How to Get to the Top of the Charter Lottery

While doing some research on charter law, I saw this article from the LA Weekly, entitled "Charter Schools: Getting Your Child on the List - How to cut in line and pervert the concept of public education" by Gene Maddaus that I thought worth passing along.

Apparently, at least a couple of tony LA charters had figured out how to exploit a federal guideline to pull in more of the "right" parents AND support their bottom line.

Here's the basis for the problem (and I had never heard of this before so news to me): under federal guidelines, there are a handful of lottery preferences.  One is siblings.  Already have a child in the school? The next one is in.  Two is a preference for children of staff (according to most of the state charter law I found, this is restricted to 10% or less of the student population).  And three?  Well, that's for "founding parents."
The preference exists so that parents who go to the trouble of creating a charter school can be assured that their kids will be able to attend. The only restriction is an unwritten rule limiting founders to 10 percent of the school's total enrollment.

School officials explained how it would work. Parents who agreed up front to make an extraordinary volunteer commitment to the school could get admissions priority. They would be called "founding parents."

They would be asked not only for their time but also for money. The school got public funding, but that wasn't enough to cover costs. The "funding gap" worked out to $2,500 per child, officials said. That was the school's not-so-subtle way of conveying the expected contribution. Larchmont is a public school, but it was behaving more like a private academy.

That's why these parents were being asked to "found" a school that had opened in 2004.

School officials did warn the parents that Larchmont couldn't guarantee admission to their children. But — wink, wink — no children of founding parents had ever been rejected.

Some of these parents were coming in a year or two ahead and working to show their dedication to the school. Great, but how many parents have the money or time to do this in advance?

Now, of course, someone is overseeing these charters, right?  And, in this case, that is LA Unified School District but well, it's a big district and they are not so concerned about these issues.

That someone is L.A. Unified. It should be policing charter schools. Instead, it has focused on facilitating them. The issue of founding parents has come to the district's attention before. But the charter school division has failed to establish a policy, much less enforce it.

L.A. Unified does not keep track of who gets admitted through lottery preferences. The district does not even know how many schools give out founding-parent preferences, or how those schools define the term.
Oddly, even charters opened by large charter management organizations can get in on this deal when clearly, their charters were not founded by parents.  Just pony up your time and money.

Many schools said the charter language is just boilerplate. They said they have never used the founding-parent preference because they don't want to play favorites. Several others said they only used the preference in their first year of existence.

"It's a clever method for inviting in particular kids and families you want in the school," Fuller says. "These mechanisms may not be created with any ill intent. But by enriching the mix of families and kids, the charter starts to look like an elite private school."

Striving for diversity, Larchmont and Los Feliz also have preferences in the lottery for kids who are poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunch. (The founding-parent preference outranks the free-lunch preference, however.)

This is the first I am hearing of this loophole but I'd be willing to bet that parents in-the-know throughout the country use this all the time.