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The nation’s largest charter system has dealt a crushing legal blow to its foes – but challenges remain for the once-revolutionary movement.

After a series of recent losses, the charter sector in Los Angeles claimed a clear win in June when a California State Supreme Court judge struck down a Los Angeles Unified policy banning charters from using classrooms at roughly a third of the city’s schools.

The policy, which went into effect this year over heated opposition and after a series of contentious board meetings, barred charters from using nearly 346 LAUSD campuses, out of about 1,000. 

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Proponents of the rule – including the majority of the school board – argued it would protect schools with programs for Black students, low performing “priority” schools, and community schools with social services.

But the California Charter Schools Association said it unfairly blocked one in five students – those who attend charters – from using LAUSD’s schools. CCSA took its opposition to court, arguing that the rule violated a state law to provide charters with classrooms at district campuses.   

The CCSA won, but L.A.’s charter movement must still confront a potentially hostile LAUSD board and headwinds faced by many schools in L.A. and other big American cities – including declining enrollment, squeezed budgets and federal government immigration enforcement.

“It’s a victory, not just for charter schools, but for public school families across the district,” said Keith Dell’Aquila, who is vice president, Greater Los Angeles local advocacy for the CCSA.

CCSA’s latest legal win is just one of several times it has prevailed over LA Unified in court over policy overreach, Dell’Aquila said.  

“It means you cannot privilege one group of students over another simply based off of where, or which model of public school their families have chosen to attend,” he said.  

Still, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Stephen I. Goorvitch upheld portions of the district policy’s charter colocation policy in his decision, allowing LAUSD to restrict charters from school buildings on the basis of capacity or safety issues.

The ruling still gives LAUSD latitude on where to allow charter schools to operate, a point district officials focused on in their statement on the ruling.

“We are very pleased with most aspects of the court’s ruling, which denied all of CCSA’s contentions aside from two lines in the policy,” reads LAUSD’s statement, adding: “CCSA significantly mischaracterizes the plain language of both the policy and … ruling.”

LAUSD officials said the district has “carefully reviewed the court’s ruling and is evaluating all available options” – but reps for LA Unified wouldn’t say if the district would appeal the decision.

“We remain firmly committed to serving the best interests of all students in our school communities while continuing to meet our legal obligations,” concluded the district’s statement.

L.A. Unified has 235 charter schools, more than any other U.S. school system. L.A.’s charter schools outperform the city’s schools according to this Stanford research and enroll high numbers of poor students and students of color.

State law gives charter schools across California the right to public school classroom spaces that are “reasonably equivalent” to those offered to other public schools. 

But charters have waged legal battles against the district for years, just to gain access to classrooms, Dell’Aquila said. He hopes CCSA’s latest win is decisive, but he’s not confident it will be. 

Charter schools now command a record 22% of the district’s enrollment, Dell’Aquila said, giving them a bigger slice of the city than any other large U.S. district. Charter schools in L.A. are losing students like schools across the U.S., he said, but LA Unified is losing kids faster.

And the district just lost an important legal battle with the charter sector.

Judge Goorvitch concluded in his June 27 ruling that the LA Unified policy, which the Board of Education approved with a one-vote majority in 2024, “prioritizes District schools over charter schools and is too vague.”

How the district will respond now is largely up to the board. So far, its members aren’t talking.

A spokesman for LAUSD Board Member Rocio Rivas, who co-authored the policy, referred a request for comment to LAUSD and declined to make Rivas available for an interview.

LAUSD Board President Scott Schmerelson didn’t respond to requests for comment on the ruling.

Reps for United Teachers Los Angeles, the powerful local teachers’ union that backed the campaigns of Rivas and Schmerelson, and also supported the colocation policy that was just struck down, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Morgan Polikoff a professor of education at USC Rossier, said the win could put some wind in the sails of the L.A.’s once mighty-yet-still-massive charter school sector, a national model for charters which has been under fire for years, and yet retains its relevance.

He questioned the need for the policy at a time when LAUSD enrollments have shrunk drastically leaving empty and underused classrooms. Enrollment in LA Unified fell to around 400,000 kids this year, down from a peak of nearly 750,000 students in 2002.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and board president Schmerelson have each suggested some schools might have to be closed if the trend isn’t reversed.

Some estimates put the district at about 40% under capacity in terms of building utilization, but LAUSD doesn’t have an official reckoning.

So why is the district trying to throttle charter schools when it has classroom space to spare? It’s about money, said Polikoff.

District and charter schools are both funded by the state on a per-pupil basis. Shrinking enrollments mean shrinking school budgets. The district is trying to retain marketshare, he explained.

“The district had basically walled off about a third of their campuses, sort of ironically, the kinds of campuses serving the students who are most likely to enroll in charter schools, said Polikoff, “Maybe not ironically, probably intentionally.”

The number of LAUSD schools sharing space with charters has dropped by nearly half in the last seven years, according to documents presented at the LAUSD board’s charter committee in May.

Enrollment in the district overall is down about 45% from its peak more than two decades ago, Polikoff pointed out,

“If the policy had had stuck, the district would have had a bit of a guardrail to protect enrollment declines in some of its campuses. And now that isn’t there anymore,” he said.  

“Both sectors are struggling, right? And that, I think, is a story of demographic trends in the city.”

Falling enrollment means fewer charter schools have to share space with district-run public schools.

This coming school year, 41 LAUSD schools will house an independently run charter school on their campus, down from 72 in 2018. In the 2017–2018 school year LAUSD provided nearly 23,000 seats for charter kids, it’ll provide about 9,000 in-district seats this year.

With fewer kids from charter schools in district schools, and enrollment dropping and empty classrooms growing across LAUSD, there ought to be less conflict now between district and charters, said Yvette King-Berg, executive director of Youth Policy Center Charter Schools, which enrolls about 850 students across three schools in L.A.

King-Berg, who serves on CCSA’s board and has four decades of experience working LAUSD and Pasadena schools, said the ruling “moves us back to what’s reasonable.” Issues such as declining enrollments, dropping attendance due to immigration enforcement and falling budgets are common to all LAUSD public schools, she said. 

“Taxpayers paid for these school buildings, and if all the taxpayers’ funds are flowing equally for all kids, we shouldn’t be pushing any group of kids out,” said King-Berg. “So it’s my hope that we can find a way now which is a little bit more fair.”