Just as they begin to make progress in an otherwise dismal scene, California’s keenest education reformers find their most revolutionary tool for change threatened by reactionary forces that place political power above the interests of children.

Under legislation originally sponsored by Democratic state Senator Gary Hart, now Gov. Gray Davis’ education secretary, California has become a leader in charter schools, deregulated public schools which gain freedom from burdensome education codes in return for agreeing to meet the goals in their founding “charter.”

If they fail to meet these goals, their charter is not renewed and, unlike other public schools where failure is rewarded with increased funding, they get shut down. For this reason, charter schools remain the only truly accountable public schools.

Most charter schools have waiting lists because parents—particularly minority parents—know their children will get the attention and respect they deserve. Liberated from the states’ massive education code and burdensome union rules, teachers and administrators enjoy the freedom to innovate, even though it means harder work and longer hours.

Some of California’s 140 charter schools have union contracts, others do not. No teacher, administrator or student can be forced to be part of a charter school, which must be approved by 50 percent of the teachers. Teachers in charters choose class size and assignments based on what they believe is best for the students, not on seniority. These freedoms provoke reaction from teacher unions but they have paid off in improved student achievement and parental satisfaction.

The Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima, has won praise from President Clinton and other leaders. The Montague Charter Academy, 96 percent Hispanic and with 95 percent of students on the lunch program, raised scores ten points in a single year.

Thirty-four states have passed charter-school laws. But supporters of the status quo, led by teacher unions, are trying to blunt those laws by any means possible.

Assembly Bill 842 sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Carol Migden and supported by the California Teachers Association, would imposing collective bargaining on charter schools, forcing educational innovation to take a back seat to union and district rules. The bill would make charter schools the only public campuses in California required to have union contracts.

“It would take away probably the most important freedom that charter schools have,” said Eric Premack, director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento. “It would not only force them to bargain collectively, but to bargain as part of the existing bargaining units,” Premack said.

Dave Patterson of the California Network of Educational Charters (CANEC), said the that the bill was a clear political payoff to the California Teachers Association.

In Assembly Education Committee hearings on April 7, Carol Migden and her handlers revealed scant and faulty knowledge of charter schools. She claimed, for example, that there were 250 of them. The hearings drew charter school teachers from across the state, including union members, who adamantly opposed the bill. Other charter school supporters saw the measure as a surprise attack.

“If it passes, we’re dead,” said Yvonne Chan, the nationally recognized principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. “If this passes it will be the districts and the unions that run charter schools.”

Irene Sumida, co-director of Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lake View Terrace told reporters that “I am very, very afraid that everything we have worked so hard for has been destroyed on a whim.” Joe Lucente, Fenton’s executive director, said the bill would “turn everything upside down… throw everything back into the box that we chose to leave.”

Not a single supporter of Migden’s bill asked whether California’s current charter law, amended last year, had been good for students. Politics, not the welfare of children, proved uppermost on their mind. The bill passed committee with 10 votes.

Glendale Democrat Scott Wildman, a former organizer with United Teachers Los Angeles, said that the bill, “will bring the charter school movement into the regular educational process.”

Wildman is right, and that is precisely the problem.

As Gov. Davis admits, the regular educational process is the one that is failing the state’s children. The recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests placed California virtually at the bottom in reading scores, below Mississippi and Louisiana.

Charter schools represent a revolt against that record. The counterrevolutionaries of a failed establishment are marshaling raw political power to quash this movement. If they succeed, the state’s children will again be the losers.

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.