My name is Jude Watson. I’m 15 years old, raised in Santa Clarita, and until last year, I was educated solely through a Santa Clarita learning center, which exists entirely because of charter school funding. My little sister still attends today, along with around 250 other students. My English teacher at the center has over 35 years of experience, including 10 at USC, teaching writing skills to students and has helped me build my critical thinking and communication skills.
However, despite her graduate degree in English, under state Assembly Bill 84, she would be unable to teach charter students because she doesn’t have a teaching credential. The same bill would prohibit an algebra teacher, who holds a master’s degree and has helped countless students excel in math for over 10 years, from teaching at the center.
AB 84 is an inherently flawed bill that stems from a real, yet complex, problem. However, instead of creating an effective system to prevent fraud, the Legislature has introduced a ham-fisted bill that will cripple learning centers like mine, which many rely on, creating severe educational inequalities between those who can afford schooling and those who cannot.
Here’s what will really happen if AB 84 passes.
AB 84 requires all charter school teachers to hold California teaching credentials, and additionally, to be directly employed by the specific charter. The bill’s sponsors likely envision charter schools replacing uncredentialed staff with credentialed teachers, raising educational quality across the board.
This won’t happen. California already faces a severe teacher shortage, and credentialed educators often gravitate toward stable public school positions rather than charter schools, which face constant regulatory uncertainty and threats of funding cuts. The credentialed teachers AB 84 demands simply aren’t available in sufficient numbers to warrant the bill.
So, centers will do what they must to survive: raise prices and serve only families who can pay full tuition. The math is simple. My learning center serves around 250 students, many of whom use charter funding. Fire the uncredentialed teachers, hire credentialed ones at 40% higher salaries; lose the charter-funded students, increase class cost/tuition, and start catering to the wealthy. Working families would be priced out entirely.
This mismatch becomes more glaring when considering public school performance. According to the state Department of Education, California achieves only 33% proficiency, as of 2022, in mathematics in fourth grade statewide, despite spending around $22,000 per student annually, according to conservative estimates. This spending per student is higher than the national average, and charter schools receive less support in California than many other states. Even so, a comprehensive study done using pre-pandemic data — this is important, because public schools and the teacher’s union will often use the pandemic as an excuse for failing schools — done by Stanford University showed that, across income gaps, charter-schooled kids perform significantly better in reading and similar in math to their district school counterparts. Public schools have seen a decline in enrollment due to parents opting out of a broken system that is not even meeting the standards it has set for itself, and the answer to this problem is not to attempt to force kids who can’t afford private education back into a system where they are struggling or failing altogether. This is what AB 84 will do.
AB 84 will devastate the families who need educational alternatives most. Wealthy families already send their kids to private schools with uncredentialed experts — art teachers who are working artists, science teachers who are practicing engineers, history teachers who are published authors. These schools will continue operating normally.
It’s working-class and middle-class families who depend on learning centers and alternative learning opportunities in place of underperforming neighborhood schools. AB 84 eliminates those options by making them financially impossible for anyone but the wealthy, turning these nonprofit learning centers into private schools.
My learning center serves kids from single-parent households, families where both parents work multiple jobs, students who struggled in traditional classrooms, and gifted kids whose public schools couldn’t challenge them. Under AB 84, these students get one choice: take whatever the local public school offers or pay private school prices.
So, call your legislators. Tell your friends, especially those who live in a different district. This bill will turn educational alternatives into luxury goods.
Don’t let that happen. Please.
Jude Watson
Newhall
