The Highly Questionable Blueprint for Charter School Takeover in Your City or Region

Oakland, California, is the below-the-radar model to drain the public schools of their funding.

By Bill Raden

Last September’s sensational leak of the Great Public Schools Now Initiative, a half-billion-dollar plan to double the number of charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), sparked a firestorm of controversy. Citing the plan’s potentially crippling fiscal impact on a financially troubled district that already leads the nation in its number of charters (around 230), critics denounced the plan as “an outline for a hostile takeover” and “a declaration of war on public schools.”

The combination of public furor and the LAUSD school board’s unanimous repudiation of the initiative—which was quickly dubbed the “Broad Plan” after its sponsor, Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad—subsequently forced the nonprofit tasked with implementing it to beat a retreat in its rhetoric, if not its intent to transform half of Los Angeles’ public schools into charters.