Anti-Charter
School Bill
Would Hurt Most
Vulnerable
CA Students
by Lance Izumi | July 14, 2025
A bill plowing through the State Legislature is using fiscal accountability as a fig-leaf issue to hide its real intentions—crippling California’s popular charter-school sector in order to bolster regular public schools that are seeing declines in both enrollment and student achievement.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools independent of school districts. They have greater operational and regulatory freedom and flexibility, but are subject to a higher level of scrutiny for student outcomes.
Thus, charter schools must be reviewed periodically by their authorizers, which are usually district or county boards of education.
While the vast bulk of California’s nearly 1,300 charter schools have operated in a fiscally sound manner, there have been a few highly publicized instances where misspending of public funds has occurred.
Enter Assembly Member Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), chair of the Assembly education committee and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, who used these rare occurrences to craft AB 84, which, instead of narrowly addressing fiscal management issues, attacks charter schools head on.
Assembly Member David Tangipa (R-Clovis), who is the only member of the Legislature who has graduated from a charter school, warned that Muratsuchi’s bill paints “with a broad brush” that “demonizes a lot of charter schools.”
Non-classroom-based charter schools are one of the main types of charters that the bill would undercut. Indeed, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) says that these charter schools would be the hardest hit by AB 84.
According to the CCSA, non-classroom-based charters are “a school model in which students spend less than 80 percent of their time physically in the classroom.” There are currently approximately 400,000 students in these charter schools.
This flexibility allows these charter schools “to offer students a blend of distance learning, independent study, home study, site-based instruction or other services offered at resource center facilities, and/or access to career technical education pathways.”
One example is the Ocean Grove homeschool charter school. According to the school, Ocean Grove parents “work with a California credentialed teacher to develop individualized learning opportunities by: choosing home-based or community-based instruction, select individualized curriculum based on learning style and functioning grade level, providing materials, resources and supportive instruction, promoting real-life context-based learning.”
The school empowers families by “giving students, parents and teachers the freedom to make responsible and effective decisions and implement educational plans, by providing them with multiple tools, resources and programs.”
The school empowers parents to use public funding to purchase educational services for their children from a list of 2,000 private vendors approved by the school.
Public funds are placed in individual instructional fund accounts for families ($2,650 annually for TK-K, $3,650 for grades 1-8, and $4,150 for grades 9-12).
One Ocean Grove mom named Heather, who I profiled in my book The Homeschool Boom, said that her middle daughter is an accomplished ballet dancer so the family was able to use part of their funding on dance classes that the family would not normally be able to afford.
She said that her family can purchase specialized curricula, school supplies, and enrichment tools that would be out of reach for lower income families. These options are often unavailable from the local regular public schools.
Yet, AB 84 would torpedo this flexibility by prohibiting parents from spending funds that are “not provided by a credentialed employee of the local educational agency [i.e., the school district] for the pupil.”
In other words, parents and their children would not be able to access private providers and would be bound to school districts for services and enrichment that are either inadequately provided or not provided at all.
Windi Eklund of the California Homeschool Network, has noted, “Since the 1990s, California public charter schools, especially non-classroom-based independent study programs, have been allowed to partner with local small businesses to provide enrichment classes, expanded learning opportunities, academic tutoring, and special education services for students.”
Eklund observed that AB 84 would force instructors serving charter school students to be credentialed by the state, despite the fact that regular public school students can take courses taught by community college instructors who “are not required to be credentialed by the state, and the government is encouraging them to take their classes.”
In the face of this double standard, Krystin Demofonte, executive director of Pacific Coast Academy, a non-classroom-based charter school in San Diego County, said that AB 84 forces charters’ vendor community partners “to meet credentialing requirements that district schools don’t face.”
Kevin Humphrey, superintendent of Guajome Charter Public Schools, has said that under AB 84, “we’d be forced to absorb a 30% cut to our state funding,” which would come out to nearly $300,000.
As Demofonte pointed out, however, flexibility allows non-classroom-based charter schools to address the needs of children with challenges such as autism, military families who have to move frequently, teenage moms who have to care for their children, students who have to work to support their families, and kids who are bullied in regular public schools.
Heather, the Ocean Grove mom, said that her oldest daughter was bullied in her regular public school, which made life miserable for her. Switching to Ocean Grove charter school opened a new world for her daughter, who graduated from the school, went to college and, in response to her experience being bullied, majored in criminal justice.
If she had remained in her regular public school, Heather said that her daughter “would have continued to struggle.” The Ocean Grove flexibility model created a “safer environment to pursue her other talents.”
“There’s no such thing as one size fits all,” Heather noted, “we don’t all wear the same size shoe.” Rather, “the reason I’m an advocate for homeschooling and homeschool charter schools is because it offers a very diverse and enriched environment.”
“Charter schools, in particular, offer choice to lower socioeconomic families, such as my husband and I,” she concluded.
Yet, AB 84 would destroy these flexible charter schools.
Demofonte says that Muratsuchi’s legislation would literally put her school out of business. “This isn’t about accountability,” she warned, “it’s about elimination.”
AB 84, she emphasized, is a “direct attack on charter schools that will crush the dreams of our most vulnerable students.”
Muratsuchi’s bill passed by the slimmest of margins in the Assembly and is now headed to the State Senate, where a more moderate bill focused narrowly on financial management is being pushed by Senator Angelique Ashby (D-Sacramento).
Which bill wins out in the end will determine the survival of an entire segment of the charter school sector and the educational future of hundreds of thousands of children who have been failed by the regular public school system.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the 2024 PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools.
