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CHARTER SCHOOLS - Religious schools exist throughout the country and in California. Churches, synagogues, mosques, private individuals and foundations, and even individual congregations pay for them to exist.
Some have great teachers and distinguished alumni. God bless them. But none of these religious schools are paid for with taxpayer money from the government in order to inculcate students with a religious program. Not yet. Not in California.
Which is in part why a charter school called Lashon Academy, now trying to change locations in the San Fernando Valley, raises such serious issues and a very worrisome precedent, for all of L.A. County and California.
Lashon faces a reckoning on Tuesday, August 13, at the Los Angeles Office of Education (LACOE). It has requested a significant change, or “material revision,” to the charter it managed to secure from LACOE in 2018.
The material revision would authorize the charter school, which teaches Hebrew language along with Jewish religion and culture, to operate at a house of worship in Valley Village.
Spending public dollars on sectarian education is unconstitutional and unacceptable. It commingles church and state. It violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It’s also explosive, putting students and teachers on a volatile footing where science, history, and fact-based learning can be trumped by religious dogma. Without church-state separation, religious officials can intrude into the teaching, operations, and governance of what were once truly public schools and insist their own private beliefs get the upper hand, no matter who gets hurt.
Lashon was chartered by the L.A. Unified School District in 2013 after a robust debate by board members. At least one pithy summation continues to haunt Lashon to this day. “This to me sounds like a private school that’s publicly funded,” observed former School Board Member Tamar Galatzan. She raised a warning that Lashon, with more than a decade to do so, has not assuaged at all.
Lashon’s charter was rejected for renewal on a 6-0 vote by the L.A. School Board in October 2017. In a maneuver common at the time, Lashon appealed its denial to the County of L.A. The charter it secured allowed Lashon to operate out of Van Nuys and serve a pool of students that was largely disadvantaged.
Now the school is seeking to move to Valley Village, a wealthier enclave, where, it turns out, many of its students already live. This enrollment pattern, out of alignment with the student body it was duty-bound to focus on, is really about cherry-picking. It’s a common tactic among charter schools. Deliberately seeking students from more well-off families and overlooking, discouraging, or “counseling out” already enrolled students who may require more attention, such as English Language Learners, or accommodation, such as students with disabilities, is cherry-picking. It’s a form of cheating. But charter schools rarely get punished for it, making it a kind of pervasive dirty secret.
Which is why the words of Maria Gennaro, a Lashon administrator, at the LACOE hearing about the material revision on July 9 are so revealing. Gennaro expressed eagerness for permission to operate at the new location at Temple Beth Hillel because it “brings us closer to our currently enrolled families residing in Sherman Oaks, Studio City, and Valley Village,” she testified.
By spilling the beans about the three relatively privileged neighborhoods that many Lashon students call home, Gennaro exposed a grave vulnerability of Lashon’s. So much for serving the socio-economically disadvantaged communities Lashon was supposed to focus on originally when LACOE granted it a charter.
Gennaro was chair of the board of the charter school in Oct. 2017 when the LAUSD School Board unanimously rejected Lashon’s renewal.
Key factors cited in that denial were Lashon’s failing to serve the diverse students in its immediate vicinity. What else? Lashon showed “an intent to avoid providing special education services,” according to an article that month in the Jewish Journal. So cherry-picking students is not a recent blip on the radar; it’s more like a defining legacy of Lashon.
With a program of kindergarten to eighth grade, or K-8, Lashon struggles to keep its mediocre status as a “middle performing” charter school. That rating comes from the statewide quality evaluation created by AB 1505, enacted in 2019.
Could the new location magically improve student performance? That doesn’t tend to happen in real life, but it does happen on the pledges submitted by charter schools to their authorizers. Gennaro, at her testimony on July 9, called the synagogue a “turnkey campus.”
This euphemism overlooks a series of major risks tied to how intermingled Lashon would be with an existing religious school operated by the synagogue. The overtly religious school and Lashon would share the same premises, on a campus already owned and overseen by a house of worship. Lashon, which would rely on the very same entrance as the synagogue, fails the very first test for appropriate use of a religious site by a charter school set in 2015 by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
These circumstances increase the risk of possible interference by church officials in hiring and retention of charter-school staff, favoritism and bias in student enrollment, and interference in curriculum, food service, calendar, facilities, or any other area of operations at Lashon. Why is this so upsetting and unsettling?
Because all these dangers — religious intrusion into public schools, insistence on taxpayer money to fund religious schools, and endorsing discrimination against teachers, students, and parents — is already materializing in Texas.
There state lawmakers are shifting resources toward charter schools and religion every chance they get. They even approved a measure to allow unlicensed pastors to infiltrate public schools under the guise of chaplains to minister to children. Instead of responding to real crises like the mass killing of 19 students and 2 teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde while hordes of police ineptly stood around, in May 2022, Texas lawmakers attacked the separation of church and state.
Further destructive bills, such as installing displays of the Ten Commandments and authorizing religious charter schools, are under consideration. So is a bill, backed aggressively by Gov. Greg Abbott, to attack K-12 public schools even more directly by allowing government funded vouchers for private and religious schools.
One year ago, in August 2023, another LACOE-approved charter school named NVMI shut down in disgrace. Strenuous effort by East Area Progressive Democrats, Parents Supporting Teachers, and allies forced LACOE to confront its own lax oversight and hold NVMI accountable to evidence of fraud and rampant neglect of student needs. NVMI had failed to request a material revision, even after it dropped several grades. That lapse was part of its undoing.
This year, to LACOE’s credit, they have enforced the material-revision requirement and notified Lashon of its non-compliance in several areas, including governance. That renewed commitment by LACOE to upholding the rule of law in L.A. did not stop some Lashon board members, including the current chair, from complaining at the charter school’s Aug. 7 board meeting of “bias” by LACOE.
Such rhetoric in this case is an escape hatch from taking responsibility and following the law. It’s also preposterous. Charter-school promoters in California got their way for nearly 20 years, with horrible effects on fraud, governance, morale, and outside spending by billionaires on school-board campaigns. For folks accustomed to preferences and privilege, fair play can feel like oppression. Instead of giving a green light to Lashon Academy, LACOE has a duty to the law and all Angelenos to say no.
Lashon Academy, a charter school with a program that includes religion, is seeking public funds to move into a religious school at a house of worship in Valley Village. The lease it negotiated fails to protect the separation of church and state.
Lashon Academy fails the very first test for appropriate use of a religious site by a charter school. The rules were set in 2015 by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Lashon aims to use exactly the same building with the same entrance, same drop-off, and same pickup as the landlord, a house of worship, and the existing religious day school whose kindergarten programs operate there simultaneously.
(Hans Johnson is a longtime leader for LGBTQ+ human rights, environmental justice, and public education. His columns appear in national news outlets including USA Today and in top daily news outlets of more than 20 states. A resident of Eagle Rock, he is also president of East Area Progressive Democrats (EAPD), the largest grassroots Democratic club in California, with more than 1,100 members.)
Follow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HansPJohnson
