they need more financial and political support than they are getting.  A good example of such a leader was Teresa De Anda (1959-2014), who might be considered the Erin Brockovich of pesticides.  She went through extraordinary measures at great personal expense to monitor and challenge the harmful use of pesticides in the small rural towns in the vicinity of Delano and Earlimart.  The question one might then ask is whether the investments of the Resnicks in community leaders like Teresa de Anda might do more for the community than an investment in the eponymic charter schools of the Wonderful Corporation.  Direct investments into community organizations that could sponsor worthy individuals to serve on local school boards might be a much better investment in the community than the Wonderful College Prep Academies.  It would restore over $7 million to the local district and put it under the control of the people who know the community best.  It is this diversion of budget control from locally elected school boards to county boards that is at issue here, even more so than whether a particular charter is a worthy investment.

On the OC School of the Arts

The issues raised by the WCPA in Delano reflect those that occur in conjunction with the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA).  There is no doubt that OCSA has provided opportunities in the arts that otherwise would be available only to those with the financial means to send their children to private schools or contract special tutors.  OCSA, however, usually requires students and parents with the means to get to and from the school on a regular basis.  While the school boasts a diverse population with measurably high achievements, only about 20% of the students who attend are Hispanic and an even smaller percentage live in Santa Ana, where OCSA is located.

OCSA also raises the same questions as the WCPA regarding the impacts on the public schools that have lost that portion of their students and parents who have special interest and talents in the arts.  Every secondary school should aspire to have the best academics, athletics, and arts programs imaginable.  It might be preferable for a district with multiple comprehensive high schools to have one of them with special focus on arts, another with special focus on a particular variety of academics, and still another that might attract athletes toward specific sports programs at that school. 

To a certain degree, the PYLUSD already practices this.  Valencia’s Academy programs (IB, Valtech, Cambridge) affords students access to some of the most demanding academic programs offered anywhere.  El Dorado has an excellent performing arts and law academy.  Yorba Linda and Esperanza both have many outstanding programs that draw students with specific professional or vocational goals.

Not only does an excellent charter like OCSA contribute only modestly to the community where it resides and deprives communities of gifted students who commute to Santa Ana, it also presents complex legal conundrums.  OCSA is currently in a $16 million legal dispute over contributions to cover the costs of special education programs in the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD).  As is so often the case in such disputes, large sums of money are flowing to the representative law firms and away from education.  Regardless of who is on the firmer legal ground, these are the kinds of problems that occur when even the best charter schools must operate within the larger framework of public school laws and obscured lines of accountability.

A similar problem occurred a couple of years ago with OCSA when a variety of sexual abuse allegations emerged.  Even though OCSA has its own advisory board, the SAUSD had the deep pockets and some potential legal liability for what happened at a school over which it had minimal authority.  What emerged was just another blame game that occurred between the SAUSD, OCSA, and OCBE.  Once again:  students lose, lawyers win.

The point is not to bash charter schools or question the value of OCSA.  The point is to illustrate the legal complexities and vulnerabilities of charter law as it currently stands in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 39.  It is exactly these liabilities in the charter laws that the OCBE is exploiting to undermine the will of voters in local school districts.  Whenever the county board circumvents the will of a local school district, local taxpayers lose control over their money.

The OCBE Opposes SB 249, natch.

OCBE is already on record in opposition to Senator Umberg’s proposed legislation.  Please see pages 58-60 on its board agenda for April 2.  The OCBE Resolution opposing SB 249 is fraught with irrelevancies, misrepresentations, and hypocrisies.

The first part of the resolution irrelevantly restates the OCBE’s opposition to earlier legislation proposed by Senator Josh Newman (SB 907).  That legislation specifically targeted Orange County with the intention of making the board more representative by expanding the number of trustees to seven while also consolidating the OCBOE election with the statewide general election in November of even-numbered years.  Governor Newsom vetoed this legislation on the reasonable assertion that there were applicable local procedures for making these changes. 

Orange County should indeed change local procedures for electing the school board.  We should expand the number of board members from five to seven.  The seven new areas should be created by non-partisan demographers and receive the approval of both the County Committee on School District Organization and the State Board of Education.  The County should also consolidate the OCBE elections with the November general election ballot in even-numbered years.  Most importantly, Orange County should resolve to severely reduce the capacity of the OCBE to intervene in local school board politics or impose charter schools in districts that do not want them.

Of course, the OCBE wants this decision to be made at the local level because it is the inherent corruption of Orange County politics that got them into their positions in the first place.  Even though most voters are keenly aware of what happens in their local school districts, very few of them have any idea of what the county boards of education do.  Very few voters are aware of how the OCBE has become little other than a front for the charter school racket.  Very few voters are aware that the OCBE has become a conduit for the Project 2025 assault on public education.  Very few voters are aware of how absurd the OCBE claim is that SB 249 would usurp local control.  The dark money forces that brought us this corrupt OCBE will rally in opposition to any effort to hold it to account. 

