The Washington State Supreme Court, in a late Friday surprise,
delivered a ruling that the state’s voter-passed, billionaire-backed charter
school initiative is unconstitutional.
The high court’s 6-3 ruling found that the independently
organized schools do not pass muster as common public schools and therefore
cannot receive public funding. Bill and Melinda Gates: $3 million in
support for 2012 charter schools initiative, just ruled unconstitutional by the
state Supreme Court.
“We hold that provisions of Initiative 1240 that designate and
treat charter schools as common schools violate article IX, Section 2 of our
state Constitution and are void,” Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote in the
majority opinion.
“This includes the Act’s funding provision, which attempts to tap
into and shift a portion of moneys allocated for common schools to the new
charter schools authorized by the Act. Because the provisions designating and
funding charter schools as common schools are integral to the Act, such void
provisions are not severable …” In short, I-1240 goes down, although supporters
said last night they would weigh legal options.
The ruling was greeted with surprise. The state has nine
charter schools set to operate this fall in Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Kent and
Highline. “We need to understand what this means for the children who would
start at the three impacted schools in Seattle,” Mayor Ed Murray said via
Facebook upon learning of the ruling. John Zilavy, a Seattle parent, lamented
on his Facebook page that the court’s ruling puts in “serious jeopardy” an
educational took that “seems to be working.” “Our experience so far with the
new Summit Sierra Charter School in the International District is that it has
really found a way to make both teaching and learning more effective for a
diverse group of students,” Zilavy wrote.
I-1240 passed by a 1 percent margin in 2012, after charter schools
had previously been rejected three times by Washington voters.
Ninety-eight percent of its $10 million-plus war chest came from just 21
individuals. Bill Gates put up $3 million, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton
gave $1.7 million, Vulcan Inc. (Paul Allen’s development company) was good for
$1.6 million, and liberal entrepreneur Nick Hanauer donated $1 million. The
father of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave $500,000.
The state’s influential teachers’ unions opposed I-1240, as did
low-income groups, arguing that charter schools would skim money and take
talented students from the public school system. The court challenge to
the initiative was brought by the League of Women Voters, the Washington
Education Association, El Centro de la Raza, and the Washington Association of
School Administrators.
In another telling passage from Madsen’s opinion, the court
stated: “Under the Act (I-1240), charter schools are devoid of local
control from their inception to their daily operations.”
“The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along —
charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms and voters have no say
in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funds,” said Kim Mead, president of
the Washington Education Association.
The Supreme Court’s majority opinion made clear that the financial
props have been knocked out from under the charter schools. I-1240
“relies on common school funds as its funding choice,” Madsen wrote.
“Without those funds, the Act cannot function as intended.”
The state’s Charter School Commission reacted with anger to the
court’s Friday surprise, noting that the case has been before the Supremes
since last October. “It is unprecedented that the Court issued a decision
in this way, at 4:05 the Friday before the Labor Day weekend,” it said in a
statement.
“We are most concerned about the almost 1,000 students and families
attending charter schools and making sure they understand what this ruling
means regarding their public school education options,” said the commission.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Mary Fairhurst noted that as an
alternative, “the state can constitutionally support charter schools through
the general fund.”
The intensity of opinion, on what charter schools give and what
they take away, was evident Friday night. Republican state Sen. Steve Litzow, who chairs the State Senate’s
K-12 education committee, said: “Public charter schools provide
high-quality opportunity, especially for at-risk children, to succeed in the
classroom. In a state that fails one in four students, disproportionately
from low-income and minority families, we cannot afford to do away with one of
the most important tools for closing the opportunity gap.”
But Don Barbieri of Spokane, retired CEO at West Coast Hotels and
a Washington State University regent, argued that public schools lack resources
and teachers are underpaid.
“I went to a private school (Gonzaga Prep), yet our public schools
are not paying livable wages and our citizens need to demand (that) no one is
placed in poverty with a teaching vocation and all our kids should ask that we
have their backs when they commit to hard work and dream,” he said.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2015/09/04/late-friday-surprise-supreme-court-says-charter-schools-initiative-is-unconstitutional/
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