The bombing campaign against California’s charter schools may have temporarily ceased, but a rearguard ground attack continues. Without reinforcement, some of the state’s most promising education reforms will be destroyed.

The attack has drawn little press coverage and no comment from state education authorities. These include the governor, whose education adviser, former Sen. Gary Hart, authored California’s charter-school law in 1993.

Charter schools are deregulated public schools usually operated by groups of teachers, parents and community organizations. They are growing nationwide, with support from President Clinton. There are more than 170 charter schools operating in California and they are providing good service in minority communities and with at-risk students. Most charter schools have waiting lists.

Teacher unions and education bureaucrats, however, have regarded charter schools as a threat because they challenge the status quo. Opponents of charter schools have found friendly politicians willing to fire their heavy artillery.

San Francisco Democrat Carol Migden tendered AB842, backed by teachers unions, which would have made charter schools the only schools in California subject to mandatory collective bargaining. Scott Wildman, Glendale Democrat and a former teacher union organizer, said the bill would bring charter schools in line with “the rest of public education.”

“If this passes, we’re dead,” said Yvonne Chan, principal of the nationally recognized Vaughn charter school in Pacoima.

Charter school supporters rallied in Sacramento to oppose 842, with support from former governor and Oakland mayor Jerry Brown. Gov. Davis said he could not sign the measure, which was amended to maintain the flexibility and independence that allows charter schools to thrive. But the battle continues on a different front.

Charter schools recognize that buildings do not teach, and that parents care about their children. Charter school innovations include independent study and distance learning programs that heavily involve parents in the education of their children, a growing tread. Nationwide, 1.5 million parents educate their children, with growth running at 15-20 percent per year. Though favored by students, parents and education reformers, the home-study and distance learning arrangement draws a hostile reaction from defenders of the status quo.

A measure in the current California budget, backed by Sen. Jack O’Connell, Santa Barbara Democrat, would defund all charter schools that do not offer conventional classroom-based instruction. If passed, this move would shut down approximately 25 percent of the state’s charter schools and effect nearly 20,000 students.

Gov. Davis has been silent, and so has state education superintendent, Delaine Eastin who has been opposed to the independent study and distance learning programs from the beginning. As an assemblywoman in 1993, Eastin backed a bill, supported by the California Teachers Association, that would have limited the number of charter schools statewide to 50 in a state with nearly six million students and 1000 school districts. Predictably teacher unions and education bureaucrats support the current budget move, along with some high-profile allies in the private sector.

Contrary to popular belief, public education is not non-profit. A veritable army of businesses, in a multi-billion-dollar industry, makes big profits selling financial advice, textbooks, computers, busses, food, furniture, cleaning supplies, and countless other items to the school system, usually at top-of-the-line prices. Non-classroom based instruction threatens that tidy and profitable relationship.

Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Kenneth Hall and Paul Goldfinger of School Services of California, a private firm, denounced charter schools as out of control and “scandals waiting to happen.” In fact, charter schools are the only truly accountable public schools because they must meet the goals of their founding charter or they get shut down.

California test scores rank near the bottom and it has recently emerged that the state graduates from high school only 67.2 percent of its students. Given these conditions, which have occasioned no shut-downs or firings, legislators need to consider whether it is prudent to stifle a reform that is actually working.

Charter schools can only continue to provide improvement and innovation if they keep their independence. California’s children deserve better than the “rest of public education,” the rigid, expensive and ultimately reactionary system that is currently failing them.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.