Charter schools are wasting taxpayer dollars. Charter schools have little accountability. 

The California Teachers Association (CTA) made these and similar claims before demanding a 5-year suspension of new charter schools in 2019. Around half of Californians oppose charter schools, according to a survey from the Public Policy Institute of California.

“I think the market is saturated. There are six charter schools within the boundaries of the Sequoia Union High School District. That’s excessive,” said Edith Salvatore, longtime President of the Sequoia District Teachers Association (SDTA).

Despite this, more people are enrolling in California’s charter schools than ever, 30 years after California established the second charter school in the U.S. More than one in nine public school students go to a charter school, according to the California Department of Education (CDE).

Charter schools are publicly funded, though many state regulations and laws don’t apply to them. According to the CDE, charter schools are run by independent organizations as nonprofits.

The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), a charter advocacy group, asserts this autonomy allows charter schools to “give every student the opportunity to achieve.” 

Local data and perspectives tell a different story, debunking the claims of supporters and opponents of charter schools.

Summit Prep: unfulfilled promises

For Salvatore, the battle over new charter schools has been raging since the 2000s, when Summit Preparatory Charter High School was established. It became the first charter school to be supervised by SUHSD in 2003.

“Summit Prep was marketed as an alternative to big, scary, unsuccessful high schools in the school district, which wasn’t true,” Salvatore said.

However, less than half of the students at Summit Prep met California’s English standards, compared to 70% of students in SUHSD in 2024, according to the CDE. 

Summit Public Schools, the charter management organization that runs Summit Prep and seven other charter schools in California, claims to “operate some of the best public schools in the country.” Testing data shows that traditional public schools in SUHSD did a better job of meeting state standards.

However, promises of academic superiority aren’t driving the increase in charter school enrollment statewide, according to Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“Their selling point is choice, purely choice, and that’s only for a small percentage of the population that wants this choice,” Carnoy said.

Summit Prep prides itself on its personalized and project-based curriculum, not simply academic achievement.

According to Salvatore, this doesn’t justify the price that non-charter public schools in SUHSD must pay.

“Because it diverts money from our schools and the ability to spend that money on the students in our schools, we advocated for the district not to grant a charter to Summit Prep,” Salvatore said.

San Carlos charter: personalized learning

Sophomore Julian Vignoles transferred to San Carlos Charter Learning Center (SCCLC), the longest-running charter school in California, after elementary school. Vignoles went to SCCLC rather than Ralston Middle School because of the school’s plan for the pandemic.

“During COVID, we were able to be a lot more flexible with things,” Vignoles said.

Regulations and state laws are more flexible for charter schools, according to the CDE. The CDE hopes this will lead to innovative education — a contentious goal.

“When students go to charter schools, the local districts lose students. Therefore, local districts oppose charter schools,” said Michael Kirst, a former President of the California State Board of Education. “Charter schools challenge the traditional model of education, which is local school districts.”

SCCLC’s unconventionality is evident in the school’s project-based curriculum, which teachers mostly create, unlike in traditional public schools.

“It’s more fun. It’s more family,” Vignoles said. “One thing that’s nice about charter is you are friends with all your teachers. They’re your family to you. You grow connections with them.”

Despite the school’s personalized learning experience, testing data shows that SCCLC is not academically superior to surrounding public schools.

SCCLC’s math test scores dropped more than Ralston’s after the pandemic, and around one-third of middle schoolers at SCCLC didn’t meet state standards for math, according to the CDE.

According to Vignoles, math was a major weakness of SCCLC. “San Carlos Charter doesn’t have the strongest math program, so you have to do math outside of school. I went to Mathnasium,” Vignoles said. 

Yet, SCCLC isn’t a waste of taxpayer money simply because its test scores are lower for one subject, according to Vignoles.

 “If you go to a charter, you have to look at what its strengths and weaknesses are because they don’t always follow the California curriculum,” Vignoles said. “Being one-on-one with teachers was extremely helpful.” 

According to Vignoles, the school’s low student-to-teacher ratio helped him immensely in English class. Still, middle schoolers at SCCLC scored lower than Ralston students for English Language Arts in 2024, according to the CDE.

The Preuss School: low-income students find success

Located on the campus of UC San Diego (UCSD), The Preuss School only admits low-income students entering sixth through 12th grade. Ninety-seven percent of students are ethnic minorities. 

Most students are from southeastern San Diego, “one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in all of San Diego County,” according to Hugh Mehan, director of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) at UCSD, and one of the founders of the Preuss School.

Only two in 10 economically disadvantaged 11th graders in the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) met English standards last year, according to the CDE.  

In the Preuss school, located inside SDUSD, around twice as many 11th graders met California’s standards for math, according to the CDE.

“We find that academically, the Preuss school does very well. It took a while to get the wrinkles out. But now that the school is well established, it does very well,” Mehan said. “Part of it is wonderful teachers.”