The costs involved in bringing changes to the OCBE are prohibitive and time-consuming.  They would include countering the massive disinformation campaign of countywide dark money forces and educating the broader public on the pernicious role of the OCBE.  What, moreover, would be the procedure for addressing the problems posed by the OCBE on a county scale?  Yes, a county-based reform of the corrupted OCBE is the ideal solution, but it does not seem practical for now.  The persistent crises that the OCBE has created in the OUSD, Capistrano USD, and the PYLUSD have rendered the special circumstances that “justify state circumvention of local procedures.”  The crisis the OCBE has created is urgent.  That is why Senator Umberg’s legislation is essential.

The biggest benefit of moving the elections to the November general election calendar is the transparency it will bring to the politicization of education in Orange County.  People have a right to see clearly and consistently that Young Kim and the entire Republican Party infrastructure in OC has endorsed such frauds and bigots as Ken Williams, Mari Barke, Leandra Blades, and Madison Klovstad Miner.  Moving the county board election to November might give Republicans seeking countywide, statewide or federal office pause before aligning their campaigns with such absurd and corrupt individuals.

The OCBE claim that SB 249 represents “an unnecessary drain on the State General Fund” is also specious.  Any costs of moving this election would presumably entail only one-time negligible costs to the state whose losses would be far outweighed by the benefits to democratic participation and the transparency explained above. 

No one should ever take fiscal arguments emanating from the OCBE seriously. 

.

• This is the same group of fraudsters who have increased annual OCBE attorney fee payouts from an annual average of $10,325 over the period from 2013-2018, to $1,743,622 since 2019.
• This is the same group of trustees who have contracted law firms aligned with their political agenda and broke the tradition of contracting with the same law firm as the OCDE. 
• This is the same board of trustees that wasted enormous quantities of taxpayer money suing the State of California over life-saving Covid mandates, in legal disputes that taxpayers footed the bills for both sides.
• This is the same board of trustees who use litigation as a means of diverting money from schools to attorneys.
• This is the same board of trustees who feel it needs to spend massive amounts of taxpayer money contracting with right-wing lobbyists working in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
• This is the same OCBE that has endorsed candidates openly working with local school board trustees to violate state law protecting the rights of transgender youth.  Such attacks on state law recently cost one school district $350,000 defending itself in a frivolous case where the taxpayers again covered the costs of both plaintiff and defendant. 
• This is the same OCBE that has endorsed programs and candidates in the PYLUSD that have cost many millions in direct waste and incalculable losses in proven leadership by dozens of administrators who no longer felt comfortable working in a district under the control of such extremists. 
• This is the same OCBE whose member Mari Barke failed to disclose $14 million in income and business interests in conjunction with her election.  This matter became the basis of a civil suit filed by Lynn Riddle, who only issued the civil complaint after Attorney General Todd Spitzer refused to investigate the criminal matter.

No other county board of education in the state plays the pernicious role of the OCBE.  Part of the perversity of OCBE is attributable to the fact that it is only one of five counties in the state whose elections are not consolidated with the November ballot.  Senator Umberg’s legislation will fix this problem.  In the meantime, local supporters of public education must step up.

FIRST:

We need to find a candidate for county superintendent of schools and we need to do so now.  The abysmal OCBE unanimously appointed Stefan Bean to replace Al Mijares after the latter’s tragic loss to cancer.  Bean bears the same disdain for public schools and is supported by the same interests as the sitting five members.  It is a tragic truth that it will probably cost around $1 million to run against this “incumbent.”  It is a countywide race that can be won, but we will start out laps behind in terms of both money and messaging.

SECOND:

We need to find a candidate to run against Young Kim who can articulate the central importance of public education and hold Kim accountable for all the damage her endorsed candidates have wrought on our great public schools.  Having already engaged the culture wars of Sonja Shaw in a losing but courageous battle, Christina Gagnier appears to be the candidate best suited to engage the Project 2025 attacks on public schools as part of the broader attack by MAGA extremists on the so-called “deep state.”

THIRD:

We need to demand that all of our state legislators work to close the Proposition 39 loopholes that allow the OCBE to undermine the authority of local school boards when they opposed the imposition of charter schools in their districts.

Finally, NOW:

Umberg’s legislation is a vital first step toward putting public schools in Orange County back on a productive path.  Supporters of public education will need to take the next steps at the local, county, state, and federal levels.  The destruction of public schools is central to realization of the Project 2025 nightmare.  The renewal of public schools is central to the restoration of democracy in response to Project 2025.  Governor Newsom, we need your leadership on this one!