"Closure of the charter school is in the best interest of pupils."Going into the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) Board meeting on April 1, 2025, the KIPP chain of publicly funded private schools already had three strikes in its attempt to renew the charter of KIPP Sol. First, the Charter School Division of the LAUSD had looked at the school's declining results and recommended that it be closed. In January, the LAUSD Board voted to approve this recommendation. The chain quickly appealed to the County and, upon review of the data, concluded that "KIPP Sol failed to meet or make sufficient progress toward meeting standards that provide a benefit to pupils of the school."
- LACOE Staff
Before the LACOE Board voted on KIPP's appeal, I sent the following comments to its members detailing some of the issues at KIPP Sol:
Today, you will consider overturning the LAUSD's decision to deny the renewal of KIPP Sol. After a thorough evaluation of this school's performance, the District's elected School Board followed the law and decided that keeping the school open was not in the best interest of its students. Your staff reached the same conclusion. Hopefully, this Board has learned the lessons from the North Valley Military Institute and will listen to these findings.
KIPP is going to tell you that closing this school will "disrupt [the] educational journeys" of its students. Did they consider this when they decided to shut down three of their schools last year? If closing schools traumatizes children, why did KIPP not find a way to continue serving the 653 students of Pueblo Unido, Generations, and Ponder?
KIPP is going to tell you that Sol's test scores went down only because of the high turnover of its staff. Somehow, the massive charter school chain thinks this argument helps its case, but it actually strengthens the argument to close them down. Why was the chain's management so inept that they allowed a struggling school to begin the 2022-23 school year with "every member of [its] leadership team "new to their role" and having "more than 50% of classroom positions either vacant or held by teachers in their first year of teaching"?
KIPP is going to tell you that last year's academic results were a one-year setback. At best, this means that the charter chain does not understand the data and has no place running a school. The California Dashboard data clearly shows that the school's performance has steadily declined since it was named a California Distinguished School in 2022:
KIPP is going to tell you that parents do not have better choices. The data tells a much different story:
KIPP is going to tell you that it uniquely cares for students in its care. Please ask them why they were looking to build a campus on a toxic waste site. The only reason KIPP students are not currently attending a site contaminated with arsenic and toxic gases is because community members won a lawsuit demanding a thorough environmental study of the site.
KIPP is going to tell you that the LAUSD denial of Sol was due to the anti-charter school bias of the Board. If this is the case, please ask them to explain why on the same day Sol was denied, three of its other schools were approved. In fact, the LAUSD Board approves the vast majority of charters and renewals that it considers and Los Angeles has the largest concentration of charters in the state.
Scarce education funds were diverted from public schools to Charter Schools with the promise that they would bring innovation to the education system. When one of these publicly funded private schools fails to deliver on its promises, this becomes a failed investment. You owe it to the students of Los Angeles to stop throwing away money and close down this failing school.
After being presented with the evidence, the unelected LACOE Board decided that it knew better than its staff and voted to overturn the LAUSD with a four-to-three vote. Chan, Foggy-Paxton, Johnson, and Cross were the Board Members who voted to ignore the recommendations of their staff. A school deemed "demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in [its] petition" will operate next year with oversight by the County.
The vote by this Board to approve a failing charter school is not surprising. In the past, they overturned the LAUSD and renewed the charter of the North Valley Military Institute. They took this action even though NVMI had not submitted the required audit and the charter school had a pending lawsuit against it alleging an administrator had sexually assaulted a student. The staff at LACOE's Charter School Division proved to be consistently inept at ensuring NVMI followed the rules, and the charter school eventually failed, leaving its students scrambling to find new schools.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appoints LACOE Board Members and is responsible for putting members on the County School Board who do not care about accountability; Kathryn Barger appointed Chan, Janice Hahn appointed Cross, and Holly Mitchell appointed Foggy-Paxton and Johnson. If you are a constituent who cares about public schools, you should let these Supervisors know about your displeasure before LACOE considers overturning the LAUSD's denial for LaLa and Crete.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, and serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him "a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles." For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.
