By Jasmin Acosta and Jacob Peterson | Special to The OBSERVER
Sacramento County has seen a significant jump in charter school enrollment over the last five years, with an increase of more than 9,000 students between 2018 and 2023.
In the 2018-19 school year, charter school enrollment in the county was 33,235 students, but by 2022-23 that number increased to 42,313, according to the California Department of Education.
Charter schools are semiautonomous public schools that receive public funding, according to the Education Commission of the States, an interstate agency that tracks education policy. These schools operate under a contract with sponsors, which can include the state, district or other entities.
Charter school advocates say they work well because they are more accountable to parents than traditional schools, produce better academic results and are able to better address the needs of individual students.
Almost 65% of the county’s charter school students identify as nonwhite, including 12% who identify as Black.
Monica Cuéllar, the regional director of advocacy and community engagement for Aspire Public Schools, which operates three locations in Sacramento, said charter school enrollment is growing due to parents being more informed on charter schools and finding the right school for their children to attend.
Schools such as Aspire open and operate with the mission to provide high-quality and tuition-free education in low-income neighborhoods, according to their mission statement.
“We’ve been seeing more parents interested in an alternative method from the brick-and-mortar that have been throughout the state since the beginning,” Cuéllar said. “Charter schools tend to look at the whole child as opposed to just the academic parts.”
Cuéllar said charter schools were able to come up with ideas not found in more traditional public schools. She also said parents have become better informed about the nature of charter schools.
“Some people believe they’re private schools [and] some people believe they’re corporate funded, and that’s not the case,” Cuéllar said. “I think parents are just seeking an alternative method.”
Aspire operates 36 locations throughout California, according to its website, including three in Sacramento County. These schools – Aspire Capitol Heights Academy, Aspire Alexander Twilight Secondary Academy and Aspire Alexander Twilight College Preparatory Academy – all have in-person instruction. Together, the three schools accounted for 1,104 of Sacramento County’s charter school students in 2023-24.
Cuéllar said Sacramento has done a good job of informing parents about their options. She said parents could find “for certain” a charter school that would be able to match their child’s needs.
Why Parents Are Choosing Charter Schools
Dave Gordon, superintendent of the Sacramento County Office of Education, said it is difficult to measure the effect of the pandemic on schools. Many parents were turned off by the shift from in-person learning to remote, he said.
“In some cases, the charter schools did not close down, so parents migrated in that direction,” Gordon said. He added that the increase in enrollment could have been influenced by parents opting for homeschool programs charter schools offered during the pandemic.
“It is a tricky one to monitor because when you enroll in a charter school, you don’t signal what program you’re enrolling in. Some of the large charter schools have homeschool type support programs where they give you computers, but you’re responsible for doing the teaching, as a homeschool family,” Gordon said.
Parents such as David Bean said they’ve had a positive experience with charter schools in Sacramento. Bean said both of his children have been enrolled at an Aspire charter school since kindergarten.
“They have a lot of good after-school programs,” Bean said.
Cynthia Nickel also has a child attending an Aspire school in Sacramento. She said she sent her child to Aspire instead of a school closer to her home because she believed they would get a better education.
“The teachers here are great, they communicate well with the parents,” Nickel said. “He seems to enjoy it, which was what I was worried about when we came here.”
Nickel said the Aspire school made the enrollment process very quick and easy.
“I actually saw a flier that they were doing enrollment. I came here, the principal met us at the door, introduced us, walked us around the building and then gave us the paperwork for enrollment. It was super easy,” Nickel said.
The launch of an online tool, Schoolmint SchoolFinder, has helped students and parents find information about Sacramento City Unified School District and made the enrollment process for charter schools more accessible. It provides a “school finder” reference link where families can explore schools in their neighborhood, including information on school clubs and activities, student support and health services, and academic programs.
Leslie Goffney, an Aspire grandparent, said her oldest grandchild attended an Aspire school and is now a senior at UC Riverside. She said the school does a good job at preparing students for college or the workforce.
“Some of my grandkids are [advanced placement] students and I love their AP teachers … all of my grandkids have gone to Aspire,” said Goffney, who has more than 20 grandchildren.
Both Bean and Nickel said that based on their experience with Aspire, they would be comfortable recommending charter schools to other parents.
Superintendent Gordon said charter schools increasingly focus on college and vocational preparation. He said work-based experience and dual-enrollment programs offered through partnerships with community colleges to earn college credits in high school are likely to increase due to the effects of labor shortages and birth rates.
“The birth rates are way down and simply are not the numbers of people that there once were to take all the jobs that are there,” Gordon said. “We have to get people through education faster if we’re gonna have people available to build a workforce.”
Who Attends And How They Work
Of the more than 1,300 charter schools in the state, Sacramento County has 53. Of these, 39 have site-based instruction.
Charter school students make up 17% of Sacramento County’s public school enrollment. Statewide, charter school students are 12% of enrollment. Sacramento’s charter school enrollment has grown more quickly than the rest of the state in the last few years, California Department of Education numbers show.
At Highlands Community Charter school in Twin Rivers Unified, student enrollment increased by more than 240% in recent years, from 1,980 students in 2018-19 to 6,749 in 2022-23.
According to the state department of education, charter schools provide a variety of accommodations to the needs of each specific student. They provide specialized programs that include learning styles such as the Montessori method. They also partner with other agencies or local community colleges. Some charter schools also provide dropout recovery classes to give adults a second chance at earning a high school diploma.
Most charter schools are chartered by a school district. Schools that qualify as a countywide charter are handled by the county office.
Independent charter schools such as the Fortune School of Education, with locations across Sacramento County, operate under their own boards and make their own decisions based on the actions of the board.
Gordon said Fortune’s board governs its operations exclusive of any relationship with the district, though the district holds its business license.
As opposed to dependent charters, the district board approves a charter for itself in order to afford the district more flexibility to do certain things under the law that it cannot without having a charter.
Laws vary among states on how charter schools can operate, with differing levels of oversight and accountability. As of 2020, 45 states have charter school laws, with California among the first to authorize them.
As in other states, California charter schools are afforded waivers from some state laws, regulations and policies in return for higher accountability for academic performance and fiscal management. Schools that fail to meet outcomes listed in their charters, or are found to have violated the law or mismanaged funds, can have charters revoked.
A 2014 study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that between 2008 and 2012, 48% of Los Angeles charter schools outpaced traditional schools in reading and 44% outpaced them in math. Black and Hispanic students in particular were found to have benefitted from attending charter schools.
While the study showed some Los Angeles charter schools were significantly ahead of contemporaries, the improvement was not universal. While 48% of charter schools were ahead of traditional public schools in reading, 13% performed significantly worse and 22% were behind them in math.
There also have been concerns with financial mismanagement and oversight of these schools, with a 2022 report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General finding significant issues – between 2013 and 2016, almost half of all federally funded charter school programs didn’t provide accurate or complete records pertain in g to their grants.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was produced by Professor Philip Reese’s Sacramento State journalism students.